Lecture 6 -Critical Positions in Popular Culture

• •‘One of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ •general process of intellectual, spiritual & aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time •a particular way of life •works of intellectual and especially artistic 
• significance

• Marx's Concept of Base / Superstructure
• Base forces of production - materials, tools, workers, skills, etc. relations of production - employer/employee, class, master/slave, etc Superstructure social institutions - legal, political, cultural 

• forms of consciousness - ideology *
• Ideology 1.  system of ideas or beliefs (eg beliefs of a political party) 2.  masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'.

• Raymond Williams (1983) ‘Keywords’•4 definitions of ‘popular’ –Well liked by many people –Inferior kinds of work –Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people 
• –Culture actually made by the people themselves
• Inferior or Residual Culture
• •Popular Press vs Quality Press •Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema •Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture
• 
  
• Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk by the Sea'
• •Culture is 
• –‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’ 
• –Study of perfection 
• –Attained through disinterested reading, writing thinking 
• –The pursuit of culture 
• –Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time’

• ‘Authentic Culture vs Mass Culture’
• Qualities of authentic culture 
• 
  
• •Real 
• •European 
• •Multi-Dimensional 
• •Active Consumption 
• •Individual creation 
• •Imagination 
• •Negation 
• •AUTONOMOUS 

Lecture 5 -Subculture and Style

Definition of Subculture:
• In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture (whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong. 

This lecture will look at:

 Skateboarding/ parkour and free running/ graffiti as a performance of the city
• The Riot Grrrl movement as a feminine and feminist subculture
• The portrayal of youth subculture in film and photography

Dogtown and Z boys (2001)

 

    

Ian Borden ‘Performing the City’
• Urban street skating is more ‘political’ than 1970’s skateboarding‘s use of found terrains: street skating generates new uses that at once work within (in time and space) and negate the original ones

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

• “Skateboarders do not so much temporarily escape from the routinized world of school family and social conventions as replace it with a whole new way of life.” (Borden:2001)

Parkour/Freerunning

Parkour

• amethodofmovement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficiency. Originally developed in France, the main purpose of the discipline is to teach participants how to move through their environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs. They train to be

Free running

• aformofurbanacrobatics in which participants, known as free runners, use the city and rural landscape to perform movements through its structures

• placesmoreemphasison freedom of movement and creativity than efficiency

Yamakasi (2001) 

Nancy McDonald The Graffiti Subculture
• Here (on the street) real life and the issues which may divide and influence it, are put on pause.
On this liminal terrain you are not black, white rich or poor.
Unless you are female, ‘you are what you write’. 

Black graffiti writer Prime says:
• I mean I’ve met people that I would never have met, people like skinheads who are blatantly racist or whatever. I can see it in them and they know we know, but when you’re dealing on a graffiti level, everything’s cool and I go yard with them, they’d come round my house , I’d give them dinner or something. 

Miss Van

• McDonald suggest that women come to the subculture laden with the baggage of gender in that her physicality

 (her looks) and her sexuality will be commented on critically in a way that male writers do not experience 

Swoon (US)
• “In the meantime there was a lot of attention coming my way for being female, and it just made me feel alienated and objectified, not to mention patronized.

‘Look at what girls can do-aren’t they cute?’ To hell with that shit. I don’t want it.” 

Angela Mc Robbie and Jenny Garber
• Girl subcultures may have become more invisible because the very term ‘subculture’ has acquired such strong masculine overtones (1977) 

Motorbike girl
• Brigitte Bardot 1960’s
• Suggests sexual deviance which is a fantasy not reflective of most conventional real life femininity at the time 

Hells Angels
• Inrockerandmotorbike culture girls usually rode pillion
• Wills1978:girlsdidnot enter into the cameraderie, competion and knowledge of the machine
 Inthissubculturewomen were either girlfriend of.. Or ‘mama’ figure

Mod girl
• Mod culture springs from working class teenage consumerism in the 1960’s in the UK

• Teenage girls worked in cities in service industries for example, or in clothing shops where they are encouraged to model the boutique clothing

Quadrophenia (1979)

Hebdige outlines the hierarchies within the mod subculture where “the ‘faces’ or ‘stylists’ who made up the original coterie were defined against the unimaginative majority...who were accused of trivialising the mod style”

Hippy girl
• Subculture arises through universities
of the late 60’s and early 70’s
• Middle class girl therefore has the space to explore subculture for longer before family etc.

• Space for leisure without work: encourages ‘personal expression’ 

Riot Grrrl- mid 1990’s onwards

• Underground punk movement based in Washington DC, Olympia, Portland, Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest 

Bands

• Bikini Kill, Bratmobil, Excuse 17, Heavens to Betsy, Fifth Column, Calamity Jane, Huggy Bear, Adickdid, Emily's Sassy Lime, The Frumpies, The Butchies, Sleater- Kinney, Bangs and also queercore like Team Dresch

Cold Cold Hearts, side project band of Allison Wolfe of riot grrrl band Bratmobile, playing 'Sorry Yer Band Sux' live at Black Cat, Washington, D.C. 3/7/97

The Raincoats, Poly Styrene, LiLiPUT, The Slits, The Runaways/Joan Jett, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Exene Cervenka, Siouxsie Sioux, Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon, Neo Boys, Chalk Circle, Ut, Bush Tetras, Frightwig, Anti-Scrunti Faction, Scrawl

Riot Grrl???

• Mount Pleasant Race Riots in 1991

• Bratmobile member Jen Smith (later of Rastro! and The Quails), reacted to the violence by prophetically writing in a letter to Allison Wolfe: "This summer's going to be a girl riot."

Wolfe and Molly Neuman collaborated with Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail to create a new zine and called it Riot Grrrl, combining the "riot" with an oft-used phrase that first appeared in Vail's fanzine Jigsaw "Revolution Grrrl Style Now”. Riot grrrls

What makes this a true subculture?

• Zines revived from 1970’s DIY punk ethic

• In turn this was influenced by posters and graphic design from the Dadaists in the 1920’s 30’s

• Women self- publishing their own music   

Raoul Hausmann- Dada
• ABCD Self-portrait
(1923-24)

• “Like the author of the the surrealist collage typically juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities” (Hebdige: 1979)

Media attention turns to Grunge scene
• Courtney Love and
Hole
• Style without the subculture

• Distorts even further as the 90’s continue into the more more media friendly Spice Girls use of phrase “Girl Power”

Spice Girls
• Band styling presents a set of visual ‘types’ that are easily consumable by the target audience

• There is no empowerment for young women as there is nothing but the reduction of young women to cartoon representations

Dick Hebdige Subculture: The meaning of Style
• “Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media.”

• Offence caused by lyrics and behaviour is important as it

The commodity form
• Subcultural signs like dress styles and music are turned into mass produced objects

• Eg: clothing which is ripped as an anarchic anti-fashion statement becomes mass produced with rips as part of the design

A threat to the family?

• Womens Own 1977 runs a feature on “Punks and Mothers”, smiling, reclining next to the family pool etc.

• Non political threat that ultimately will not disturb traditional values

• Hebdige suggests that the press set up this perceived threat as away of neutralising something that could not be conceived by the petit-bourgeois therefore has to be ‘domesticated 

Zandra Rhodes 9ct White Gold Diamond Safety Pin Brooch
• Although punk seems to challenge eventually and surprisingly quickly it goes mainstream/high end and is turned into “To shock chic” which marks the end of the movement as a subculture. 

21st century demonisation

• “Style in particular provokes a double response (in the media): it is alternately

celebrated (in the fashion page) and ridiculed or reviled (in those articles which define subcultures as social problems)”

Bricolage: Edwardian Style- Saville Row-Teddy Boy