G1 (male): You can do what you want and you can get away with it, and not actually give a shit what anyone thinks of you. Many of my own open-ended interview respondents were also keen to emphasize their individuality rather than talking about their conformity to a clear and consistent set of group-specific symbols, as in the case of the following respondent from Plymouth: On the basis of such apparent evidence of internal diversity, Muggleton concludes that contemporary subcultures are essentially liminal and, as such, ‘characterised as much by ambiguity and diversity as by coherence and definition’ (Muggleton 2000: 75). This is consistent with the observation of Sarah Thornton (1995: 99) that participants of early 1990s British club culture tended to play up the heterogeneity of the ‘crowd’ with which they associated themselves. Even in those cases where his interview respondents cautiously accepted an involvement with a particular genre or grouping, he reports a strong perception that their tastes and those of fellow participants were individual and distinctive to themselves rather than determined by group norms (Muggleton 2000: 55-80). Muggleton has also argued that style and taste are essentially individualized, playing down the importance of distinct collective styles on the basis of the testimonies of participants themselves. Sifting through various types of music, artists and sounds, consumers characteristically choose songs and instrumental pieces which appeal to them with the effect that the stylistic boundaries existing between the latter become rather less important than the meaning which the chosen body of music as a whole assumes for the listener. Bennett, for example, argues that music tastes tend to have as much to do with individualized processes of selection and meaning as with collective normative systems: While acknowledging some kind of stylistic organization to the range of floating artefacts, such descriptors seek to move away from the fixed, consistent and clearly bounded sets of looks and sounds implied by traditional subcultural theory. Please note that the following extract is taken from a pre-publication draft and does not include minor changes made prior to publication.įrom Chapter 3, ‘Goth as a Subcultural Style’…Īn acceptance of this notion of the breakdown of clear distinct styles pervades the reasoning of some of those who seek to replace the notion of subculture with terms such as neo-tribe, scene and lifestyle. Identity, Style and Subculture from Amazon Identity, Style and Subculture, Oxford, Berg.īuy Goth. Identity, Style and Subculture, by Paul Hodkinson.
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