Sub-cultures and Music

Like the rural dream of the majority, some of sub-cultures are based on nostalgia for a lost world, for example, an imagined traditional working-class culture for the Skinheads, or an idealised Africa for Rastafarians.

The single greatest influence for all these rebel sub-cultures has been Afro-Caribbean. Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and more particularly their children, have felt excluded from mainstream British society. Many feel they have exchanged one colonial situation for another, as a cheap labour force. As they were largely confined to depressed urban areas, many whites associated Afro-Caribbean youths with violence and disorder.

At a spiritual level many Afro-Caribbeans, like those still in the Caribbean, dreamed of a golden age in Africa before the slave traders came. Their text was the Bible, which had traditionally been used by a dominant white culture to tame them.

Rastafarians began to wear distinctive clothes, camouflage jackets, large hats in the red, gold and green colours of Ethiopia, and put their long, uncut hair in ‘dreadlocks’. They took to speaking in a special dialect. This was defiance and revolt, until Rastafarians became a recognised and legitimate minority group at the end of the 1980s.

Most important, however, for its cultural impact, has been the black music which came into Britain mainly through the Rastafarian movement. Two particular types, skai and reggae, envolved in the Caribbean and United States but were developed in Britain during the 1970s. ‘Break-dance’ music came direct from the United States as did ‘Hip-hop’. “Nowhere in the world”, according to the style writer Peter York, “is black American dancing music more cherished than in England”. At first the music spread through informal channels, and home-made tapes. By the mid 1980s there were over 100 different independent reggae companies making tapes and records of reggae music. These types of music were powerful expressions of dissidence.

Black dissident music was adopted by other rebel sub-cultures, even those which were openly hostile to the ethnic minorities. Indeed, it is through music that the black and white cultures have fused. The Skinheads, for example, who developed in the 1970s out of an older cult, the Mods, copied black mannerisms and fashions and danced to reggae.

They wear heavy boots, jeans and braces, and shave their hair or cut it very short.

As a movement the Skinheads are now in decline.

A broader movement, a reaction to the glamour of the pop star world of the 1960s, is that of the Punks. Punks, like the Skinheads, are reactionary, but they are passive and politically apathetic. Their real appeal to the young has been their ability to outrage middle-aged opinion, particularly among the guardians of social values, like the police and other civil authorities. They have done this by using foul language, dressing in torn clothes, wearing Union Jacks, swasticas, mutilating their bodies with safety pins, particularly reggae, to inspire its own Punk sound. Unlike Skinheads, however, many Punks openly identified with Black Britain. After almost twenty years, Punks too are in decline.

Who is attracted to such cults? Generally it has been young people with low self-esteem, who have done poorly at school. Joining a gang is a means of finding status, and of defying the conventional world in which they have been defined as failures.

‘Heavy metal’ is the music of failure, and the fact that it is widely despised by those who enjoy pop, reggae or soul, is its appeal. The capital of heavy metal is Birmingham, one Britain’s least loved cities.

At the end of the 1980s the fashionable sub-culture was Acid House, which attracted thousands of adolescents. Acid House promised fun and all-night dancing. It came ready-made with its own music, another variation on black music from America (‘House’ music). By 1990, this too was in decline.

Such sub-cultures follow a cycle. They create initial shock and provoke a strong response, particularly from the police. It attracts youth in search of a rebel identity (often merely to irratate their parents). Many, perhaps most, adopt it for fun, conforming to the requirements of conventional society during working hours, and playing at rebellion in their leisure time. Meanwhile the fashion designers commercialise the look and sell it in the clothes shops.

In the end, of course, the sub-culture becomes another accepted and colourful part of urban culture.

TASK: Which of the groups or performers do you consider the most socially dangerous? Your reaction as parent/ teacher upon discovering your kid’s infatuation with one of the given list?