Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above

Abstract

The concept of subculture has been criticised a great deal in recent research on youth and popular music. Two concepts have emerged as offering new ways of conceiving musical collectivities, particularly among young people: scenes, and tribes (or neo-tribes). I offer criticisms of the work of advocates of both terms. I also argue, however, that there is no possibility of a return to the concept of subculture in any adequate sociology of popular music, even if the concept may have some residual use in the sociology of youth. I discuss the potential advantages of the concepts of genre and articulation as a way of at least beginning to address some of the problems raised in the literature on subcultures, scenes and tribes, concerning the politics of musical collectivities. The common feature of the three terms under discussion is that they have been discussed by those concerned with the relationship between youth and popular music, and I close by reflecting on the relationship between the study of these two entities. I suggest that the assumption that there is a close relationship between youth and popular music was the result of particular historical circumstances and I argue that, while the study of young people's relationships with popular music remains a topic of interest, the privileging of youth in studies of music has actually become an obstacle to a more fully developed understanding of music and society.

Notes

The author thanks Johan Fornäs, Keith Kahn-Harris, Brian Longhurst, Jason Toynbee and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on this paper.

In the context of music-related studies, the concept has also been taken up, much more fleetingly, by Ben Malbon (1999, p. 57) in his study of clubbing. Bennett comments on tribes elsewhere (2000, pp. 80–81), echoing his article in a brief exposition.

The same can be said of Zygmunt Bauman's brief comments on neo-tribes (1992, pp. 136–137).

See Blackman and France (2001) for a recent discussion of some of these issues with regard to young people and questions of active citizenship.

The same, in my view, is true of the literature on ‘post-subcultures’. There is no space to address the limitations of this work here, but see the neighbouring article by Shane Blackman in this issue.

Willis has returned to the concept in a recent book (Willis 2000, pp. 127–130). As he points out there, the concept was criticised by another Birmingham subculturalist, Dick Hebdige (1979), writing from a much more post-structuralist perspective, for its supposed inflexibility and fixity. Willis himself claims that his model of socio-symbolic analysis, outlined in a theoretical appendix to Profane Culture (Willis 1978) and developed in the more recent book, is precisely oriented towards such an understanding of diachronic change and that the notion of homology was just one part of that larger project. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the debate, this suggests the problems of analyses that downplay the internal differences of ‘Birmingham’ approaches.

In fact, some of the most useful aspects of Straw and Shank's work concern the operations and temporalities of particular musical genres.

• Simon Frith's comments at the beginning of his Sound Effects make it clear that youth culture provided a legitimate front for those who wished to think seriously about popular music in the early 1970s:

  • In order to pursue my musical interests, I had to pursue a double life: on one hand, going through the paces of an academic sociological career – doing respectable research on youth as a social phenomenon; on the other hand, ringing the changes as a semiprofessional rock writer. (Frith 1981, p. 4)