Club Cultures by Thornton Sarah;

Author:Thornton, Sarah; [THORNTON, SARAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Mungham searches for the normal, the average, the routine and the mundane. He positions his study as a counterbalance to sociology’s orientation toward the conspicuous and bizarre, repeatedly straining to emphasize the conformity, conservatism and ‘sheer ordinariness of this corner of youth culture’ (Mungham 1976: 101). In the end, Mungham describes the dance as a ‘mechanical configuration’ and as a ‘Mecamization of the sexual impulse’ (Mungham 1976: 92). Despite his ethnographic observation, he projects a ‘Mass Society’ style vision on to the Mecca dancers, portraying them in a way not unlike Adorno depicted jitterbug dancers of the 1940s as ‘rhythmically obedient … battalions of mechanical collectivity’ (Adorno 1941/1990: 40).

Both Hebdige and Mungham define subcultures and mainstreams against each other. Their antithesis partly derives from the high cultural ideologies in which both formulations are entangled. Hebdige perceives his mainstream as bourgeois and his subcultural youth as an artistic vanguard. Mungham sees his mainstream as a stagnant ‘mass’, only their deviant others are, by implication, creative and changing. Although assigned different class characteristics, both ‘mainstreams’ are devalued as normal, conventional majorities.

In her article ‘Dance and social fantasy’, Angela McRobbie questions the basis of these value judgements but still preserves their binary structure (cf. McRobbie 1984). McRobbie maintains the opposition between mainstream ‘respectable city discos’ and ‘subcultural alternatives’, but instead of exclusively celebrating the latter, she suggests that dancing offers possibilities of creative expression, control and resistance for girls and women in either place. In several essays, McRobbie has explored the substantial complications that gender poses to these distinctions, but she stops short of disputing the dualistic paradigm (cf. McRobbie 1991).

The mainstream-subculture divide is not the only dichotomy to which the musical worlds of youth have been subject. Other sociologists contrast the culture of middle-class students with that of working-class early school-leavers. For example, Simon Frith outlines a split between a mostly middle-class ‘sixth-form culture’ of individualists who buy albums, listen to progressive rock and go to concerts and a working-class ‘lower-fifth-form culture’ of cult followers who buy singles, listen to ‘commercial’ music and go to discos (cf. Frith 1981a). He links these research findings to a broader distinction between rock culture and pop culture:

the division of musical tastes seemed to reflect class differences: on the one hand, there was the culture of middle-class rock – pretentious and genteel, obsessed with bourgeois notions of art; on the other hand, there was the culture of working-class pop – banal, simple-minded, based on the formulas of a tightly knit body of business men. (Frith 1981a: 213–14)

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