Subculture : the meaning of style / Dick Hebdige.

Originally published: London : Methuen, 1979.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-177) and index.

From culture to hegemony -- pt. 1. Some case studies -- Holiday in the sun : Mister Rotten makes the grade -- Boredom in Babylon -- Back to Africa -- the Rastafarian solution -- Reggae and Rastafarianism -- Exodus : a double crossing -- Hipsters, beats and teddy boys -- Home-grown cool : the style of the mods -- White skins, black masks -- Glam and glitter rock : albino camp and other diversions -- Bleached roots : punks and white 'ethnicity' -- pt. 2. A reading -- The function of subculture -- Specificity : two types of teddy boy -- The sources of style -- Subculture : the unnatural break -- Two forms of incorporation -- Style as intentional communication -- Style as bricolage -- Style in revolt : revolting style -- Style as homology -- Style as signifying practice -- O.K., it's culture, but is it art?

"Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style is so important: complex and remarkably lucid, it's the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige ... is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks."--Rolling Stone With enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time Out This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era.