Inside Subculture
by David Muggleton
Buy on Amazon"Situating an empirical case study within a wider consideration of postmodernism and cultural change, the author rejects cultural studies perspectives that attempt to 'read' subcultures as texts. Drawing on extensive interviews with people who dress in what might be deemed a stylistically unconventional manner, he seeks instead to establish whether contemporary subcultures display modern or postmodern sensibilities and forms. He argues persuasively that they do both - a stress on postmodern hyperindividualism, fluidity and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity and underlying essence.…
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"This is a crucial book in the field of subculture studies and cultural studies. Its importance comes from the finding that members of subcultures – or subculturalists – are a lot less coherent than they were originally thought to be. Coherence was a critical component in earlier studies. A subculturalist chose a certain music and a certain style because it carried a coherent set of ideological values. You couldn’t be into both punk and trance, for example, and if you were, well, you were a true fan of neither. But this is no so true in postmodern times any more. It’s quite common for many people to have eclectic tastes, and therefore to have eclectic styles, and diverse cultural elements to choose from and combine together. This is not a form of incoherence, however. Rather, it is a form of pastiche, of bricolage. Subculturalists are a lot more playful than originally thought, and lot more diverse – within their own scene – than previously argued."
The Ethnography of Music · fivebooks.com