#sub-cultures

HARD MOD

photo by Nick Knight

In the late 1950s the post-war economic boom led to an increase in disposable income among many young people. Some of those youths spent that income on new fashions popularised by American soul groups, British R&B bands, certain film actors, and Carnaby Street clothing merchants. These youths became known as mods, a youth subculture noted for its consumerism and devotion to fashion, music and scooters.

Mods of lesser means made do with practical clothing styles that suited their lifestyle and employment circumstances: work boots or army boots, straight-leg jeans or Sta-Prest trousers, button-down shirts and braces (called suspenders in North America). When possible, these working class mods spent their money on suits and other sharp outfits to wear at dancehalls, where they enjoyed soul, ska, bluebeat and rocksteady music.

Around 1966, a schism developed between the peacock mods (also known as smooth mods), who were less violent and always wore the latest expensive clothes, and the hard mods (also known as gang mods, lemonheads or peanuts), who were identified by their shorter hair and more working class image. These hard mods became commonly known as skinheads by about 1968. Their short hair may have come about for practical reasons, since long hair can be a liability in industrial jobs and in streetfights. Skinheads may also have cut their hair short in defiance of the more middle class hippie culture.

In addition to retaining many mod influences, early skinheads were very interested in Jamaican rude boy styles and culture, especially the music: ska, rocksteady, and early reggae (before the tempo slowed down and lyrics became focused on topics like black nationalism and the Rastafari movement).

Skinhead culture became so popular by 1969 that even the rock band Slade temporarily adopted the look as a marketing strategy. The subculture gained wider notice because of a series of violent and sexually explicit novels by Richard Allen, notably Skinhead and Skinhead Escapes. Due to largescale British migration to Perth, Western Australia, many British youths in that city joined skinhead/sharpies gangs in the late 1960s and developed their own Australian style.

By the early 1970s, the skinhead subculture started to fade from popular culture, and some of the original skins dropped into new categories, such as the suedeheads (defined by the ability to manipulate one's hair with a comb), smoothies (often with shoulder-length hairstyles), and bootboys (with mod-length hair; associated with gangs and football hooliganism). Some fashion trends returned to the mod roots, with brogues, loafers, suits, and the slacks-and-sweater look making a comeback.

In the late 1970s, the skinhead subculture was revived to a notable extent after the introduction of punk rock. Most of these revivalist skinheads reacted to the commercialism of punk by adopting a look that was in line with the original 1969 skinhead style. This revival included Gary Hodges and Hoxton Tom McCourt (both later of the band the 4-Skins) and Suggs, later of the band Madness. Around this time, some skinheads became affiliated with far right groups such as the National Front and the British Movement. From 1979 onwards, punk-influenced skinheads with shorter hair, higher boots and less emphasis on traditional styles grew in numbers and grabbed media attention, mostly due to football hooliganism. There still remained, however, skinheads who preferred the original mod-inspired styles, and thus, maintained that Spirit of ‘69.

DOC’S

Dr Martens

The 1960s – the decade in which the Dr. Martens boot was born – saw an unprecedented wave of change, new ideas, cultural upheaval and eventually social revolution. This radical atmosphere also witnessed extravagant and often exotic fashion, an odd backdrop for the birth of such a functional work-boot ... but then Dr. Martens has always kicked against the norm.

Initially worn by postmen and factory workers, Dr. Martens’ first few years of existence was very much that of a £2 work-wear boot, selling solid quantities to Britain’s working classes. Then something incredible started to happen..

Without any warning or intent, Dr. Martens were suddenly picked up by early multi-cultural, ska-loving skinheads – who proudly championed British working class style. Shortly after, Pete Townsend of The Who became the first high profile individual to wear them as a symbol of his own working class pride and rebellious attitude. In so doing, both first generation skinheads and Townsend altered the course of the brand’s history, changing this functional work-wear boot into a subcultural essential.

The decade of glam, punk, Two Tone and early goth saw British youth culture mushroom into countless distinct tribes. Each successive new tribe who adopted the boot subverted the style of the previous wearers – yet large sections of the anti-establishment underground continually championed Dr. Martens. By the end of the decade the boot had become a fierce symbol of self-expression at the very heart of British youth culture. With Britain plagued by anti-government riots and social resentment, youth culture rose up from the streets with yet more highly visual and individual tribes such as psychobilly, grebo and scooter boys.

Today I wanted to talk about some terminology and stereotype roles that have become associated with females and gamers.

Gamer Girl (or Gurl)/ Fake Gamer ~This is the girl who posts half naked pictures of herself with games or game equipment (controllers, mice, keyboards, headsets etc.) and only want attention. This is the girl who performs  sexual favours while playing (or pretending to) games. I advise not searching the gamer girl tag unless you are okay with seeing girls doing stuff like this and doing things to themselves with gaming gear.

Girl who plays Games ~These are the self-proclaimed REAL gamers who spend days on gaming binders where they don't shower and only wear sweatpants and gaming merch and eat junk food 24/7. Typically judged as being unattractive. Or if they happen to be attractive behind the sweat and grime of not showering they get a million marriage proposals.

Female Gamers ~These are the ones who are in between the previous two categories... another self-proclaimed title. These are the girls who dress traditionally feminine in dresses and with perfectly done hair and make-up but also enjoy going on day long gaming binders to beat that level or dungeon but don't go as far as not showering. These girls are also told that they are only trying to impress guys and that the only reason they play is to land a guy.

Capitalism has co-opted counter-culture and made all our anti into agreement – but don’t hate the players, hate the game…

Kill All Hipsters by Rhian E Jones

The death throes of the hipster have lasted a surprisingly long time. Critiqued and commodified in hipster-spotting handbooks as early as 2003, and subsequently skewered and parodied everywhere from the hipster-baiting grand guignol of Nathan Barley to the YouTube gold of ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’, the hipster, like the cockroach, has proved almost admirably resistant to attack. Surely we’ve now reached a point of peak hipster-bashing, as well as Peak Hipster?

The hipster has been adept at the adoption and commodification of the past. The objection often made to this aspect of hipsterism is that, unlike its subcultural predecessors, it makes little attempt to carve out a distinguishing niche through creation or innovation of its own, but instead appropriates and pastiches the signifiers of previous subcultures. To be fair, this reliance on recycling and the turbo-charged reviving of previous trends has tended to define contemporary popular culture in general, a tendency which Simon Reynolds usefully diagnosed as ‘retromania’. 00s popular entertainment seemed to concentrate on remakes, reboots and rebrandings of the already bankable, safe and commodified, glutting itself on reformed bands and jukebox musicals, and ending up retreating down a cultural cul-de-sac. But, where one might have expected those beyond the mainstream to construct their own version of the avant-garde, hipsters seemed to lack both inclination and ability to do so.

In addition, the adoption by hipster culture of previous trends seemed to involve stripping them of any subversive or oppositional political potential they might once have held, giving hipsterism the appearance of a radical alternative subculture while in reality it had only reactionary politics or political disengagement to offer. Some kind of countercultural renewal was clearly called for in a decade where political discourse continued to drift lazily rightwards while insisting on the existence of liberal harmony and contentment in the face of worsening material inequality – leaving society becalmed in deepening waters of unfocused resentment and dissatisfaction. Hipsterism, though, offered only a wilfully weak reanimation of the signifiers used in previous shows of resistance and opposition, effectively forming a counterculture without the ‘counter’.

To some extent, this disengagement merely reflected growing political alienation and estrangement in wider 00s society. Demoralisation took root, notably, through Blair’s dismissal of popular opposition to war on Iraq, despite its expression in some of the biggest mass demonstrations the world has ever seen. In ‘alternative’ as in mainstream culture, a remarkable spirit of apathy, disinterest and individualism prevailed; it grew increasingly nostalgic through immersion in vintage and retro and increasingly averse to taking an interest in politics, when events appeared to reinforce the idea of activism as futile and escapism as both an attractive and logical alternative. Political engagement came to be seen as resolutely uncool: dabbling, playfulness and pastiche was preferred to po-faced, earnest political commitment, and a rising tide of irony swamped everything.

As with so many cultural excrescences of late capitalism, the rot that has resulted in contemporary hipsterism seemed to settle in during the 1990s. The loss of political alternatives, as New Labour embraced a post-Thatcher economic consensus, and the switch from an alternative culture that rejected consumerism to one that celebrated market-driven consumption, both significantly damaged alternative culture’s capacity for political opposition – they reached their peak in the smugly noncommittal irony of the hipster. More insidiously, the opportunities offered by the 90s trends of Britpop, Cool Britannia and ‘new laddism’ for class tourism, for attempting to live like common people, set the tone for the stripping of political meaning and identity from working-class signifiers, while the existence of ‘working-class’ as a political identity was downplayed or dismissed. Over the next decade, the adoption of working-class drag by the comfortably trust-funded became so ubiquitous that it now seems to barely raise an eyebrow. 

Retromania can be seen as a function of what Mark Fisher has defined as ‘capitalist realism’ – the denial of any possible future significantly different from the present, which stifles both artistic and political innovation. This has obvious resonances with Douglas Haddow’s 2008 broadside ‘Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilisation’, which claimed that the appetite of US hipster culture for the ironic appropriation of previous subcultural signifiers had neutered its potential for radicalism and invention.In the UK, from second-wave Britpop’s attenuation of post-punk’s radicalism, to the compromised conservatism of nu-folk, retromania and hipsterism have overseen not merely the commodification of previously subversive or oppositional artistic movements – under capitalism, this process is both predictable and inevitable – but their co-option to the extent of preventing the emergence of anything new.

From this perspective, hipster culture’s derivative and appropriative nature, its inability to innovate, mirrors a wider lack of alternative political possibilities. The instability, uncertainty and introversion that has produced a loss of faith in political orthodoxies has also produced a culture at a loss as to how to define itself and, given the apparent imminence of disaster, unconvinced that it’s worthwhile bothering to do so. Have we fallen back on imitations or reproductions of what has gone before because creating or producing anything culturally distinctive currently seems as pressing and productive a task as arranging deck-chairs in a previously untried pattern on the Titanic? Half cynical disbelief in alternative possibilities, half comfort-seeking focus on past certainties and glories, this impasse illustrates the acceptance by both mainstream politics and pop culture of late capitalism’s ‘end of history’ propaganda. Hipsters are hardly the originators of this political and cultural malaise, even if they have arguably become its cheerleaders; there is less to be gained by hating the hipster itself and more by focusing on the underlying processes – of which hipsters are symptom, not cause.