Subculture, posse, gang or just a bunch of weirdos?

Once, in an art studio class, I had a silkscreen piece critiqued and rejected because it was “too subcultural.” The piece looked great to me but, as I later realized, its language was too obscure for even the art studio kids to get—it was simply a reproduction of the inner sleeve of a “slowcore” album I liked, but it was no Warhol. Why? It was inside baseball—no one knew what the image was supposed to mean outside of the subcultural underground rock context I had received it in. It communicated all kinds of emotions to me, but not to anyone else.

Subcultures are defined by a complex series of rules, aesthetics and ways of being that the members tend to keep to themselves and exchange only with each other. It’s not a private club where the rules are posted and easy to understand—the etiquette is socially constructed, the fashions and signifiers developed overtime. You’ve got to own the right records or read the right car magazines or buy the right pomade. The details are important and they can’t be learned or deeply ingrained overnight.

I’m often surprised how useless categories are—many definitions can break down on close inspection. But when considering the idea of a subculture, I find myself protective of the concept. Not every group of people that dresses funny qualifies. Despite what the urban dictionary might say, “a branch of mainstream culture with unique style” hardly seems to cover it. Get a bunch of friends together and listen to swing music and ride old-tymey bicycles while wearing spats? That’s hardly a subculture. That’s because subcultures aren’t just about style; they’re about worldview.

Though we tend to think of subcultures in terms of youth movements these days, technically, the term applies just as often to religious sects of a certain size, cults, utopian groups and the like. But there is something these groups and the youth cultures have in common—a desire to create an idealized world in miniature, to express contrarian values, aesthetics and systems of being in a smaller social context in the real world. In a sense, a subculture is a miniature expression not of style, but literally, of a different life in a different world.

The term has been watered down in a multifaceted marketplace of lifestyles. Lifestyles are easily exchangeable, and with the Internet, the once secret codes of a subculture are all too easily discovered. Lifestyles hardly impinge or threaten the world order—they actually tend to reinforce them. So, the line between subculture and lifestyle hedges on the depth and ferventness of the commitment of the individual.

While members of a subculture might not despise the term itself, they’re unlikely to use it. “The scene,” “the movement,” etc. are more uplifting ways of describing the culture in question.

Why is music often the identifier for subcultures? Because it is the most powerful cultural identifier in the Western world—fashion, thought, action, even diet and sexual preference can be expressed, however crudely, by musical preference. Groups based on intense hobbies, such as the hot rods in Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, certainly qualify when the obsession defines the individual’s existence—but again, a subculture seems more all-enveloping than Trekkie or obsessive fan of Saved by the Bell—subculture is not always obsessive because it’s often ideological. At the end of the day, that’s the best I’ve got—adhering to a subculture means not just buying the records and getting the haircut, but for a time, adopting the worldview as a deeply held belief.

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