Youth Culture

Lawrence Grossberg and Dick Hebdige both write about the creation of subcultures, the (primarily) young people who join the movements, and the signs and styles they use to present themselves in opposition to mainstream society.  While Hebdige delves into the subversive power of the style that subcultures create as an active form of protest against the establishment, both he and Grossberg shed considerable light onto the paradoxical nature of such movements.  This nature, which originates in stark contrast to either conscience or subconscious hegemonic power structures, often spells its own doom as it elicits tangible societal change.   As both authors clearly present, these subcultures will inevitably fade away as they achieve their desired ends, become a commodity, are naturalized into standing power structures, or turned into “meaningless exotica.”  This paradox challenges the validity of subcultural movements while simultaneously confirming their effectiveness as agents for social change.

To further consider what I perceive to be the paradoxical nature of subculture, an investigation into both the aberrant origins and ultimate absorption of these movements should prove illustrative.  To borrow Hebdige’s example of the Punk movement, these young people created a chaotic, nihilistic style, which stood in total opposition to the conservative ideology of mainstream culture.  This explosive and intentional middle finger to the hegemony of the establishment was done to illustrate the ridiculousness of accepted material objects when stripped of their contextual familiarity.  The Punk’s movement was initially quite effective at subverting the power of assumed social strata as every and any symbol was hijacked and displayed to the world as entirely constructed and meaningless without it’s accompanying ideology.

Likewise, the rock and roll movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s in the United States was born of a desire to stick it to the institutions that both defined and perpetuated the powerlessness of youth.  By creating a social medium that claimed residence strictly outside of the domesticity of home, the rigidity of school, and the sterility of the medical establishment, rock and roll provided a direct challenge to mainstream ideas of youth and the roles they played in society.  This challenge effectively deconstructed generally accepted roles within our culture, but in so doing muted the legitimacy of rock and roll as a subculture of youth – and sets the stage for the flip side of our paradoxical coin.

Both the Punk movement and the ascendency of rock and roll sowed the seeds of their own demise as the ideologies they protested began to change in response to their very presence.  As Punk’s became adopted into mainstream material society (through fashion, media, and industry) their brash and alarming style, and their attack on meaning, was minimized to the point of there really being no “other” against which Punks could rage.  Likewise for rock and roll, as the movement began to find success in challenging and eroding the hegemonic institutions that set parameters on the role of young people in society, rock music ultimately lost a “man” to damn.  In the end, it appears that while youth subculture burns with a brilliant intensity, the flames become self-consuming in the face of hegemonic break down, ideological change, societal adoption and a culture of incessant materialism and mass media connectivity.  While the youth subculture remains an effective tool for social change, it appears to remain forever paradoxical as well.