Subcultures
The
20th century was a time of social diversity and the rise of the
individual. The world wars and revolutions which dominated the first half of the century put a terrible
psychological pressure upon the vast majority of people. For instance the war conscriptions meant that enormous numbers of people were put into
uniform and thus denied the freedom of individuality in their choice of clothes and hairstyles. In addition there was the threat of death and the loss of friends and loved ones. As a result the 20th century produced a breed of people frantic to live life to the full (before it was taken away) and to express individuality.
There seems to be a dynamic relationship between
subculture and
warfare. Society sends its young, healthy and strong to kill the young, healthy and strong of another society and subculture seems to be provoked through the social
trauma which results. There also is a clear relationship between subculture and
refugee or immigrant status. Since there is clearly a link between warfare and the creation of refugees and forced exiles a
sociological pattern is discernable.
Richard Collier's 1984 book
The Rainbow People describes a subculture of transatlantic-based wealthy hedonists. He says,
"The era of the Rainbow People opened with the coronation of a prince called Tum-Tum as Britain's Edward VII in 1902 and closed in 1975 with the death of Aristotle Onassis, dubbed Daddy-O by Women's Wear Daily."
Wealth and class can be considered a subculture although the term is more usually associated with fashion or with resistance against social repressions. Other subcultures are connected with
sexual orientation,
religion and ethnicity. Travelling people such as the Roma tend to be universally a subculture.
The early years of the century
In the period before
World War I subculture was a small thing, social groupings of
hobbyists or a matter of
style and
philosophy amongst
artists and
bohemian poets.
One continuing 20th century subculture was
Nudism. The first known organised club for nudists, Freilichtpark (Free-Light Park), was opened near
Hamburg,
Germany in 1903.
Also in Germany, from 1909 onwards there was the beginning of a movement, mainly of young men and then also young women, toward freedom and getting back to nature. They wanted to throw off the strict rules of society and be more open and natural. They were called
Wandervogel which can be translated as "hikers", "ramblers" or perhaps "freebird".
In
Italy a popular
art movement and
philosophy called
Futurism championed change, speed, violence and machines.
Hairstyles at the beginning of the century were not strict unless you were in a religious order or other controlled circumstances (the
military or
prison etc.). Both men and women regarded long hair as
normal. Men and women had, after all, always had long hair, since prehistory.
World War I
Because of the (1914-1918) world war, though, everything changed. The wartime trenches had infestations of lice and fleas. Soldiers had their heads shaved. Consequently men with short hair appeared to have been at the
front in the war, while men with long hair might be thought of as
pacifists and cowards, suspected of desertion.
Some artists managed to avoid the war by sitting it out in
neutral Switzerland. A group of artists in
Zürich invented
Dadaism as an anti-war, anti-art,
art movement and a parody of the pro-violent attitudes of Futurism. They became politically active as an
underground anarchical attempt to change society's trend toward self-destruction.
The 1920s and 30s
:See:
Roaring Twenties
In the
1920s American Jazz music and motor cars were at the centre of a European subculture of freedom and wild living which began to break the rules of social
etiquette and the class system. (See also
Swing Kids.) Meanwhile, in America, the same
flaming youth subculture was
"running wild" but with the added complication of alcohol
prohibition.
Canada had prohibition in some local areas but where alcohol
was permitted thirsty Americans coming over the border found an oasis. Some
smuggling was done and this escalated as the crime gangs became organised. In the southern states of the USA
Mexico or
Cuba were other possible destinations for drinkers. Thus a drinking subculture grew in size and a crime subculture grew along with it. Other drugs existed which could be used as alternatives to alcohol. When prohibition ended the subculture of drink, drugs and jazz didn't go away. Neither did the gangsters.
The nudist movement gained prominence in Germany in the 1920s, but was suppressed during the Nazi Gleichschaltung after
Adolf Hitler came to power. Social nudism in the form of private clubs and campgrounds first appeared in the United States in the 1930s. In Canada it first appeared in
British Columbia about 1939 and in
Ontario nine years later.
In the
art world, the spritual home of most subcultures, the
surrealist movement was attempting to shock the world with their games and bizarre behaviour. The surrealists were at one and the same time a serious art movement and a parody of other artforms and
political movements. Surrealism had been developed by Andre Breton and others from the thinking in the Dada movement. Based in several European countries, surrealism was going to run into serious trouble when the Nazis began to take over. Subcultures and
"degenerate art" were almost completely stamped out and replaced by the
Hitler Youth.
In North America
the depression caused widespread unemployment and poverty, causing many young people to feel like
dead end kids. The phenomenon of the dead end kid was taken into fiction and put on the stage and screen where it proved an enormously popular image with which people could identify. Films featuring
The Dead End Kids,
The Bowery Boys,
Little Tough Guys etc were popular from the 1930s to the 1950s. See external link:
The (Unofficial) Bowery Boys' Page.
The
Dust bowl disaster forced large numbers of rural Americans from
Oklahoma and elsewhere to move their entire families to look for some alternative way to continue living. This got them labelled as
"Okies" and treated very poorly by the authorities in other states they moved to. The refugee situation was recorded in folk songs (many of them by
Woody Guthrie) and in a novel,
The Grapes of Wrath by
John Steinbeck and a subsequent movie of the book. The movie starred
Henry Fonda.
The 1940s
Avant-garde artists like
Max Ernst,
Marcel Duchamp and
Marc Chagall had to flee Europe following the outbreak of World War II. They arrived in the
United States and began to make contact with each other. Modern art's new home was in
New York City. A subculture of American-based surrealism and avant-garde experimentation became the new centre of the art world.
In the
1940s American fashion was still gangster orientated. Gangs gravitated largely around immigrant and racial cultures. In
California hispanic youths developed a fashion recognised by their distinctive
zoot suits. The girls dressed all in black and were called
Black widows. The zoot suiters use of language used a lot of
rhyming and trick words like so-called
pig latin (also known as backslang). The whole thing, including Afro-American, Cuban, Mexican and
South American elements and bits introduced by
Slim Gaillard like
McVouty oreeney was collectively known as
Swing or
Jive talk. See external link:
Dictionary of Swing
The entry of America into
World War II was heralded by a new legislation which made zoot suits illegal because of the extra cloth which they used up. This led to the
Zoot Suit Riots.
In Europe
black-marketeers prospered under the rationing. Clothing styles depended on what could be begged or acquired by some means, not necessarily legal. There were restrictions everywhere. When the Americans arrived in Britain, black-marketeers did deals with
GIs for
stockings, chocolate, etc. Inevitably, subculture continued to have an image of criminality and the brave, the daring, the milieu, the resistance, etc. The black market in drugs thrived just about anywhere.
British black-marketeers were sometimes called
Wide boys.
After the second war the zoot suit craze spread to
France in the form of the
Zazou youths. Meanwhile the intellectuals in France were forming an existentialist subculture around
Jean Paul Sartre and
Albert Camus in
Paris cafe culture.
In post-war America folk songs and
cowboy songs (also known, in those days, as
hillbilly music) were beginning to be more popular with a wider audience. A subculture of rural jazz and
blues fans had blended elements of jazz and blues into traditional cowboy and folk song styles to produce a
crossover called
western swing. This type of music was able to spread across America in the 40s thanks to the prevalence of
radio. Radio was the first
almost instantaneous mass media and had the power to create large subcultures by spreading the ideas of a small subculture across a wider area.
A new jazz subculture formed from the rebellion of some musicians against the melodic stylings of swing. Their rebellion produced
Bebop and the early players of it included
Dizzy Gillespie and
Charlie Parker.
The subculture which formed around this kind of jazz was the beginning of
Hipsters and the
Beat generation.
In 1947, the same year that
Jack Kerouac made his epic journey across America which he would later describe in
On the Road and the same year as the occurrence at
Roswell, New Mexico which was claimed as a
UFO crash, there was an incident involving a motorcycle gang at
Hollister, California. A story about the incident was published that year in
Harper's Magazine and would be developed (6 years later in 1953) as the
Marlon Brando film
The Wild One. A year after the incident the
Hells Angels (without the apostrophe), formed in 1948 in
Fontana, California. The name
Hells Angels had been used as a movie title by
Howard Hughes ten years before. The Hells Angels began as a motorcycle club looking for excitement in the dull times after the end of the war. They became far more notorious as time went on. Motorcycle gangs in general began to hit the headlines.
The 1950s
The Existentialists had a profound influence upon subcultural development. The emphasis on freedom of the individual influenced the
beats in America and Britain and this version of existential
bohemianism continued through the
1950s and into the
60s under the guise of the
beat generation.
Beards and
longer hair returned in another attempt at returning to the image of
peacetime man and the normality which had existed before the two wars. At the same time, as a result of American post-war prosperity, a new identity emerged for youth subculture: the
teenager.
Jazz culture was transformed, by way of
Rhythm and Blues into
Rock and Roll culture. At the same time, jazz culture itself continued but changed into a more respected form, no longer necessarily associated with wild behaviour and criminality.
From the 1950s onward society noticed an increase in street
gang culture, random vandalism and
graffiti. Sociologists,
psychologists, social workers and
judges all had theories as to what was causing the increase to urban trouble but the consensus has generally tended to be that the modern urban environment offers all the bright lights and benefits of the modern world but often provides
working class youths with little in reality. This theory and others were parodied in the musical
West Side Story (based on Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliette) in song lyrics such as
Jet Song,
America, and
Gee, Officer Krupke.
As American rock and roll arrived in the
United Kingdom a subculture grew around it. Some of the British post-war street youths hanging around
bombsites in urban areas and getting drawn into petty
crime began to dress in a variation of the zoot suit style called a
drape suit with a country style bootlace tie,
winklepicker shoes, drainpipe trousers, and
Elvis Presley style slicked hair. These youths were called
Teddy boys. Their girlfriends would usually wear, for a night out dancing at the palais, the same sort of poodle skirts and
crinolines their counterparts in America would wear. For day-to-day wear there was a trend toward girls wearing slacks or jeans. At the time the idea of girls wearing trousers and boys taking time over their hairstyle was socially shocking to many people.
British youth divided into factions. There were the modern jazz kids, the
trad jazz kids, the rock and roll teenagers and the skiffle craze. Coffee bars were a meeting place for all the types of youth and the coolest ones were in Soho,
London.
In Britain, the political side of the Beat Generation was the anti-nuclear movement led by CND.
Ban the Bomb marches became a very recognisable British social phenomenon.
In America and
Australia,
Hawaiian-influenced
Surfing was the new youth sport. A whole subculture grew around the sport and the associated parties, clothes, speech patterns and music. During the same timeframe
skateboard riding developed as a parallel lifestyle to wave riding. Both forms of board riding continued throughout the remainder of the century and into the next. From these two sports young people learned to provide their own social structure within which they could display skills and excellence.
The 1960s
In the
1960s the
"beats" or
"beatniks" grew to be an even larger subculture, reaching such proportions that they spread around the world, and developed subcultures of their own. Subcultures within subcultures. That was the extent of cultural fractiousness in the 60s. The
beat scene included
Radicals, Peaceniks,
Mods,
Rockers,
Bikers,
hippies and, eventually, the self-parody thing: the
freak scene.
The term
mod had different meanings depending which side of the Atlantic you were on and so did
radical. Subcultures were still usually about living life to the full and wild behaviour but in the 60s there was the
Vietnam war to protest about, rebel against and avoid getting drafted into.
The hippies' big year was 1967, the so called
summer of love.
There were subcultures which were also political movements, for instance the
Black Panther Party and the Yippies.
University
students around the world had always been a minor subculture but, by the mid-60s, had become a major one. In Paris, France in
May 1968 a student uprising brought the country to a standstill and caused the government to call a general election rather than run the risk of being toppled from power.
Also during the 60s was the beginning of
Hacker culture from the increased usage of
computers at colleges. Students who were fascinated by the possibilities of computers, the
telephone and
technology in general began figuring out ways to make the technology more freely available or accessible.
Another subculture of the 60s was the
Rude boy culture in
Jamaica and, latterly in the
United Kingdom. The rude boy subculture influenced some elements of the British mods, which then developed into
skinheads around 1969.
The 1970s
In the
1970s the hippie, mod and rocker cultures were in a process of transformation which temporarily took on the name of
freaks (openly embracing the image of strangeness and otherlyness). A growing awareness of identity politics combined with the legalisation of homosexuality and a huge amount of interest in
science fiction and
fantasy forms of
speculative writing produced the
autre with an attitude freak scene. There was a lot of talk about
"revolution", most of which was, undoubtedly, a lot of talk.
At some stage, though it's unclear when, some of the hacker/computer
nerd subculture took on the derogatory word
geek with pride, in the same way the freaks had done. Computer usage was still a very inaccessible secret world to most people in those days but lots of people were interested in computers because of their appearance in
science fiction. The dream of one day owning a computer was a popular fantasy amongst science fiction
fandom which had grown from a minor subculture in the first half of the 20th century to a quite large contingent by the 70s, along with
horror fandom,
comics fandom and
fantasy freaks.
Since the freak scene was connected to the political ideas of the
alternative society the bands on the freak circuit didn't please the bank balances of the
pop industry very much. A band like
The Edgar Broughton Band or The
Pink Fairies would play at a free festival, not on
Top of the Pops. Legend has it that
Hawkwind, a
space rock band on the freak scene had refused to play on
Top of The Pops when their first single
Silver Machine "accidently" went into the
UK Singles Charts. The music/fashion/subculture which the pop industry created as a commercial alternative to the freaks was
glam rock. Glam was a continuation of the
trendies of the mod culture in the 60s which appealed to the
androgynous trend of the seventies.
At the same time there emerged a new subculture called skinheads. The "skins" or skinheads were anti-aesthetic, pro-basic, fiercely
working class tough youths. They had the image of
homophobia and
racism and this image was often true although, paradoxically, they loved black
Jamaican reggae,
ska, and bluebeat.
Skinheads mainly began from 1969, as a development from the hard, headcase type of
mods but, by the mid-70s, some crossover was happening between skins and the freak scene. This developed into the
punk rock culture which became apparent from about 1975 onward. Punks managed to be both hardcases and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. The concept of
Anarchism became fashionable.
Disco became a really significant centre of subculture from about 1975 onward.
When punk was happening some of the
progressive rock elements took it as a challenge to live faster, harder and tougher than punk. They kept the long hair of the freak scene, adopted the black leather jacket as virtually a uniform and took on the name
heavy metal (which is a phrase from the writings of
William S. Burroughs).
The continuance of hippie ideas of spirituality and mysticism was in the
New Age movement, which increased in size and influence.
Mods made a comeback in the 1970s as a post-punk
alternative mod phenomenon, inspired by rock band
The Who and the
British film Quadrophenia.
In 1979 the
Usenet was created as a medium of communication over the, still very primitive,
internet of the time. The Usenet and the
BBS subculture would become increasingly significant over the next few decades.
The 1980s
At the beginning of the
1980s some of the followers of punk rock began to be bored with it and wanted to make it more stylish and introduce elements of glam. By 1981 this trend had become
New Romantics and the music was synthesiser electro-pop.
New Romantics tended to be slightly
camp and fay of behaviour regardless of whether they were
gay or not. There was a
bisexual vibe generally, regardless of the individual's actual sexuality. The clothes style was a return to the freak scene's roleplay of fashions from previous eras or imagined future ones. It was like using fashion to create a
time warp. According to the music press at the time there were some alternative names New Romantics wanted to call themselves. One was Futurists and another was
the cult with no name.
There was an unsuccessful attempt to manufacture an artificial subculture around the pop group
Adam and the Ants. Supposed to be called
Antpeople this remained merely a fictional subculture and didn't catch on in reality.
Post punk and post hippie elements continued and a particular type of anarchist-pacifist subculture centred around the records being put out on the independent
Crass label by Crass themselves and other bands including The Poison Girls. Crass records was a
very independent operation enabling bands with an extremely raw sound to put out records when the major labels might not have bothered with them. Crass also organised gigs around the country for themselves and other bands and campaigned politically for the anti-nuclear movement and lots of other causes they believed in.
In American urban environments a form of street culture using
freeform and semi-stacatto
poetry combined with athletic break dancing was developing as the
Hip hop and Rap subculture. In jazz jargon the word
rap had always meant speech and conversation. The new meaning signified a change in the status of poetry from an elitist artform to a community sport. Rappers could attempt to outdo each other with their skillful rhymes. Rapping is also known as
MCing, which is one of the four main elements of Hip hop: MCing,
DJing,
graffiti art, and breakdancing. From the early to mid 1980s
poetry culture in a broader sense caught the same kind of energy as rap and so began the first of the
Poetry slams. Poetry slamming became an irregular focus for the latest wave of poetry aficionados.
After the New Romantic fashion broke and had been around for a lot less than the five years they talked about the trend moved on. There was a brief abortive fashion which was called Urban vagrants but which failed to become a true subculture. Urban vagrants was too artificially manufactured by the media. One thing which actually became a real subculture was
Goth. Gothic culture developed naturally enough, without too much media forcing. The goths are a culture of fetishism and gloomy romanticism with sado-masochistic tendencies. They have continued from the mid-80s to the
21st century with their roots reaching backward to the gothic-romantic movement of the late
18th and early
19th centuries.
A subculture relishing free enterprise
capitalism sprang up in the mid 80s and were branded by the
tabloid press with the name of
Yuppies (the first two or three letters intended to mean either
Young Urban Professional or
Young and Upwardly mobile and the remainder to sound like
hippies).
Wine bars gained popularity over the traditional pub as a meeting place in Britain of the 80s. Wine bars in fact gained such popularity that many pubs converted part of their premises to a wine bar style. Along with this trend was a resurgence of
jazz, especially in the forms of Jazz funk and
Smooth jazz.
The free festival movement was still going in the 80s and, in fact, expanded to create different types of events.
free parties and raves began from the mid-80s and became a flourishing subculture. The music was electronic dance music which was a development of
electronic music pioneered by
Karlheinz Stockhausen,
John Cage and others, taken by way of progressive rock bands like Hawkwind, filtered through the sounds of
dub-reggae and the electro-pop bands like
Kraftwerk and
Depeche Mode and given a different twist via
The Art of Noise and early
hip hop and recycled
psychedelia. Towards the end of the 80s rave culture had diversified into different forms connected to music such as
Acid House and
Acid Jazz and would continue to diversify into the 90s. Rave culture thrived from the mid-80s to the end of the century and beyond.
The Usenet and BBS subculture had developed an element called
Slashdot subculture which involved its own forms of ettiquette and behaviour patterns both social and anti-social and the phenomena of
trolling,
spamming,
flaming etc. The computer subculture was also influenced by
fictional subcultures of the future to be read about in
cyberpunk literature.
The 1990s
The
1990s saw mostly a continuation of existing subcultures from the 80s. The music and clothes changed more than the sense of identity associated with the cultures. Dance music continued. Raves continued. Pop continued. Hip hop continued. Rock continued. Goth continued. Punks and Hippies were back. Sixties styles like Mod bands and psychedelia were revived and recycled. There were, within rock and dance music, some variations like grunge within rock or
drum and bass within dance styles but these and others were just musical styles, not radically different mindsets representing actual subcultures. Even the term
Generation X or
Gen X refers to a condition experienced equally by previous generations and presented in a published form by journalists and novelists as if it were a new phenomenon.
The main
new development of the 90s was on the internet. As the 1980s ended and the 90s began
Tim Berners Lee created
HTML which made possible the
World Wide Web. The web allowed internet subcultures to grow from tiny numbers of geeks, to big global online communities. These communities are as diverse in their preoccupations as any other subcultures. There are online gaming communities, online forums, online projects of all kinds, serious or frivlous.
As always,
coffeehouses are a gathering place for subcultures. In the 90s some new ones sprang up offering internet access with the coffee:
Internet cafes.
In the 90s there was an increase in
anti-globalisation protests. These had been taking place since the 1970s but the
World Wide Web made it possible for isolated groups of the anti-global movement to get into close and regular cantact with each other. They became more of a single community of protest and developed an international
alternative media.
See also:
Subcultures
Category:Subcultures
Category:20th century