Dick Hebdige - Subculture - the meaning of style

Dick Hebdige - Subculture - the meaning of style, 1994, Routledge, London.

"a subculture... signals a break down of consensus." (Dick Hebdige)

The extracts I found in Subculture - The Meaning of Style, explain how subcultures are always resisting the mainstream. It is:
a) a refusal to participate in mainstream culture.
b) a desire to subvert or parody.

People are being brought up with the internet now - printed media isn't a necessity any more.

Subcultures were treated as threats to public order which cause them to rebel against the mainstream. They took mundane objects e.g. the safety pin and gave it an ideology/discourse associated with that subculture, (Punks.) 

Signals of 'Refusal.'

These reflects on how subcultures feel alienated by society. Fanzines were created as a product to fit their beleifs/values as the mainstream class had different interests. The mass media is not the same for all classes - some have more say. The Punk subculture would have had no say in mass media as all media was against them. Fanzines gave them a chance to have their own say/view on things. 

The ruling class - the mainstream - the dominant ideology.

Objects like the safety pin were meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to mass culture - 'against nature' and interrupting the process of normalisation. The safety pin was used as a fashion accessory instead of it's primary use. Subcultures are the 'silent majority' which contradicts the myth of consensus. (Barthes)

"No subculture has sought with more grim determination that the punks to detach itself from the taken-for-granted landscape of normalised forms..." 

Punk claimed to speak for the neglected constituency of white lumpen youth.

Punks and other subcultures were capitulated to alienation. 

The subculture tends to be presented as an independent organism functioning outside the larger social, political and economic contexts.

This is touching on Baudrillards theory of the Hyppereal. 

Punks directly responded to Britain's Decline.

There was a lot of bad press against the Punk's because of their subcultural values and ways of living.

Prominant forms of discourse (particularly fashion) are radically adapted, subverted and extended by the subcultural bricoleur. 

The existence of an alternative punk press demonstrated that it was not only clothes or music that could be immediately and cheaply produced from the limited resources at hand. 

Sniffin' Glue contained perhaps the single most inspired item of propoganda produced by the subculture - the definitive statement of punk's do-it-yourself philosophy - a diagram showing three finger positions on the neck of a guitar over the caption: 

"Here's one chord, here's two more, now form your own band."