Who ARE They?
[motivational thinking klaxon sounds again]
I’ve been really enjoying doing a bit of teaching lately. Last week I did some guest lectures for BIMM Bristol, it was an absolute vibe being part of a Q&A about journalism for the music business students (see my last post), and even more so speaking to the ones doing a more social studies oriented course about subculture. But before I did these sessions, I thought I’d better get my own subjects clear in my head.
For context: I’m in a major moment of reassessment right now. When I finished the major part of the writing of the fabric book at the end of 2023, I thought I was going to have some space to take stock and look forward to some fun passion projects, but the way 2024 panned out I did NOT get space but I definitely did a lot of stock-taking.
Everything got very real for me this year – turning 50 would have been stark enough, but my birthday came in a month of three bereavements; add to that plenty more inescapable reminders of mortality and realities of neurodivergence – my own and others’ – and there were very, very few soft edges to anything, anywhere. This means it’s felt more important than ever to be clear about what I’m doing and define my terms as I cue up “fun” projects.
That especially goes for the topic of subculture. Everything I do comes back to subculture, and when I was asked to do the BIMM lectures, as with the nature of journalism practice, I thought I’d better jot down some notes on what I actually mean by that. And in fact, after two hours of back and forth with the students, the ideas became clearer still.
Funnily enough I had put quite a bit of thought over the years into depicting subcultures, without actually defining what subculture meant. As the 'If the Walls of Nightclubs Could Talk' article linked below explains, going back to the 00s, I’d consciously studied how it’s possible for writing to depict collectivity, mass movements of people, hypersocial happenings, events that unfold over long durations and myriad interactions.
It wasn’t until I started prepping what would become Bass, Mids, Tops, in the late 10s, though, that I hit on convincing ways to do this: in short, overlaying lots and lots of individuals’ stories told in a conversational fashion full of everyday detail, and allowing the contours of the broader social movements and occurrences to emerge from the intersecting lives. (That's something we've continued to be conscious of through developing the Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest Substack.)
And it wasn’t until after that that I started to really think about what those movements were. I started joining groups where actual sociologists of subculture congregated, and investigating more of The Literature of the discipline. In this it struck me that a lot of thinking about subcultures is still stuck in a Boomer / Gen X model that thinks of them as “tribes”.
It’s understandable: these are the generations of the mods, rockers, hippies, punks, skinheads and so on. These were times that – and it’s staggering how little people factor this in, or even register it – were significantly more violent than now in the developed world, and it’s natural that youth did band together in localised, easily identifiable groups: for protection as much as anything.
But of course subculture always was, and is now more than ever, a lot more fluid than just joining a group and having that become your identity. As I talked to the students I asked them to name some subcultures: of course “punk” was the first one shouted out, but as we went on, we got into much more detailed discussion about modern identities like “gym bros”, “huns”, “resist moms”, protestors, petrolheads, fandoms and also subsets of things like work-related or sexual identity and how these things overlap and… yes we ended up at intersectionality.
We talked too about who gets to define what a subculture is. Of course there isn’t one line drawn around what a hip hop fan is, what a punk is, what a metaller is, what a Swiftie is, let alone around what it is to be, say, a queer punk. So given that who defines what these things are? Sociologists or anthropologists looking from outside? Specialist journalists? The generalist media? The people within these scenes themselves – many of whom will strongly disagree about what “the thing” actually is?
Well… the answer is: all of those. The nature of scenes, subcultures, identities – as well as always intersecting in different ways in different people – is to have dynamic boundaries, constantly evolving, and constantly accumulating different and contradictory stories about what they are. Which means that we don’t define them, we negotiate their nature: every time someone talks about or reports on them, they’re adding to the mutating collective definition, shifting assumptions a little bit. The urge to impose thick black lines around areas of this flux is always the Victorian imperial cartographer's urge: it's an act of claiming ownership.
And subcultures and fandoms affect their individual participants. They affect what they know, what they read, how they interact, how they walk and move! I thought about how coming to becoming a hardcore Joni Mitchell fan quite late in life, listening intently to her and reading about her, altered the way I veiwed the history of her era: from my perspective, it actually altered the past. The information available to me about the music I loved and the person who made it altered me. I have written about THIS at some length.
All of which then gives us a choice when we come to talk about something as if we know how it is defined: are we going to be honest that that’s what we’re doing and intentional about the way we do it? Are we going to ask “Who am I to define this?” and accept that the way we in turn are percieved will affect how our attempts to define land and affect current, past and future particpants in the thing we’re talking about?
None of which is to say don’t define things. We all need working definitions if we’re ever to talk about or interact with anything – but is it possible for we who study culture to accept them as just that: working definitions, contingent, constantly in negotiation? That can be a tough pill to swallow for people who grew up, as I did, on the classic model of pop culture journalism where the guy – it was always a guy when I was growing up – tells you how it was, and you’re expected to build your stories on that solid ground. But maybe, just maybe, have a little humility about it and you might even find your work remains just as valid and “important” as if you’d scrawled your lines around the territory you wanted to mark out….
Obviously this applies to all kinds of groupings of people, not just what we think of as subcultures. Clans, cliques, gangs, teams at work (in the BIMM lecture we talked about how particular flavours of humour are often a subcultural identifier, and this led to thinking about specifically health worker cultures for example, who are bonded by gallows humour, in different ways in different departments or specialism) and all the rest.
That might not sound quite like the clarity I hinted at, but trust me – as I plan future projects and go about my day-to-day work – it really is. In the face of never-ending data overwhelm, it's not just blind relativism to look at the mechanisms by which these identifiers evolve: quite the opposite, it's engagement with material realities. And it makes you realise the potential significance of your words and acts. In this never ending negotiation, whether you assume or assess makes a huge difference to where and whether you then choose to add your voice to the negotiation. And what you choose to reinforce or redefine alters things - infinitesimally, yes, but in complex systems who knows which is going to be the grain of sand that changes everything? As I've always said, it's not naive to think you can't change the world: it's naive to think you're NOT changing it.
Through the stories found within a legendary nightclub comes the detailed narration for a fast-growing body of subcultural history.