EDUCARE 2016:2

2016:2

CONFERENCE ISSUE: POLITICS OF IDENTITY, ACTIVISM AND PEDAGOGY IN PUNK OF HIP-HOP STUDIES

EDUCARE VETENSKAPLIGA SKRIFTER EDUCARE – Vetenskapliga skrifter är en sakkunniggranskad skriftserie som ges ut vid fakulteten Lärande och samhälle vid Malmö högskola sedan hösten 2005. Den speglar och artikulerar den mångfald av ämnen och forsk-ningsinriktningar som finns inom utbildningsvetenskap i Malmö. EDUCARE är också ett nationellt och nordiskt forum där nyare forskning, aktuella perspektiv på utbildningsvetenskapens ämnen samt utvecklingsar-beten med ett teoretiskt fundament ges plats. Utgivning består av vetenskap-liga artiklar skrivna på svenska, danska, norska och engelska. EDUCARE vänder sig till forskare vid lärarutbildningar, studenter vid lärarutbildningar, intresserade lärare vid högskolor, universitet och i det allmänna skolväsendet samt utbildningsplanerare.

ADRESS EDUCARE-vetenskapliga skrifter, Malmö högskola, 205 06 Malmö. www.mah.se/educare

ARTIKLAR EDUCARE välkomnar originalmanus på max 8000 ord. Artiklarna ska vara skrivna på något nordiskt språk eller engelska. Tidskriften är refereegranskad vilket innebär att alla inkomna manus granskas av två anonyma sakkunniga. Redaktionen förbehåller sig rätten att redigera texterna. Författarna ansvarar för innehållet i sina artiklar. För ytterligare information se författarinstruktioner på hemsidan www.mah.se/educare eller vänd er direkt till redaktionen. Artiklarna publiceras även elektroniskt i MUEP, Malmö University Electronic Publishing, www.mah.se/muep

REDAKTION Redaktör: Jonas Qvarsebo. Redaktionsråd. Cecilia Ferm, Hector Perez, Lisa Asp-Onsjö, Thomas Johansson, Andreas Fejes och Ann-Carita Evaldsson

COPYRIGHT: Författarna och Malmö högskola

EDUCARE 2016:2 Conference Issue: Politics of identity, activism and pedagogy in punk of hip-hop studies Titeln ingår i serien EDUCARE, publicerad vid Fakulteten för lärande och samhälle, Malmö högskola.

GRAFISK FORM TRYCK: Holmbergs AB, Malmö, 2016

ISBN: 978-91-7104-700-7 (tryck) ISBN: 978-91-7104-701-4 (pdf) ISSN: 1653-1868

BESTÄLLNINGSADRESS www.mah.se/muep Holmbergs AB Box 25 201 20 Malmö

TEL. 040-660 66 60 FAX 040-660 66 70 EPOST: [email protected] EDUCARE

EDUCARE är latin och betyder närmast ”ta sig an” eller ”ha omsorg för”. Educare är rotord till t.ex. engelskans och franskans education/éducation, vilket på svenska motsvaras av såväl ”(upp)fostran” som av ”långvarig omsorg”. I detta lägger vi ett bildnings- och utbildningsideal som uttrycker människors potential och vilja att ömsesidigt växa, lära och utvecklas. EDUCARE - Vetenskapliga skrifter är en sakkunniggranskad skriftserie som ges ut vid fakulteten Lärande och samhälle vid Malmö högskola sedan hösten 2005. Den speglar och artikulerar den mångfald av ämnen och forskningsinriktningar som finns inom utbildningsvetenskap i Malmö. EDUCARE är också ett nationellt och nordiskt forum där nyare forskning, aktuella perspektiv på utbildningsvetenskapens ämnen samt utvecklingsarbeten med ett teoretiskt fundament ges plats. Utgivning består av vetenskapliga artiklar skrivna på svenska, danska, norska och engelska. EDUCARE vänder sig till forskare vid lärarutbildningar, studenter vid lärarutbildningar, intresserade lärare vid högskolor, universitet och i det allmänna skolväsendet samt utbildningsplanerare.

Författarinstruktion och call for papers finns på EDUCARE:s hemsida: http://www.mah.se/educare

Redaktion: Redaktör: Jonas Qvarsebo. Redaktionsråd. Cecilia Ferm, Hector Perez, Lisa Asp-Onsjö, Thomas Johansson, Andreas Fejes och Ann-Carita Evaldsson CONTENTS

Foreword Jonas Qvarsebo 5

‘Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi! Matthew Worley 7

The performance and meaning of punk in a local Swedish context Philip Lalander & Jonas Qvarsebo 26

Redefining the subcultural: the sub and the cultural Erik Hannerz 50

Theorizing Power, Identity and Hip Hop: Towards a Queer, Intersectional Approach Kalle Berggren 75 EDUCARE 2016:2 Foreword This issue of EDUCARE is dedicated to the fields of punk and hip- hop studies. In December 14-16 2014 the network for childhood and youth studies, funded by FAS/FORTE, hosted a conference at Malmö University with the name “Politics of identity, activism and pedagogy in punk of hip-hop studies”. In this issue we present four articles based on papers and presentations from the conference.

In the first article of this issue, ”’Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi!”, Matthew Worley looks at the controversial music genre Oi! In relation to youth cultural identity in late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Matthew Worley is professor of modern history at the University of Reading, England. He has previously worked on British politics between the wars, primarily on the relation between the British Labour and Communist parties. His current research is focused on the relationship between youth cultures and politics, providing a historical method to test the basic CCCC thesis that youth cultures provide ‘sites of restistance’.

In article number two, “The performance and meaning of punk in a local Swedish context”, Philip Lalander & Jonas Qvarsebo reflect on what happened to punk culture as it travelled from the US and UK to Sweden and the town of Norrköping in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Philip Lalander is professor of social work at Malmö University and his research has focused on diverse phenomena such as youth cultures, alcohol, heroin, gambling and criminality. Jonas Qvarsebo is senior lecturer in educational science at Malmö university and his research has mainly revolved around education, childhood and youth from historical perspectives.

The third article, “Redifining the subcultural: the sub and the cultural”, is written by Eric Hannerz and addresses the question of what constitutes the subcultural. Drawing from his work on punks in Sweden and Indonesia the author argues that the different strands in regards to subcultural difference can be combined into a refinement of subcultural theory that moves beyond style to how objects, actions, and identities are communicated, interpreted, and acted upon.

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 5 Eric Hannerz is assistant professor in sociology at Lund University and a research fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, USA. He is currently working on a research project on graffiti writers’ perception and use of urban space.

Article number four, “Theorizing power, identity and Hip Hop: Towards a queer, intersectional approach”, is written by Kalle Bergren and looks at hip-hop culture in relation to power and identity. In the article he outlines some key differences between different understandings of power and identity, and their consequences for the study of hip hop. Kalle Bergrens research inte-rests revolve around meaning-making in relation to different forms of social inequality.

6 EDUCARE 2016:2 ‘Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi!

Matthew Worley

This article looks at the controversial music genre Oi! in relation to youth cultural identity in late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. By examining the six compilation albums released to promote Oi! as a distinct strand of punk, it seeks to challenge prevailing dismissals of the genre as inherently racist or bound to the politics of the far right. Rather, Oi! – like punk more generally – was a contested cultural form. It was, moreover, centred primarily on questions of class and locality. To this end, Oi! sought to realise the working-class rebellion of punk’s early aesthetic; to give substance to its street-level pretentions and offer a genuine ‘song from the streets’.

Keywords: youth, class, punk, culture, skinhead, Oi!

Matthew Worley, professor of modern history, Faculty of Arts Humanities & Social Science, University of Reading. Email: [email protected]

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Introduction I don’t need a flash car to take me around/ I can get the bus to the other side of town/ I didn’t get no GCE/ It makes you think you can’t talk to me/ Why should I let it worry me/ I’ll never believe you’re better than me (‘Hey Little Rich Boy’, Sham 69).1

The class character of British punk has long been contentious. From the outset, early interviews with the Sex Pistols focused on the working- class origins of the band’s members and traced the source of their ire to the deleterious economic conditions of the mid-1970s. Just as Caroline Coon wrote of ‘drab, Kafka-like working-class ghettoes’ serving as incubators for punk, so Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons invoked the idea of ‘seventies street music’ made by ‘working-class kids with the guts to say “No” to being office, factory and dole fodder’ (Coon 1976: 34–5; Parsons 1976: 29; Burchill 1977: 29). For Mark Perry, who founded Britain’s first punk fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash provided a mirror image of ‘life as it is in the council flats’ (Perry 1977a: 3–4; idem 1977b: 9). It was, Peter Marsh suggested, a form of ‘dole queue rock’ that comprised ‘kids’ who had ‘only just “escaped” from the concrete comprehensive’ to realise there was nothing to escape to (Marsh 1977: 112–14). Punk was urban and angry, it seemed, a youthful reaction to the prospect of no future. Of course, punk proved to be a rather more diverse and complex phenomenon. As Simon Frith was quick to point out in reply to Marsh, many of the ideas that informed punk – and many of those involved in punk, not least Malcolm McLaren – were a product of an art school education. In effect, punk continued in the tradition of radical British art, Frith argued. Though it utilised class rhetoric and urban iconography, any refusal to be office, factory or dole ‘fodder’ pushed punk closer to a new bohemia than a class war (Frith 1978: 535–6; Frith and Horne 1987). Indeed, those such as The Clash’s Joe Strummer who adopted rather than inherited a guttersnipe persona soon came in for criticism once their backgrounds revealed reference to the tower block was born more out of fetish than frustration. Not dissimilarly, the whole question of class was dismissed as a misnomer by many of those associated with 1 Sham 69, ‘Hey Little Rich Boy’, written by Jimmy Pursey and Dave Parsons, published by Maxwood Music Limited and used by kind permission.

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punk’s formation. For Siouxsie Sioux, Marco Pirroni and others drawn together by the Sex Pistols, punk (if the term be used at all) was about style and transgression rather than ‘oiks’ or socio-economics (Paytress 2003: 47; Savage 2009: 336–46 and 354–61). This article should not, therefore, be seen as an attempt to claim punk as necessarily or inherently working class. It does, however, wish to reassert class as an important component of the cultural critique offered within punk. In particular, it examines the emergence of Oi! to argue that class formed an integral part of what punk meant for at least a section of those drawn to it. If punk’s impact came from its fusion of cultural innovation and rhetorical populism, then it offered both a form of cultural experimentation and a medium for social and political commentary. Consequently, the version of punk that ran through bands such as the Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, Cock Sparrer, Menace, The Ruts, Sham 69, (early) Skrewdriver and the UK Subs was far more concerned with street sensibility than it was with cultural theory. To Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer of Sham 69, punk meant ‘a kid in Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Southampton, who lives in a little grimy industrial estate, wears an old anorak, dirty jeans, pumps, goes out at night, has a game of football on the green, throws a couple of bricks through a window for a bit of cheek, a kick. He likes the things he likes, no fucking about ... they’re the kids that this was supposed to get over to’ (quoted in Morley 1977: 9–10). In other words, these were bands who took up the gauntlet set down by Bernie Rhodes for The Clash to write lyrics relevant to their everyday life. What was once termed the ‘sound of the Westway’ was distilled into a ‘song from the street’; a street-level punk rock that eventually became known as ‘Oi!’ The research for this article stems from a Leverhulme Trust funded project designed to explore the politics of British punk both in terms of overt political sensibilities (towards anarchism, fascism, feminism, socialism) and implicit political effects born of agency, reaction and cultural practice. Within this, Oi! deserves attention for continuing a cultural trajectory distinct from the stylish bricolage discussed by Hebdige (Hebdige 1979) or the cultural praxis extolled by Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds (Marcus 1989; Reynolds, 2005). It moves away from the Sex Pistols and Crass as the locus-point of punk’s gestation and evolution (Savage 1991; McKay 1996) towards a culture informed

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by a combination of punk’s social realism and a working-class style that fed back to the football terrace and street corner. More generally, it reasserts punk as a contested cultural space; a cultural practice of critical engagement that took varied – often conflicting – form. To do this, an emphasis has been placed on what those involved in making the culture said and did; that is, the lyrics, records, interviews and statements offered by bands, fans and writers in contemporary context. Oi!, in sound and in substance, was often blunt and brutal. It was presented as voice from the street; it was interpreted by a hostile media as a hotbed of lumpen reaction. By recovering the voices of those involved, it hopes to present a historical record of substance rather than allegation.

Sounds from the streets: origins and definition Oi! was not so much created as discovered. The term was adopted by the Sounds writer Garry Bushell in 1980 to describe a new wave of punk bands for whom ‘punk ain’t dogma or religion but the fulfillment of a burning need for rock ‘n’ roll in its purest form, raw, aggressive and threatening’ (Bushell 1980c: 32–3). Taken from the Cockney Rejects’ Jeff (Stinky) Turner’s habit of shouting ‘oi’ at their live gigs, Oi! was first used as the title of a Rejects song (’Oi! Oi! Oi!) before then christening a compilation album designed to reassert punk as a form of ‘working-class protest’. More broadly, it served as a catch-all term for what Bushell described as ‘a loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’ (Bushell 1981a: 11). To the forefront, initially at least, were bands and poets such as the 4-Skins, Blitz, The Business, The Exploited, Infa Riot, Garry Johnson and the Last Resort. For Bushell, they revived punk’s original promise in providing ‘music made by and for the hundreds of thousands of human hand grenades primed by this middle-class and middle-aged controlled society which has guaranteed them NO FUTURE and left them to fester in their frustration’ (Bushell 1980: 32–3). As this suggests, Bushell was by this time already a veteran of the punk wars. Born in 1955 to a working-class family in south-east London, Bushell was in 1976 a young member of the International

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Socialists, or Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) as they were known from 1977. He was, moreover, quick to recognise punk as a form of working- class rebellion resonant of a society in crisis, championing the Sex Pistols and The Clash in the pages of Socialist Worker (Bushell 1976: 11). Like many others, he got involved in punk by writing a fanzine, Napalm, which brought him to the attention of Sounds’ editor, Alan Lewis. As a result, Bushell formed part of the new generation of writers recruited by the weekly music press in 1976–78 to charter and interpret the upheavals triggered by punk. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Bushell took punk’s urbanity and class rhetoric seriously. Though he became estranged from the far left as its class focus began to give way to conflicting identity politics, he retained what he called a ‘street socialist’ outlook that prioritised collective action rooted in the working class itself. In the language of the time, Bushell offered a ‘workerist’ perspective that he applied to cultural politics as well as socio-economics. Oi!, therefore, was presented as an authentic version of punk mythology: it was punk as a working-class culture made by and for the kids from the council estates and football terraces that Mark Perry had envisioned back in 1976. The parameters of Oi! were outlined in a series of articles published in Sounds over the course of 1980–81. The first of these, ‘The New Breed’, complemented the release of Oi! The Album in November 1980 and sought to showcase and contextualise what Bushell distinguished as a particular strand of punk rock. This, as noted above, was born of the Sex Pistols and The Clash but filtered through the rougher- edged 1977-sound of bands such as Cock Sparrer and Slaughter and the Dogs, both of whom featured on Oi! The Album, and the blunt social realism of Sham 69. Two more immediate precedents were the Cockney Rejects and the Angelic Upstarts, the first of whom came from London’s Custom House and helped forge the nucleus of a ‘scene’ in and around the Bridge House pub in Canning Town. While the Rejects produced a kind of ‘ruck ‘n’ roll’ that soon found favour with members of West Ham’s Inter City Firm (ICF), the Angelic Upstarts offered a more politicised street punk inspired by The Clash but firmly rooted in the working-class culture of their native north-east. Where the Rejects sung of ‘fighting in the streets’ and eschewed politics in all its forms, so the Upstarts’ set concentrated its fury on ‘police oppression’ and included paeans to mine workers. For the Upstarts’ lead singer, Mensi

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(Thomas Mensforth), punk was ‘working-class rebellion, a way of making kids think a bit more’. For Jeff ‘Stinky’ Turner, the Rejects’ lead singer, punk was ‘bootboy music. Harringtons, boots and straights, that’s what we’re all about’ (quoted in Bushell 1980b: 50; idem 1980a: 32–4). The ‘new breed’ article featured two bands from similar stock: the 4-Skins and Infa Riot. Not only did they comprise members who, if not still at school, were building workers, engineers or unemployed, but each sought to write songs that reflected what was happening on their respective east end and north London streets. In the context of 1980, this meant unemployment, street fashions, petty crime, social tensions and run-ins with the police. Both, too, sought to cut across youth cultural, political and football rivalries, fusing a raw punk sound with the skinhead style and sensibility that had re-emerged over the late 1970s. ‘We’re talking about skinheads not as fashion but as a way of life’, Lee Wilson (Infa Riot) insisted (Bushell 1980c: 32–3). Oi!, therefore, was imbued with what Bushell described as a ‘skin/bootboy/hardcore-punk mentality’. This was presented as quintessentially masculine and based on principles of pride, loyalty and courage. It was also ‘anti-politics’, in that it rejected both mainstream politics and the ‘crackpots’ of the political fringe. Oi!, instead, sought to provide a street-level form of reportage and an alternative means of protest against the ‘smug politicians and greedy bosses [who] have destroyed whole communities and thrown an entire generation on the scrapheap’ (Bushell 1980c: 32–3). The potential dangers of such expression were duly noted. A masculinity based on strength and pride could all too easily give way to ‘bullying and bigotry’, as in the lumpen ‘yob’ of media caricature. Political disillusionment, too, could bleed into extremist views that rejected conventional politics, or to an impulsive nihilism that found solace in violence, the glue bag or drugs such as tuinal. Indeed, the tendency for some young skinheads in the late 1970s to align themselves with the politics and signifiers of the far right seemingly fused both possibilities. As National Front (NF) and British Movement (BM) interventions at punk and 2-tone gigs became commonplace into the 1980s (especially in London), so the ‘bonehead’ – all tatty MA-1 flight jackets, skin-tight jeans, facial tattoos and over-sized boots –

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became a recognisable outgrowth of skinhead. For Bushell, therefore, it was essential that those involved with Oi! refuse to ‘play into the hands of the demagogues’ and ‘keep their protest and righteous wrath untainted by power games’ (Bushell 1980c: 32–3). It was for this reason, moreover, that an ‘Oi! debate’ was organised for January 1981. The January debate was chaired by Bushell and involved band members and fanzine writers keen to reassert punk’s point and purpose (Bushell 1981b: 30–1). First, the question of what Oi! represented, or stood for, was discussed. All agreed that the music should be raw and exciting, that it was avowedly working class, and that it was concerned more with connecting to the ‘kids in the audience’ than any kind of artistic progression. Oi! was punk for ‘ordinary geezers’, Lee Wilson suggested, not art school students or ‘trendies’ following fashion. There was some disagreement over just what Oi! sought to communicate. Where Mensi recognised the implicit politics of telling ‘the truth about police harassment, unemployment [and] Margaret fuckin’ Thatcher’, Turner felt politics ‘had nothing to do with music’. More generally, formal politics were dismissed as divisive and ineffectual; politicians were ‘all the same’, none of the parties were worth voting for, and none of them related to ‘the kids’. Accusations of far-right sympathies were refuted, though little residual support remained for Labour, let alone left-wing organisations associated with ‘student’ politics. There was, however, general agreement with Bushell’s assertion that ‘there’s poor whites and there’s poor blacks and we’re all getting everything taken away from us. Instead of slagging each other we should be after the people who are making the cutbacks, they’re the real enemies’. Oi!’s principal objective, therefore, was for bands to work together and inject an authentic working-class voice into popular music. While all agreed that punk had been marginalised within the media, its protest was deemed even more relevant in 1981 than in 1976. Or, as Charlie Harper (UK Subs) put it, ‘unemployment’s ten times as bad as it was in ’76, things are getting worse all round, so we’ve gotta keep talking about it’. Benefit gigs, primarily for the unemployed and prisoners’ rights, were seen to offer a way forward (Bushell 1981b: 30–1). Six months later, and a ‘new punk convention’ was organised at London’s Conway Hall. In the interim, new bands had formed beyond

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London and a second Oi! album – Strength Thru Oi! – had been released through Decca. More generally, and despite being scorned by the NME, Oi! formed part of a resurgent punk scene that saw bands such as The Exploited and Vice Squad break into the mainstream chart over the course of 1981–2. In May 1981, therefore, a conference of London Oi! bands met to reaffirm their commitment to ‘organise benefits against cuts (hospital and school closures and other matters hitting local communities), against unemployment, against vivisection’ and in support of ‘justified local strikes’ and the prisoners’ rights organisation. They also reasserted their affinity to punk, thereby paving the way for the Conway Hall meeting to demonstrate that Oi! was about ‘all types of herberts, punks and hooligans as well as skins’ (Bushell 1981c: 14). In the event, 57 ‘delegates’ attended from across the country, swapping lists of ‘friendly venues’ and charging Lol Pryor with responsibility to contact the SWP’s Right to Work campaign with a view to arranging a benefit for the unemployed. By the end of the convention, it was agreed that punks and skins should work together (under the dubious banner of skunk rock), and that kids in localities should put on their own gigs, form their own labels or work with trustworthy independents, start their own fanzines, and support local causes so as to never ‘give up the fight’ (Bushell 1981d: 16). Despite all this, Oi!’s attempt to define itself as a youthful form of working-class protest was soon overtaken by events. First, a gig at the Hambrough Tavern, Southall, on 3 July 1981, featuring the 4-Skins, The Business and The Last Resort, ended in a riot when local Asian youths mobilised in response to the arrival of a large number of skinheads in an area with a history of racial tension. Second, the interpretation of skinheads as violent Nazi thugs was seemingly confirmed by the front cover of Strength Thru Oi!, which featured a photo of Nicky Crane, a member of the BM Leader Guard. As a result, the dots were joined between the album, skinheads and the far-right to ensure that where Oi!’s critics had once found a supposed caricature of working-class life, they now constructed a caricature of their own.2 And yet, a closer

2 See, for criticism of Oi!’s class approach, Crass, ‘Rival Tribal Rebel Rev- el’, Crass Records, 1980 (a flexi-disc given away with Toxic Graffiti fanzine); Penman 1980: p. 41; Bohn 1981: 36–7. And, post Southall, for its ‘reactionary politics’, Kinnersley 1981: 18–19; Donovan and Evans 1981: 3; Hodges 1981: 3; Spencer 1981: 4–5.

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look at Oi! suggests that class remained its overriding motif (Worley 2013: 606–34). The ugly politics of race impinged on Oi!, but the ‘beat of the street’ remained more readily at war with the ‘chosen few, the middle class and the boys in blue’ (Johnson 1981b and 1981a).

‘Your iron curtain is the public school’: expression and articulation Oi!’s emergence and early development was catalogued on a series of six albums released between 1980 and 1984.3 Most of the principal artists associated with Oi! were included on at least one of the albums, which in turn featured sleevenotes that sought to define and locate Oi! within a broader cultural context. The quality varied, but taken altogether they provided a fairly comprehensive overview of Oi!’s attitude and approach. If Oi! was about ‘having a laugh and having a say’, as Bushell insisted, then the albums contained a suitable mix of irreverent humour and social commentary. Throughout, the politics and signifiers of class were to the fore. Most obviously, references to a residual working-class culture pepper the album sleeves and the lyrics of the bands featured. Oi!’s landscape was the inner-city back street; it moved through the pubs, clubs and terraces where youth gang rivalries and the weekend provided tales of punch-ups, piss-ups and bruised pride. Much time was spent exploring the spaces between work/school and home life, forging a kind of celebratory protest that provided for a ‘generation of scars’ on the one hand and ‘dead end yobs’ on the other. Oi! was always active: running, fighting, going out. As a result, there was an ambivalence shown towards violence that helped feed Oi!’s negative reputation. Turf wars, football and the bank holiday beano were a recognised part of Oi!’s cultural lineage, as demonstrated by sleevenotes (and songs) that evoked the ‘bovver books’ of Richard Allen and reveled in the localised identities of Oi!’s youthful milieu. It was precisely the thrill of ‘runnin’ riot’ that gave Oi! its vitality, especially when set against the futility of a boring job, unemployment or impending adulthood.

3 These were, initially, Oi! The Album (1980), Strength Thru Oi! (1981), Carry on Oi! (1981) and Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot (1982), followed by Son of Oi! (1983) and The Oi! of Sex (1984).

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Things you say, things you do, sure worry me/ When we’re out on the street making money for you in your society/ It seems to me that the time is right, for another generation and anoth- er street fight/ Got no future, sure got a right, I got a right tolive. I can’t stand the peace and quiet/ All I want is a running riot/I can’t stand the peace and quiet/ Because all I want is a running ... RIOT!

Don’t you try to understand the way we feel/ Flash limousines and mort- gages ain’t no big deal/ I’ve got no friends who want to be, living like you when they’re 33/ Getting old sure bothers me, it bothers me to death.4

Paul Morley, back in 1978, had noted Sham 69’s ability to capture youth’s social and domestic claustrophobia; the sense of struggling to cope with a life shaped by factors beyond any immediate control (Morley 1978: 37). This, in turn, continued through Oi! In the context of the early 1980s, with unemployment rising to over three million and Britain’s industrial base contracting under the monetarist policies of Margaret Thatcher, so songs of pent up rage and dystopian visions of the near future permeated all six Oi! albums. The 4-Skins, in particular, proved adept at prophesising doom, with ‘1984’ and ‘On the Streets’ depicting a country caught between authoritarianism and violent social collapse. Others, such as Blitz (‘Nation on Fire’), documented the sense of frustration that helped ignite the inner-city disturbances that spread across Britain in 1981. Infa Riot, too, offered a neat summary of the morale-sapping effects of unemployment with ‘Each Dawn I Die’.

I’m trapped in here, a self-built cage, nobody’s got the key/ I’ll scream and shout, please let me out, Margaret give me money/ Pull the cage, open the cage, it’s held there by a hook/ 3 million people are trapped inside and none of them get a look. So here I am, no future here, there’s nothing left for me/I’m only young, I want some fun, just a bit of security/ A daily job from 9 til 5 would be asking oh so much/ But I don’t think I’ll work no more, I’ve just really given up.5

4 Cock Sparrer, ‘Runnin Riot’, words and music by Stephen Burgess and Gar- rie Lammin, reproduced by permission of Orange Songs Ltd.. 5 Infa Riot, ‘Each Dawn I Die’, words and music by Barry Thomas Damery and Lee Raymond Wilson © 2007 Cherry Red Songs. Administered by Kass- ner Associated Publishers Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Simultaneously, however, Oi!’s negation was complemented by a stubborn refusal to submit. While Prole insisted that they would ‘never say die’, even as the factories closed and the dole queue beckoned, so The Last Resort’s ‘King of the Jungle’ defined an alternate site of working-class empowerment: youth cultural style. The skinhead persona, so intrinsic to Oi!, was in this instance a statement of class pride; a totem of rebellious youth and street-level ‘suss’. As this suggests, Oi! venerated those who sought to circumnavigate the social- economic obstacles before them. Local ‘faces’ – part of an Oi! milieu that included football firms, pub regulars and associated characters – were name-checked in songs and on the album sleeves. And if, as Garry Johnson insisted, football, boxing and rock ‘n’ roll were the principal working-class escape routes from the dole queue or the ‘dead- end job’, then the Oi! albums paid due respect to those boxers (Charlie Magri, Alan Minter), footballers (Trevor Brooking, Dixie Dean) and bands/artists (Conflict, The Jam, Judge Dread, Madness, Rose Tattoo, Errol Scorcher) with whom they felt an affinity (Johnson 1981a). More humorously, Oi! contained a ‘pathétique’ strand of bands that specialised in bawdy humour and drew from a ‘Carry On …’ or music hall tradition of working-class comedy. Indeed, the term ‘oi’ had links back to variety performers – Jimmy Wheeler, Max Miller, Flanagan and Allen, Billy Cotton – that fed neatly into Oi!’s referencing a down- at-heel Englishness; a ‘cockney’ culture that resonated beyond its more obvious youth cultural context but was simultaneously being diluted within its traditional habitat.6 In terms of politics, Oi!’s perspective was rarely formed by party or ideological allegiance. Members of political organisations on the left and right were involved in Oi!, though such affiliations were not made explicit on the albums. Of those featured, only ABH (on The Oi! of Sex) aligned openly with the NF (Anon 1984: 3). Oi!’s audience, too, undoubtedly contained some who embraced (or accepted) the

6 Pathétique bands included The Gonads (featuring Bushell), the Toy Dolls and the various bands led by Max Splodge. The cover of Carry on Oi! was designed like a saucy seaside postcard, and each of the Oi! albums came with a billing – eg. ‘for your titillation, edification and enjoyment’ – that recalled music hall stage announcements. Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot (1982) was named after a Jimmy Wheeler catchphrase.

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racial politics of the NF or BM. But in the wake of Southall there was – if anything – a leftist slant to the albums, with the inclusion of overtly socialist bands and poets such as The Burial, the Newtown Neurotics, Attila the Stockbroker and Mick Turpin. Mick O’Farrell, of Red Action, also lent his anti-fascist credentials to the sleevenotes of Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot (1982), while the League of Labour Skins Choir sang ‘Jerusalem’ on 1983’s Son of Oi! More typically, however, the politics of left and right were seen as divisive and detached from the interests of the working class. So, for example, Garry Johnson’s lyric for The Business’ ‘Suburban Rebels’ bemoaned ‘the middle-class kiddies from public school’ who appeared to dominate the far left by the late 1970s and early 1980s but had no experience of the inequalities about which they campaigned. Nor, Bushell added, did these ‘bedsit radicals’ seem to understand a working-class culture that failed to conform to a romanticised stereotype (Bushell 1982a). Simultaneously, Johnson’s ‘Boy About Town’ depicted a young skinhead enticed by the far right.

Boy about town, dressed to kill, Fleet Street headlines give him a thrill/ Enoch warns ‘rivers of blood’/ Boy about town can’t see he’s a mug/ On a daily diet of stale white bread/ The Sun, the scum, with his middle-page spread [ …]/ He’s a bully boy in bovver boots/ A willing slave to men in suits/ A militant mug, a vicious thug, hooked on hate, a dangerous drug/ Patriotic songs, slogans of war/ Holocaust anthems we’ve heard before/ The forgotten boy who loves to hate/ A museum piece who’s out of date/ The enemy of the working class, got no future, lives in the past.7

For this reason, the sleevenotes to Strength Thru Oi! railed against ‘twisted nazis’ and ‘middle-class commies’, both of whom ‘try and use us [or] write us off as sub-animal no hopes’ (Bushell 1981e). The politics of Oi! – its protest – were therefore filtered through a street-level lens. Geo-politics were sometimes engaged with, as on the Angelic Upstarts’ ‘Guns for the Afghan Rebels’ or The Partisans’ ‘Arms Race’, but the focus tended towards the socio-economic and the cultural. Beyond the vivid depictions of recognisable class- cultural signifiers, Oi! kicked back against those social and structural

7 Garry Johnson, ‘Boy About Town’, on Son of Oi!, Syndicate Records, 1983, used by kind permission of the author.

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forces that served to ensure that ‘we’re the ones who do the work, we’re the ones they take for jerks’ (Prole, ‘Generation Landslide’). Not surprisingly, the Conservative government was recognised to stand for ‘mass unemployment and poverty, a them and us society’ (Johnson 1981b). But equal disdain was reserved for social workers, the police and a state that drew on the working class to both generate and protect its wealth. Most poignantly, perhaps, the Angelic Upstarts’ ‘Last Night, Another Soldier’ told the tale of a young squaddie who signed up to ‘get out of it’ and secure his future, only to be shot down in Ulster to become ‘just a number in the papers, another one of the innocents’. Workplace politics were dealt with on occasion. Oi! The Comrade’s ‘Guvnors Man’ offered a vicious critique of the shopfloor careerist, but the problem of finding work was more commonly expressed. Beyond the Oi! compilations, the Angelic Upstarts’ ‘King Coal’ and ‘Heath’s Lament’ both invoked the miners’ struggles of the 1970s, while The Business’ ‘National Insurance Blacklist’ exposed the means by which employers in the building trade sought to silence active trade unionists and workers who stood up for their rights.

Job chances seem very thin/ It’s a losing battle we must all win/ The CBI are winning, keep down the pay/ Mysterious people calling early in the day/ The ‘x’ has appeared, another lost life/ No tears are shed for the children and wife/ The dailies ignore it or treat it with tact/ Since when have you known them to report fact In our country so fair and free/ So say the holders of the economy/ There is a monster said not to exist/ They call it the employers’ blacklist.8

As the song makes clear, Oi! bands had scant regard for a media they recognised as complicit in the demonisation of the working class. Cock Sparrer’s ironic ode to The Sun, ‘The Sun Says’, remains an Oi! classic. Finally, of course, the fallout from Southall ensured that racial politics were projected onto Oi! This, initially at least, tended to

8 ‘National Insurance Blacklist (Be a Rebel and You’ll Always be Wrong)’, words and music by Laurence Keith Pryor and Steve Kent © 2007 Cherry Red Songs. Administered by Kassner Associated Publishers Ltd. Used by permis- sion. All rights reserved.

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revolve around ‘guilt by association’ rather than accusations of Oi! bands being overtly racist. First, Oi!’s link to a skinhead culture that harboured racist elements ensured that connections were soon made. The media’s interpretation of the late 1970s skinhead ‘revival’ was typically built on a narrative of racism and fascist politics.9 Second, Oi’s unabashed patriotism ensured that its use of the Union Jack was read either as naïve or willfully contentious – charges most Oi! bands refuted (Duffy 1991: 4–5; Rollo 1981: 4).10 In response, therefore, the Oi! albums released post-Southall sought to redress the balance, be it via the Angelic Upstarts’ ‘I Understand’, a song in support of Richard Campbell, a young Rasta murdered whilst in Ashford Remand Centre, or Garry Johnson’s ‘United’, which made clear that ‘Oi! ain’t about black v white’. Oi!, in any case, boasted close ties to 2-tone – which Bushell championed in Sounds – and, given its skinhead roots, was born into a cross-cultural tradition that belied its media stereotype. Indeed, several Oi! bands played anti-racist gigs or made anti-racist statements over 1981–4; some, too, including the 4-Skins, Blitz, Case and The Burial, adopted ska or reggae elements into their songs.11 Bushell, certainly, refused to cover bands with ties to the far right, a stance that led to him and Garry Johnson both being physically attacked by the NF/BM and condemned by the nascent ‘white power’ scene organised around Skrewdriver.12 Oi!, then, expressed its protest in primarily class terms. Its working- class origins served as a common denominator across those associated

9 See, for example, ‘Danger on the Right’, TV Eye, ITV Documentary, 1980; ‘Skinheads’, Arena, BBC Documentary, 1982. 10 For example, Cock Sparrer’s Steve Bruce insisted that ‘We’re taking our flag back and proving you don’t have to be a fascist to wave the Union Jack. It’s our flag, not the NF’s’ (Bushell, 1982b: 14). 11 For examples of Oi! warning against fascism and racism, see Angelic Up- starts, ‘Kids on the Street’, Blitz, ‘Propaganda’, Cock Sparrer, ‘I Got Your Num- ber’ and ‘Run With the Blind’. 12 Skrewdriver came from Blackpool and become a presence on the London punk scene in 1977. They adopted a skinhead look and attracted a skinhead audience, but passed through a series of incarnations before its founder and singer, Ian Stuart, allied his band to the NF’s Rock Against Communism ini- tiative in the late 1970s. By 1982, Skrewdriver formed the focal point of a white power scene that later became Blood & Honour.

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with it; politics, youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries provided points of tension. In many ways, Oi! offered a living counterpart to John Lydon’s 1978 definition of punk as being ‘basically a lot of hooligans doing it the way they want and getting what they want’ (Coon 1978: 14–15). For Garry Johnson, Oi! meant ‘working-class anthems – not mindless violence or dodgy politics but the logical continuation of “Anarchy in the UK”, that attitude […] Not fighting each other in the streets, but fighting the system, challenging the establishment through words and music’ (Bushell 1983: 22–3. Oi!’s politics were contestable. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that provided for a political and cultural impact beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union and the NME.

Conclusion: ‘loud, proud and punk’ Writing in 1987, Simon Frith and Howard Horne argued that punk was the ‘ultimate art school movement’. Not only, they insisted, were many of punk’s leading protagonists art school educated, but its political and cultural rationale was largely shaped by ideas, aesthetics and critiques honed in the studios, bars and bedsits of an increasingly pop-savvy and theory-literate art school milieu (Frith and Horne 1987: 124). Fair enough. It is easy to point to examples that affirm Frith and Horne’s thesis. But such an argument is partial. There were many more involved in or inspired by punk, both during its ‘first wave’ and thereafter, who did not go to art school and who saw in punk a means of cultural expression that bore little relation to either bohemia or the academy. To suggest, moreover, that only ‘punk-as-art-school movement’ really ‘matters in terms of cultural history’ is contentious in the extreme (Frith and Horne 1987: 124). Oi!, by contrast, formed part of an alternative ‘pop’ narrative. Not simply the ‘punk-as-pub-rock movement’ that Frith and Horne dismissed as the art school contingent’s irrelevant other, but a stylistic and class-based tradition that gave preference to, say, bluebeat over the blues; teds and skins over beats and hippies; Slade and The Faces over prog rock or Roxy Music. If the stylised urbanity of The Clash proved inspirational to many attracted by punk’s social realism, then

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so too did Johnny Rotten’s irreverence and the brash working-class persona of the Pistols’ Steve Jones. Punk’s claim to give voice to the ‘kids’ from the council estates and the football terrace was not just art school pretense; it really did provide a cultural space for the likes of Cock Sparrer and Sham 69, not to mention The Jam, 2-tone and the punk resurgence of 1981–2 (in which Oi! played a major part). Just as Oi! contained echoes of the 1950/60s ‘kitchen sink’ books and films that dramatised the tensions and transformations of post-war Britain,13 so we may follow a line from the teds, skins and bootboys through to football casuals, bands such as the Happy Mondays, and into the modern-day housing estates that provide the urban backdrop to grime. Thus, in 2012, as Plan B assessed the fall-out from the inner-city riots of the previous year, he wore t-shirts depicting skinheads and used lyrics that referenced both Sham 69 and Oi! By so doing, he connected the street styles and music of the late 1970s and early 1980s with the grime artists of twenty-first century – that is, kids from the inner-city estates, reporting and celebrating their lives and culture, bemoaning the socio-economic structures that ensnare them, and simultaneously forging a means to avoid the dole queue and the dead-end job. Rather neatly, perhaps, one of grime’s defining records was More Fire Crew’s ‘Oi!’, released in 2001. Class was not essential to punk. As a cultural form, punk proved diverse and open to interpretation. But class remained the defining characteristic of Oi!, even as its influence spread overseas to inform street punk scenes in every continent (Marshall 1996). For the bands brought together under the Oi! banner, class mattered. It defined their understanding of punk and sought to affirm a sense of identity within the shifting contours of British society. Oi! was more than just a voice from the dead end of the street, it was about ‘thinking for yourself’, being ‘sharp in brain and dress’, ‘knowing no-one is better than you’, ‘not giving a toss about the boss’, being ‘proud to be British, but not xenophobic’. Most importantly, however, Oi! was steadfastly and unapologetically ‘proud to be working class’ (Bushell 1984).

13 The most obvious example of this was Sham 69’s That’s Life album (Polydor, 1978), which documented a day-in-the-life of a working-class teenager from the east end of London. It was also made into a short film (‘Grant’s Story’) by BBC’s Arena: ‘Tell Us The Truth’ (1979). Grant was Grant Fleming.

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Acknowledgments Matthew Worley, ‘Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi!’, Punk & Post-Punk, 3:1 (2014), pp. 5–20, by permission of Intellect Ltd. The article forms part of a wider research project supported by a grant awarded by the Leverhulme Trust. Many thanks to Angela Bartie, Russ Bestley, Tim Brown, Garry Bushell, Kev Clark, Jon Garland, Keith Gildart, Steve Ignorant, Garry Johnson, Tom McCourt, Lisa McKenzie, Gary O’Shea, Andrew Perchard, Lucy Robinson, Andrew Smith, John Street, Paul Stott, Toast, Tim Wells and David Wilkinson for their help and insight.

References Anon., (1984), Interview with ABH, Bulldog, Number 39. Bohn, Chris (1981), Review of Strength Thru Oi!, NME (20 June). Burchill, Julie (1977), ‘1976’, NME (1 January). Bushell, Garry, ‘Sex Pistols: Whose Finger on the Trigger?’, Socialist Worker (18 December). _____ (1980a), ‘The Angelic Upstarts are all Washed Up’, Sounds (3 May). _____ (1980b), ‘Harder Than the Rest, Sounds (8 March). _____ (1980c), ‘The New Breed: A Teenage Warning’, Sounds (1 November). _____ (1981a), ‘Oi! – The Column’, Sounds (17 January). _____ (1981b), Oi! – The Debate’, Sounds (24 January). _____ (1981c), ‘Oi! – The Column’, Sounds (30 May). _____ (1981d), ‘Skunk Rock ‘81’, Sounds (11 July). _____ (1981e), Sleevenotes, Strength Thru Oi ! (Decca Records). _____ (1982a), Sleevenotes, Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot (Secret Records). _____ (1982b), ‘Strictly for the Birds’, Sounds (20 November). _____ (1983), ‘The Voices of Britain’, Sounds (23 January). _____ (1984), Sleevenotes, The Oi! of Sex (Syndicate Records).

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Coon, Caroline (1976), ‘Sex Pistols: Rotten to the Core’, Melody Maker (27 November). _____ (1978), ‘Public Image’, Sounds (22 July). Donovan, Paul and Pat Evans (1981), ‘Exposed: The Racist Thug on the Cover of this Evil Record’, Daily Mail (10 July). Duffy, Mike (1981), ‘Playing with Fire – And Other Skin Problems’, NME (11 July). Frith Simon (1978), ‘The Punk Bohemians’, New Society (9 March). Frith Simon and Howard Horne (1987), Art into Pop, London: Methuen. Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen & Co. Hodges, Lucy (1981), ‘Racists Recruit Youth Through Rock Music’, The Times (3 August). Johnson, Garry (1981a), ‘The Dead End Yobs’, Strength Thru Oi! (Decca Records). _____ (1981b), ‘United’, Carry on Oi! (Secret Records). Kinnersley, Simon (1981) ‘The Skinhead Bible of Hate from an Establishment Stable’, Daily Mail (9 July). Marcus, Greil (1989), Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, London: Faber & Faber. Marsh, Peter (1977), ‘Dole Queue Rock’, New Society (20 January). Marshall, George (1996), Skinhead Nation (Dunoon: ST Publishing). McKay, George (1996), Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, London, Verso. Morley, Paul (1977), ‘Don’t Follow Leaders’, NME (12 November). _____ (1978), Review of Sham 69, That’s Life album, NME (4 November). Parsons, Tony (1976), ’Go Johnny Go’, NME (3 October). Paytress, Mark (2003), Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Authorised Biography, London: Sanctuary.

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Penman, Ian (1980), Review of Oi! The Album, NME (1 November). Perry, Mark (1977a), ‘The Sex Pistols for Time Out’, Sniffin Glue, Number 6. _____ (1977b), ‘The Truth’, Sniffin Glue, Number 9. Reynolds, Simon (2005), Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-Punk, 1978– 84, London: Faber & Faber. Rollo, Joanna (1981), ‘Sounds Familiar’, Socialist Worker (18 July). Savage, Jon (1991), England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London: Faber & Faber. _____ (2009) The England’s Dreaming Tapes, London: Faber & Faber. Spencer, Neil (1981), ‘Oi! – The Disgrace’, NME (11 July). Various Artists (1980), Oi! The Album (EMI). _____ (1981a), Strength Thru Oi! (Decca Records). _____ (1981b), Carry on Oi! (Secret Records). _____ (1982), Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot (Secret Records). _____ (1983), Son of Oi! (Syndicate Records) _____ (1984), The Oi! of Sex (Syndicate Records). Worley, Matthew (2013), ‘Oi!, Oi!. Oi!: Class, Locality and British Punk’, Twentieth Century British History, 24:4.

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 25 The performance and meaning of punk in a local Swedish context

Philip Lalander & Jonas Qvarsebo

When punk culture travelled from The US and England to Sweden in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the result was a mix of symbols, emotions and attitudes from all three national contexts. One Swedish town where punk made an impact was Norrköping, a middle-sized working class town south of Stockholm. The foucus of this article is the transformation of punk as it entered a new national and local context. We are interested in what happened to punk as it travelled from centre – London, Detroit and New York – to periphery – Sweden and Norrköping and what kind of meaning- maing practices that became possible in the new context. The empirical material consists of interviews with 24 informants who were part of the punk scene in Norrköping during the period. Besides the interviews we have made use of photographs, song lyrics and newspaper material. Our methodological approach is interactive memory work in which we together with the informants reflect on the performance and meaning of punk in Norrköping.

Keywords: Punk, Oi!, politics, style, Sweden

Philip Lalander, professor in social work, Malmö University. [email protected]

Jonas Qvarsebo, senior lecturer in educational science, Malmö University. [email protected]

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I hadn’t seen Snibbe for some time. One day I walked over to his house on Generalsgatan and rang the doorbell. As he opens the door, I notice that his hair is dyed in a very clear red color, standing straight up. I ask him if he’s up for miming to some KISS songs, as we had done so many times before. But he laughs and says that he doesn’t do that stuff anymore. He says he’s into punk now. We enter his room, and he turns on a record on a small turntable with plastic loudspeakers placed on his desk. The aggressive sound of Sex Pistol’s ”God Save the Queen” hits me hard. This experience was to throw me like a projectile into the punk universe. It meant that the KISS era was definitely over. No more boots made ​​of wood and no more fake guitars. It was for real now (Qvarse, in Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014:95).

In this article we analyse how punk was used and charged with meaning by young people in Norrköping – a midsize Swedish working-class town – in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We focus on what happened to punk as it travelled from the USA and the UK and was put to play in a local context in Sweden. We were both actively involved in Norrköping’s local punk scene and have recently released a book about Norrköping’s punk culture during this period.114The article is based on the empirical data – interviews, newspaper articles, local punk lyrics and photographs – gathered for the book project.

The complexity and fluidity of punk Punk is a dynamic and fluid phenomenon and not easily defined (Hebdige 1979; Marcus 1993). The local punk culture in Norrköping was put together by elements from several national and local contexts. The first influences came from the punk scene in Britain. Later on the Norrköping punks were strongly influenced by the British Oi!- movement, which was a development of punk with a strong working- class element. But the earliest expressions of punk, going back to the early and mid-1970s in American cities like Detroit, New York and Los Angeles, also had an impact on punk in Norrköping (Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014). These influences have to do with much more than just musical expression, even if music has always been central for punk

1 Lalander, Philip & Qvarsebo, Jonas (2014), Punk i Peking: Motstånd, attityd och mening, Malmö: Peking Studio & Förlag.

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experience. The early American punk culture was to a large extent about self-expression and raw energy, and about being creative and anti-authoritarian. It had an artsy and avant-garde outlook and was not politically outspoken (Marcus 1993). Later on this would change with the punk culture that emerged in California with bands like Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. British punk took on some of the elements of early American punk but merged it with a more politically outspoken approach – punks raising their voices against new forms of raw capitalism and the industry of war. The political component of British punk became stronger in the Oi!-movement, where angry young men glorified traditional and masculine working-class symbols and sought to fight and resist the system in their own way (Worley 2014). As punk culture travelled to Sweden, it brought with it elements from both the American and the British context where it was merged with elements from the new national and local context. The result was a new mix of symbols, emotions, attitudes and political ideas. A way to make sense of this process is to use what Hebdige (1979) has called “signifying practices”, a creative and dynamic construction of cultural meaning through the use of role models and symbols as reference points. In the works of the Birmingham School, youth and subculture has been perceived as resistance to a suffocating bourgeoisie culture, and as a symbolic reaction to the economic, political and social crises of the UK in the mid-1970s (Hall & Jefferson 1975/1991; Willis 1977; Johansson & Lalander 2012). However, as Nick Crossley (2014) has pointed out, it is not tenable to explain the rise of subcultures from working-class people suffering from various crises only (see also Hannerz 2013). And this is certainly true for punk. We have already mentioned the early American punk culture, which was not politically outspoken, at least not in the way we generally think of politics as a way of trying to influence state and government in certain ways. The working-class explanation for the rise of punk can be questioned in the British context as well, since punk culture in Britain was partly developed by middle- class young people at art schools. The founding members of The Clash, for instance, met at art school. The British punk scene also had a musical background in the many bands that played simple and raw rock’n’roll at local pubs during the early

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1970s. Several of these bands later became punk bands. In analysing the proliferation and popularization of punk, Crossley (2014) also stresses the importance of the marketing and promotion strategies by entrepreneurs like Malcolm McLaren – the legendary manager of The Sex Pistols. Sarah Thornton’s work (1995) on the important role of media in the creating of subcultures can halso be mentioned here. Rather than understanding punk as an expression of of class struggle, we view its emergence and transformations against the background of many different style elements that can be put together in various ways given the specific cultural conditions of possibilities (Laclau & Mouffe 1985). Hence, local punk cultures have been constructed in the intersection between different media-constructed styles, role models, and social life circumstances and social structures. Punk can also be understood as a struggle for authenticity, as acts of distancing oneself from what is perceived as mainstream, both within punk culture and in society at large (Hannerz 2015). In line with this some punks have defined themselves as the real deal, while defining other punks as too commercial or as fakes. Some punks have valued DIY, the do- it-yourself-ideal, while others have favoured a more aggressive and sometimes commercial style with clothes bought from commercial punk stores. These practices of inclusion and exclusion of style elements within punk culture have varied in different contexts and have not followed any predetermined rules. Furthermore, punk music is a very diverse phenomenon containing influences of many different sorts. Punk has sometimes sounded much like classic rock’n’roll with a more aggressive and loud expression. Elements from musical styles such as reggae, ska, rocksteady, garage rock, dub, pop and blues can all be found within punk music. Hip- hoppers have their four elements that connect the whole world of Hip-Hop and give that culture a sense of coherence. This is not the case when it comes to punk since no fixed elements are there to bind the culture together. Some symbols that are often associated with punk – such as safety pins, black leather jackets, rivets and coloured hair – may signal a coherent style. Yet, some very influential punk rockers have not looked very punky if these style elements are viewed as defining for punk culture. An influential band like the Clash, for example, basically looked like a rock’n’roll or rockabilly band, and

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The Ramones, with their simple leather jackets, t-shirts and jeans did not use the typical punk symbols either. And many other examples like this can be mentioned. The non-coherence and fluidity of punk has made posssible several different versions of the style. Thus, punk is put together by many different visual, musical and emotional elements without a predetermined framework or logic (Hebdige 1979). The punk culture in Norrköping was first shaped by influences from the early punk scenes in the UK, the USA as well as other parts of Sweden. However, as early as 1981, it became heavily influenced by the Oi!-scene in England (Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014). British Oi!-culture was to a large extent a product of British working-class culture, with bands like Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects. Oi!-lyrics were about everyday life in the working-class districts, about going to the pub, being on the dole, going to the football stadium; and it was fuelled by a sense of pride in one’s local neighbourhood. According to Matthew Worley (2013:29), Oi! was a “song from the street”. The early punk movement, had, to a large extent, been individualistic and was known for its shocking and provocative expression. The Oi!-style, on the other hand, was much more uniform in its visual expression and had a strong emphasis on the collective. The pub fellowship, the football firm and the uniform-like skinhead look were some of the important collective symbols that bound Oi!-culture together. The class identity of Oi!-music was thus clearly working class, and Oi! can be viewed as a kind of symbolic restoration of a working-class identity that had become fragmented (Worley 2013). Many of the bands that appeared on the Oi! albums (six influential albums released with the Oi!-name between 1980-1994) – clearly struggled to maintain their working-class identity through their lyrics and attitude. Consequently, Oi! was very much about taking part in a class struggle in the UK, in contexts where a strong working-class tradition existed (Worley 2013). Nevertheless, Oi! Cannot define punk as a whole, which, as already stated above, is more diverse when it comes to class identity. In the empirical part of this article, we describe and analyse some central themes of the local punk culture in Norrköping and show how different elements of punk culture were put to play in this context. We also highlight how the Oi!-symbols were imported, decoded and used on the streets of Norrköping, and how this entailed a transformation

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of the original meaning of Oi!. Even though the visual symbols in many ways were identical in both contexts – bomber jackets, short hair or shaved head, Doc Marten boots, thin braces, and so on – the circumstances and possibilities of meaning were different. The different context made possible a play with these symbols in which they took on a different meaning and provided possibilities for a political alternative that was different from the original context.

An interactive memory work As indicated in the introduction, we have made use of our own experiences and memories as a way of understanding the Swedish local punk culture in Norrköping. However, the bulk of the empirical material is based on interviews with 24 persons who participated in the Norrköping punk scene during the period. We contacted and recruited our informants through Facebook and met them for qualitative interviews and conversations. We listened to their stories and memories from the punk era and asked questions about why punk was important to them and how they viewed their own involvement in punk culture. In the conversations, we helped each other to fill various memory gaps. As a consequence, we as authors and the interviewees became involved in what can be viewed as a collective and interactive memory work. We experienced what Lindesmith, Strauss and Denzin have described in the following way:

When we are within a given group (for example, our families) over a period of time, the members talk about past experiences and keep them fresh in our minds. Familiar faces and old haunts become linked with memories of past events. When we leave the group for a long time or permanently, the memories fade, along with the faces, places and names, until a skeleton of almost nothing remains. If we return after many years to the old group and the old environment the memories are revived, although they are not the same. (Lindesmith, Strauss and Denzin 1999:168)

At the start of this project, we had not had any contact with each other or with our old friends for more than thirty years. Therefore, we really had “left the group” for a long time. Some of the informants still viewed themselves as punk rockers of some sort, maintaining contact with a network of old punks. These informants had the most

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vivid memories of the punk era, probably because they had maintained their relationship with the punk movement over the years. Through our conversations with the informants, we remembered things that we had never really reflected on before. We realize of course that we do not remember things as they actually happened since our perspectives of the world and ourselves – our habitus – have changed over the years. Yet, this can also be seen as an advantage in that is has made it possible for us to analyze our past from a distance and from sociological and historical perspectives. In addition to our evolving memories, interviews and conversations, we have used more than 400 photographs. The photos helped us to more closely investigate the style that the punks composed and to reflect on the different influences of the style. Hairstyles, jackets, different logos, types of boots, ways of posing, and so on, provided us with a semiotic material that we could use in combination with the interviews. Lastly, we conducted searches in databases for local newspapers and found some interesting articles about the punk culture in Norrköping with several quotes from young punks who were interviewed on the streets.

Situating Punk in Norrköping and Sweden Although Norrköping is known as a classic Swedish working-class town, its development in the 1900s in comparison to similar towns was not a story of success. That said, the 1700s and 1800s were the heydays of Norrköping as it was one of the country’s most successful textile towns. At its peak, Norrköping was known as Sweden’s Manchester. However, in the 1900s the town became known for the mass closure of its factories and for large-scale unemployment. The situation worsened after the Second World War; between 1950 and 1980 over sixty companies were forced to close down, and the effects on the economy and on general living standards were quite devastating. However, post-war Sweden was also the period of the “strong state”, as the Social Democratic Party had a unique strategic role in planning and designing society at every level. Therefore, the crisis in Norrköping was countered by political intervention such as the state-sanctioned relocation of five large state agencies from the country’s capital to Norrköping (Nilsson 2000).

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This state action was characteristic for Swedish welfare state politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Integral to this politics was the endeavour to do away with all the remains of the former poor and dirty Sweden. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Social Democratic housing politics led to the demolition of entire old districts in the inner cities. The old buildings and city districts stood as symbols of poverty and misery for the Social Democratic politicians, who, in many cases, had grown up in these poor areas of the cities. The new and modern welfare state needed new and modern buildings with clean running water, modern toilets and spacious apartments. A large-scale demolition and rebuilding of many Swedish cities was the very concrete consequence of this political vision (Nilsson 2000; Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014). As a result, many parts of the inner city of Norrköping in the 1970s were laid in ruins and some parts of the town resembled – in the words of the Specials - a ghost town. During this period, it became common to talk about Norrköping as the “bombed city”. Though Sweden was never bombed during the war, the housing politics created a war-like topography. Looking out over Norrköping during the late 1970s, one’s thoughts were more likely to revolve around war and destruction than modernity and future hope. However, as Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the Clash, pointed out when commenting on the rough exterior of the city of Belfast in the 1970s, “Punk was the perfect soundtrack to the ravaged cities” (O’Neill & Trelford 2003:50). The demolished appearance of the urban landscape became a context and a symbol that could be used to shape the emergent punk style in creative ways. Other old symbols of the old working-class town were also done away with in this process. The beer halls, for instance, located here and there in towns like Norrköping, were all closed down. This was not done by accident or because of market reasons; rather it was a strategic move in Swedish health politics where beer halls were viewed as bad for people’s health and were, therefore, to be shut down. The new and modern society was to be populated by healthy and productive citizens, not unproductive drunkards who hung out in beer halls. Other older meeting places and symbols in the city centres went the same way during this period. The Swedish welfare project was all about creating an equal society with small class distinctions; and through political intervention, the entire population became lower middle class people

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with very small differences in income and living standards. In this process, many of the symbols that were important for working-class identity disappeared. Still, not everyone liked the remodelling of the cities. Besides the very unpleasant war-zone like environment that the housing politics created, critical voices were raised against new types of social problems that emerged in the new city districts and suburbs. Several of the new districts had become plagued with problems such as drug addiction, violence and criminal behaviour; and on a scale that Norrköping had not seen before. The political intentions behind the housing politics were good, but the results were very mixed. People lived in more modern, spacious apartments as a result of the housing politics, but the suburbs and new city districts seemed to be situated in a new and dark world (Nilsson 2000). Critique of this dimension of the Swedish welfare state project was quite common in the punk lyrics of the 1970s and early 1980s, and it mirrored a widespread uneasiness in the new and modern society. “There is nothing to do in these boring suburbs, there is nothing here for us. Well, excuse me I exaggerated a bit, we can always do booze, drugs and fight” (our translation), as punk band Ebba Grön put it in 1979 (Ebba Grön 1980). The anger and frustration of the early punk movement can also be illustrated by the 1980 song “Suburban Kids” by the band KSMB.

Suburban kids! Suburban kids! They kick senior citizens in the head. Suburban kids! Suburban kids! They steal in every shop. Suburban kids! Suburban kids! They spit the headmaster straight in the face. Suburban kids! Suburban kids! They cut up the seats in the tube (KSMB, Various 1980, our translation).

Sometimes the punk lyrics went even further with the critique of modern society and bordered on a terrorist like approach, for example, Ebba Grön’s songs “Shoot a Cop” (unrecorded) and “Arm Yourselves”, with lines like “I hate King Gustaf and Prince Bertil”, “We from the suburbs will arm ourselves” and “They can take a little lead in their necks” (Ebba Grön 1980, our translation).

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To understand punk culture in Sweden and in Norrköping, we must also situate it in relation to earlier youth cultures. During the latter part of the 1950s, the youth culture in Sweden had taken on a more independent relationship to the adult world. These earlier youth cultures emerged in the meeting places that were available to the young back then: coffee houses, cinemas and dance halls. The car became more and more important during the 1950s, and the youth group called “raggare” (roughly comparable to “Teddies” in Britain) made the car the prime symbol of identity (Bjurström 1990). Raggarna, with a strong working-class identity, had a very traditional masculine style. They drove around in large American cars and listened to rockabilly, partied and got drunk on Fridays and Saturdays. However, on the weekdays they were law-abiding citizens who got up in the morning and went to work in the factories. When the punks showed up on the scene in the 1970s, raggarna became their fiercest enemies. The punks, with their coloured hair and gender transgressive style, were perceived as a threat to raggarnas’ traditional masculine and gender stereotype identity. Many of the punks we have interviewed have told us stories of how they were beaten up by raggare. The punks, who were much younger than raggarna, answered with their strongest weapon, which was their music. Lyrics like “Raggare is (sic) a Bunch of Motherfuckers” by the Rude Kids (1978) and “Refuse Raggarna Petrol” (our translation) (P-Nissarna 1980) are examples of this response. In the wake of the 1968-movement, a new youth culture had emerged in Sweden. They were called “proggare” (from the word progressive) and basically looked like hippies. This movement had a completely different outlook compared to raggarna. If raggarna represented a small-town, working-class masculine style, proggarna represented a new politically conscious and urban subculture. Proggen was a combination of a music movement and leftist activism, with the emphasis on the latter. There was quite an overlap between proggen and the early phase of the punk movement, especially when it came to song lyrics. Later the punks would free themselves from the outspoken leftist politics and soft style of proggarna and develop a much more dystopic and aggressive style; but during the early phase, there were several connections between these two youth cultures. Ebba Grön’s

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close collaboration with the progg-group Dag Vag was one expression of this connection. Yet, it was a form of high culture that still dominated the cultural landscape in Sweden in the late 1970s. Pop and youth culture had not yet become a part of what was considered real culture, and the boundaries between pop culture and high culture were not as fluid as they are today. The culture journalism in the local newspapers in Norrköping at the time preferred to cover theatre, art exhibitions, classical music and poetry evenings rather than small concerts where young punk bands were screaming out their frustration, cutting their arms with razors and squirting beer on the audience. Punk culture, with its raw and aggressive expression, furious rock’n’roll and the scandalous behaviour on stage was shocking to the general public and caused great anxiety within the cultural establishment. However, the high culture opposition to the punk movement served to enhance the voluntary alienation from mainstream society among the punks and increased their feeling of being subversive rebels in a society of boredom (Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014).

Creating punk: subverting normality Above we have outlined some aspects of the social and cultural landscape in which the local punk culture in Norrköping emerged and was a reaction to. In the following section, we will highlight some defining themes of early punk culture and show how they were enacted in creative ways in Norrköping. These themes and symbolic expressions gave punk a specific outlook and helped to differentiate punk from other youth cultures and from what was perceived as mainstream and “normal” (compare Hannerz 2015). In our material we have discerned four broad themes that have to do with the subversion of normality in various forms: subverting the body, the use of provocative signs, subverting space and subverting gender roles. These themes were intertwined in several ways, but for analytical purposes we will treat them separately. Through these themes the politics of punk in Norrköping also becomes visible. We use the term politics in a broad sense in this article, as a way of shaping life that becomes an alternative to the lifestyles of mainstream society; the opening up for new possibilities to do life.

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Subverting the body. Cultural analyst Pasi Falk (1994) has shown that the public exposure of bodily liquids or materials is condemned in modern culture. Whether it is faeces, urine or blood, these things, when visible, create intense feelings of discomfort in modern society. The punks challenged cultural taboos of this kind, especially as the punks often used blood in public. One of the local punk pioneers in Norrköping who we interviewed was called Dino. He was also known by his self-invented last name Disastro, and says that he was inspired by The Sex Pistols’ legendary base player Sid Vicious and the singer Iggy Pop, both of whom used to cut themselves with razors and broken glass on stage. Dino used to cut himself on stage and at parties, making his blood a component of his public performance. Dino tells us that the purpose of his behaviour was to appear bizarre and weird and to shock people. It was his way of showing that he did not follow the normal rules of conduct but that he walked his own way. Dino claims that his actions were a way to create a new and more aggressive identity. By acting out punk in this manner, Dino became somewhat of an icon among the punks in Norrköping during the early years. He could neither play guitar nor any other instrument, and he was not a formal member of any punk band, even if he used to jump up on stage and perform at various concerts. His competence consisted mainly of acting bizarre and strange, and of transgressing ordinary rules of conduct by showing his bleeding body. This is reminiscent of Sid Vicious from The Sex Pistols, who was not a skilled musician, but who knew how to use his bass as a prop and to appear in a shocking manner; and through this, he made a name for himself and his band (Marcus 1993:21). The early Norrköping punks also used safety pins in unorthodox ways as did punks all over the world in the late 1970s. Mankan, who was one of the early punks in Norrköping, says that he could sometimes sit in the classroom in school and press a safety pin through his cheek, letting his blood drip down on the desk. Just like Dino, this was meant to shock his teachers and classmates and send out a message of individuality and freedom. This was long before body piercing became normalized in Western youth cultures, and it was more about hurting yourself and showing your blood as a shock effect than about ornamentation (Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014; Marcus 1993).

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Another aspect of subverting the body concerned various rules pertaining to hygiene. One group of punks was characterized by the other punks as “garbage punks” or “slum punks”. They were not a big group, perhaps only eight or ten people. We interviewed five of them. They got their name because they were dressed in whatever clothes they could find and in many ways resembled homeless people. They used to hang out on the streets, smoke discarded cigarette butts that they found and ask passers by for money. In this way they were subverting the rules of cleanliness and hygiene in various ways. The slum punks sometimes hung out with the local adult alcoholics in the parks, one of the punk girls tells us, and some of them sniffed glue and sometimes even sniffed gasoline straight from cars parked on the street. These punks could be as young as twelve or thirteen, and they took the “no future” attitude of punk to the extreme. Karin, one of the punks says:

During the summer between sixth and seventh grade (at the age between twelve or thirteen) I was probably not sober for a single day. This is quite frightening when you think about it now, when you have kids of your own. We used to hang out in Oxelbergen (a local park area in Norrköping). We hung out there for a whole summer, with the alcoholics, drinking booze and sniffing glue.

According to anthropologist Mary Douglas, every society and culture creates rules of purity and taboos (Douglas 1966/2002). The slum punks broke with these rules by living on the streets and in hanging out in public parks. This behaviour can also, at least in part, be tied to the will to shock people, as shown above. By breaking completely with rules of normality, they challenged the order of society. The use of provocative signs. Another element that was taken over from the punk movement in the UK was the use of swastikas and other symbols from Nazi Germany. Some punks painted big swastikas on their t-shirts and wore them in public. As with the cutting phenomenon, Sid Vicious, who often wore a red t-shirt with a big black swastika on the chest, was an inspiration. A punk rocker who was interviewed in one of the local newspaper in 1980 explained this phenomenon as follows: “We want to shock people, to make the Joneses react” (Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014:118). But at the same time, he was very clear about not

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sympathizing with the Nazi ideology in any way: “Sometimes people do not understand that we are being ironic. That can be a problem. When we have swastikas painted on our t-shirts, people think that we are Nazis. But we are the opposite of that” (Lalander & Qvarsebo 2014:118). Using these types of symbols was a sure way to provoke people. The Second World War and the Holocaust were really not very far back in time, which meant that use of Nazi symbols could stir up very strong emotional reactions. The most influential local punk band in Norrköping between 1979 and 1983 was called Peking SS. “Peking” is a nickname for Norrköping and the inspiration behind the name came from the early British punk band London SS, founded in 1975 and included Mick Jones, who later became a central member of the legendary punk band The Clash. London SS were criticized for their name, since it obviously could be connected to SchutzStaffel, the German national socialist’s paramilitary elite organization. However, Jones and his band mates made it clear that they did not have any Nazi sympathies whatsoever; the same was true for Peking SS. The lead singer, Thomas, tells us in an interview that the name was meant to provoke and that the SS letters also could stand for Super Star or Skjut en Snut (Shoot a cop). He states, “It was good branding, and we never thought about changing our name”. The provocation value in the band name was tested when Thomas, during a religion class in school, was printing posters for a gig. A teacher saw the poster – which included both the name Peking SS, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a swastika – and then contacted the principal, who had a “serious talk” with Thomas. Subverting space. The punks were carving out a way of life that stood in stark contrast to how “normal” people lived their lives. This can also be exhibited through how the punks used public spaces and the consumer pathways at the shopping malls. In conjunction with the building of new city districts and suburbs in the 1970s, large shopping malls replaced the smaller shops in Norrköping as well as other Swedish towns. Instead of the many small shops along Drottninggatan (the main street) – the butchers, the bookshop, the tobacco shop, and so on – big malls that looked like huge concrete blocks appeared. According to the capitalist logic of the day, a good citizen was a good consumer who shopped in the malls. The streets were now for walking

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to and from work, for catching the bus or for walking to the malls. However, by using the urban areas in new and unpredicted ways, the punks subverted public space. They gave the urban landscape a new character by sitting or lying down outside the shopping malls. Several of our informants say that people often stared at them because of how they were dressed, their haircuts and their odd behaviour. As we have stressed above, the purpose of the punks’ attire and actions were partly to provoke and to wake up the Joneses, but it was also about claiming a place of their own in the urban landscape, a place where they could hang out and have fun together. Although the punks used to go to a billiard café and a music studio to rehearse with their bands, they also deemed it important to hang out outside the shopping malls to make themselves public because they saw malls as an arena of recruitment for new punk rockers, who could hang there for a while, try out the style and feel how it was to hang out with the punk gang. Subverting gender. Another component in the early punk culture of Norrköping was a type of queer style, similar to the early US punk scene and some of the glam icons such as David Bowie, The Sweet and Alice Cooper. Thomsen, the drummer in Peking SS, says that the American punk scene was a strong influence on him and that it inspired him to wear a skirt and to use lipstick. He tells us that he quite often was chased around by raggarna, who wanted to beat him up because of this provocative appearance. Dino Disastro adds that he too used a lot of makeup around his eyes and that this made raggarna furious. One time they got hold of him and beat him up in a restaurant basement. Raggarna even forced him to wash the makeup from his face. Some of the punk girls we have interviewed say that punk culture was a free zone from gender stereotyping; it was a zone where they did not have to live up to commercial feminine ideals such as Olivia Newton John from the popular movie Grease. One of the punk girls, Mala, says:

You didn’t have to look like everybody else. You didn’t have to be thin really, you didn’t have to be pretty and have the latest haircut and the newest shoes. You were allowed to be yourself, you were accepted by almost everyone.

The punk girls could, for instance, dress in men’s clothing, such as their grandfather’s old coat and military boots, when they wanted to.

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The theme of subverting gender boundaries thus had very much to do with notions of emancipation and were tied to subverting normality as such (Berkers 2012). From these themes about subversion and transgressions of normality, it is obvious how several elements of the punk style were imported from the UK and the USA to Sweden, and how they could be used in creative ways on the streets of Norrköping. The role models were popular icons like Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux and Iggy Pop. Through these icons, and the various symbols that punk culture provided, young people could construct themselves in new ways. They could resist the hegemonic culture and reject ideals of what the future should be like: ideals that authority figures from the established society – such as politicians, parents, teachers and football trainers – held as the only option. Therefore, punk provided young people with an opportunity to resist established norms and practices and to construct an alternative way of life as outsiders in the urban landscape. Nevertheless, this way of using symbols was changed when the Oi!-style gained increased local popularity in the former industrial city of Norrköping.

When Punk turned into Oi! Oi!’s principal objective, therefore, was for bands to work together and inject an authentic working-class voice into popular music. (Worley 2014: 8)

During 1981 and 1982, the local punk style in Norrköping began to change quite dramatically as the Oi!-culture was imported from the UK. This is obvious from interviews as well as from photographs, both of which reveal a change in style and in attitude. Some of the local punks in Norrköping used to take the ferry from Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden, to London in order to be inspired by the punk scene there. They visited places like the famous 100 Marquee Club, where all the punk icons of the day performed. They drank beer at pubs and bought clothes and records that were unavailable in Sweden at the time. In this process, sounds and styles were imported from England to Norrköping. Rick was one of the most active local punk rockers when it came to taking in and importing influences from various places. He

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tells us that he often visited London, but also Stockholm, and he got to know many punks and skinheads in these cities. Rick introduced new musical influences in Norrköping with bands such as Exploited, Anti Pasti, The 4-Skins and Cockney Rejects, as well as the Oi!-albums. The Oi!-culture had a strong impact on the local punk scene in Norrköping even though many of the punks had a middle-class background, which should perhaps have made them an unlikely target for the Oi!-culture. Thomas, the lead singer of Peking SS, tells us that he came from a typical suburban middle-class background. But he became very attracted to the Oi!-music and its raw expression. He says that the Oi!-music was a “revitalisation of the whole punk scene”. When he tries to capture the energy he initially felt with his first experience of Oi!, he compares it to getting a “hard punch straight to the face”. Thomas felt this power of Oi! even though he was very far from the working -class culture in England in which Oi! was born. Thomas had not experienced the closing down of factories and having a dad on the dole as many young British Oi!-kids had. Rather, he came from a nice middle-class family with regular family meals and annual ski holidays in the ski resorts of northern Sweden. Neither did Rick, the major importer of Oi!-culture, and his younger brother Fippe, have a working -class background. Their father was a museum curator and their mother a psychologist. Qvarse came from a family of actors and art-professions people who were very much part of the cultural establishment in Sweden. There are many more examples of Norrköping punks who came from a middle-class background that was far from the British working-class experience. But despite their middle-class background, these young punks eventually changed their symbolic outfit – from the earlier and chaotic punk style to a more uniform skinhead/Oi!-style with shaved heads, Doc Martens boots, bomber jackets, thin braces and chlorine bleached jeans. In this way, they became a part of a youth culture that had been shaped and formed in a very different culture and class background than their own. Furthermore, by taking on the style and symbols of Oi!, they were also part of a local transformation of Oi!, in which it was made into something different than the original British context. Though there were also Oi!-punks and skinheads in Norrköping who had a working-

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class background, they were not considered more authentic Oi! than the kids from the middle-class. As a consequence, class background meant little to the Oi!-expression in Norrköping; class was not a theme in the lyrics of local Oi!-bands such as Anti Society League and Peking SS. In fact, class did not seem to have been important at all. Most of the punks who were influenced by the Oi! began wearing local English football symbols: scarfs, badges and sweatbands. In one photo of Rick, he is wearing a West Ham scarf, even though he did not have any connections to West Ham and that particular district of London. However, West Ham was the team of Oi!-band Cockney Rejects. The West Ham logo, therefore, became charged with a new meaning through Oi!-culture, thereby becoming a general symbol for Oi! when this culture travelled to Sweden. We asked him about this photo and he agrees with our interpretation, that wearing the scarf was a way of copying the members of Cockney Rejects. This symbolical interest in football clubs could also embrace Swedish football clubs who had nothing to do with Norrköping. Some of Rick’s friends, who now had become Oi!-punks or skinheads, became enthusiastic football supporters, especially of the Stockholm club Hammarby. This club’s green and white colours now became a part of the Swedish Oi-!/ skinhead look. In trying to understand why many punks started to wear symbols of Hammarby it is possible to discern a certain logic that can be described in three steps. Firstly, as described above, the Oi!-style had an outspoken working- class identity. As a result, you had to use working-class symbols of some sort, even if you came from a middle-class culture in order to be authentic Oi!. Moreover, going to a football stadium to get drunk, watch the game and fight against other supporters was a part of this type of British working-class identity. Secondly, the Stockholm club Hammarby was, and still is, seen as the number one working-class football club in Sweden. This means that the colours of this club are possible to use for signalling a connection to working-class identity. By becoming a Hammarby supporter, one could, therefore, identify with a similar-working class identity as the Oi! punks/skinheads in England, and thereby create a sense of authenticity. Thirdly, the majority of the Stockholm skinheads were Hammarby supporters; and since there was a quite lively interaction between the local Oi!-culture of Norrköping

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and the skinhead-culture of Stockholm (only 160 km away), Hammarby could become an identity marker also in Norrköping. The town had its own local football club, IFK Norrköping, which was quite successful, but no Oi!-punks/skinhead in Norrköping supported their own local club. Norrköping’s local football club had not become symbolically connected to the Oi!-culture, even though it was the local football club. Therefore, it was not thought of as a symbol of identity. It is a bit paradoxical that the punks in Norrköping became so interested in football, since many of them have told us they had bad experiences of all types of team sport in their childhood. If the punks were into sports of any kind before entering punk, it had for many of them been skateboarding, which fit well with the individualistic nature of early punk culture. It is obvious that the use of Oi! to a certain extent copied the Oi!-movement in the British context if we view it from a symbolic perspective. However, the local Oi!-culture in Norrköping did not have the connection to local working-class culture that was important in the British context. If it had, the punks would have chosen their own local working-class football club. What is more, if the working-class connection had been important, they would have supported the quite unsuccessful working-class football team, Sleipner. But they did not. Rather, they saw it as more authentic to create connections with clubs that were loaded with Oi! and working- class identity in the British context, such as West Ham and Manchester United. As we have shown above, much of the traditional working-class identity of Norrköping was swept away during the modernisation of the city. In the British Oi!-movement, you were proud of your working- class identity, one which was symbolically maintained by the link to spaces such as the pub and the football stadium. These attributes of British working-class culture were also often referred to in the Oi!- songs, which often centred on local everyday life circumstances – a poetry of the streets and the neighbourhoods. The lyrics of the local Oi!-bands in Norrköping, such as ASL (Anti Society League) and Peking SS, were not about local places, the streets or the sorrows of everyday life. Rather, the lyrics were about more distant things like war, the military and the coming doomsday. These themes of a future dystopia were inspired from reading newspapers, watching the news on

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television and dystopic movies about the cold war and new destructive technologies. When it came to lyrics, the Norrköping Oi!-culture had perhaps a stronger affinity with American hardcore punk bands such as Dead Kennedys and Black Flag than the British Oi!-bands. Below the sample from a song by Peking SS titled “Doomed to Die” illustrates the dystopic theme in Oi! in Norrköping.

Who want’s to throw his life away? Who want’s to be blown to pieces? When those in charge are fucking assholes? We are doomed to die We are doomed to die, die, die, die, die, die (Our translation)

There is neither locality nor working class-identity here. Still, even though the local punks used Oi!-style in a more fluid fashion, the young punks and skinheads could sense a similar energy from the local Oi!-bands as they did from the British bands. Thus, Oi! in Norrköping was more about furious rock’n’roll and raw energy than social class.

The meaning of punk in Norrköping In this article, we have stressed the fluid and complex nature of punk, a culture capable of taking on different meaning in different contexts. The young punk rockers in Norrköping made use of American as well as British punk symbols in the transformation of their identities. Thus, punk can be viewed as a culture of openings and opportunities, a toolbox from which one can pick attitudes, emotions and behaviour and use them for transgressing normality in various ways. Subverting the body, signs, and rules of normality, space and gender were some important themes in this transformative practice in Norrköping that we have highlighted in this article. This transformative and subverting character of punk indicates that punk can be viewed as a form of identity politics, though a very open and fluid one since it is not fixed on a specific and shared identity marker such as class, race or ethnicity. Rather, the punk politics consists in pointing out the possibility of an alternative way of life. Furthermore, punk culture has the capacity of taking up various elements from

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different contexts and putting them together in new ways. At the heart of the politics of punk in Norrköping was the forming of a fellowship for young people who felt that they did not belong anywhere else. This new fellowship and way of life included forms of resistance against what was perceived as an oppressive normality. In a sense, the local punk culture in Norrköping can, therefore, be seen as an alternative society where inclusion and fellowship was not based on the established societal norms for how life should be lived. No formal authorities governed this society: everyone had a potential say and nothing was predetermined. Another metaphor that can be used for the punk culture in Norrköping is that of a family. As many punks did not feel at home in their biological families, the punk group became a family-like structure where they could belong and feel accepted. The punk family had its own “family values” where individuality, freedom of expression and creativity were celebrated, and where the boundaries of the family were not closed as in the nuclear family but open and fluid. Inclusion in the punk family was not based on pursuing what the Joneses pursued: things like having a job, building a nuclear family and behaving according to established gender codes and societal norms of decency. Instead, inclusion was based on not belonging anywhere else. The element of resistance and protest in Norrköping’s punk culture was not specifically aimed at right or left politics, but against the system as a whole. The enemy was not capitalism first and foremost, or the Social Democratic Party who sat in government at the time. Rather, the enemy was the whole culture of boredom and all the predetermined ways of life that young people were expected to follow. The authority that was resisted by the young punks in Norrköping was, therefore, adult authority as such – parents, football coaches, shop owners, politicians, teachers, police officers and security guards. The subversive practices that we have described above can be viewed as important strategies in this resistance against adult authority and the system of boredom. Furthermore, we have shown that punk in Norrköping had different expressions. Even if the punks liked the same kind of music and bands, there were differences when it came to style and expression. The DIY- punks composed their style from any old clothes they could find while

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other punks travelled to London to buy the right kind of brands. The slum punks took the no future attitude of punk to its absolute limits with their voluntary outsider lifestyle. The ideal of rejecting authority made it possible to be strange and odd if you wanted to, and this culture of strangeness meant that young people who felt odd at home and in school could be accepted in this new kind of family with its own carnivalesque family values. With Oi! the individualistic dimension of punk was gradually toned down and replaced with a stronger emphasis on a collective with a much more uniform style and use of symbols. In retrospect we view this transformation as quite dramatic. Former punks suddenly began to look very similar to each other with their shaved heads, bomber jackets and boots, the aggressive look, and so on. In this change of style, the former punks also began performing a tough form of masculinity. Many punks in Norrköping, more or less, took over this new style. However, they did not fully understand the working-class nature of original Oi! and the links to everyday life in the British local setting, elements that Worley (2013 and 2014) has pointed out as the very core of Oi!. A reason for this lack of understanding was the different social and national context in Sweden. The energy and power of Oi! meant a revitalization of punk in Norrköping but in a different way compared to the British context. The contribution of Oi! had more to do with tough masculinity than with class. We believe that this “misuse” of Oi! was largely due to the different social organization of working class in the UK and Norrköping/Sweden respectively. Oi! In Norrköping did not, as in the UK, develop organically within working-class culture as a result of various economic crises; instead, it developed in a more postmodern way, using the symbols but not the cause behind them. In Norrköping there was no strong working-class culture to relate to. Although the same symbols were used, there was no working-class politics in them, no belief in or struggle for a better existence for young people through social mobilization.

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Literature: Berkers, P. (2012). “Rock Against Gender Roles: Performing Femi- ninities and Doing Feminism Among Women Punk Performers in the Netherlands, 1976–1982”. Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol 24 (2), 155–175. Bjurström, E. (1990). “Raggare: En tolkning av en stils uppkomst och utveckling.” In P. Dahlen and Rönnberg, M. (ed.) Spelrum: Om lek, stil och flyt i ungdomskulturen. Uppsala: Filmförlaget. Douglas, M. (1966/2002). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Falk, P. (1994), The Consuming Body. London: Sage. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (ed.) (1975/1991). Resistance Through Rit- uals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Routledge. Hannerz, E. (2015). Performing Punk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Rou- tledge. Johansson, T. and Lalander, P. (2012). “Doing resistance – youth and changing theories of resistance”. Journal of Youth Studies, vol 15 (8), 1078-1088. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso (New Left). Lalander, P. and Qvarsebo, J. (2014). Punk i Peking: Motstånd, attityd och mening. Malmö: Peking Studio & Förlag. Lindesmith, A. R., Strauss, A. L. and Denzin, N. K. (1999). Social Psy- chology. Thousand Oaks, London, New Dehli: Sage Publications. Marcus, G. (1993). In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music 1977- 1992. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Nilsson, H. (Ed.) (2000). Norrköpings historia 1900-talet. Linköping: Centrum för lokalhistoria. O’Neill, S. and Trelford, G. (2003). It Makes You Want to Spit! The De- finitive Guide to Punk in Northern Ireland. Dublin: Reekus Music. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Culture: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London: Polity Press.

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Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Worley, M. (2013). “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality and British Punk”. Twentieth Century British History, March 2013, 1-31. Worley, M. (2014). “‘Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi!”. Punk and Post Punk Vol 3 (1), 5-20.

Albums: Ebba Grön, We’re Only in it for the Drugs, Mistlur: 1980. P-Nissarna, Jugend, RIP Records: 1980. Rude Kids, Raggare is a Bunch of Motherfuckers, Polydor: 1978. Various, Bakverk 88, MNW: 1980.

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 49 Redefining the subcultural: the sub and the cultural

Erik Hannerz

Arguing against the previous research’s presumption that the subcultural constitutes a single set of meaning, this article addresses the simple question of what constitutes the subcultural? What does it mean when we address an object, practice, identity, or meaning structure as subcultural? Through outlining three dominant strands in regards to how subcultural difference has been defined, the author argues that the previous research on subcultural theory has been preoccupied with a definition of subcultures as being a response to external structural problems, with the result that both the “sub” and the “cultural” become dependent variables. Drawing from his work on punks in Sweden and Indonesia the author argues that although differing, the different strands in regards to subcultural difference can nevertheless be combined into a refinement of subcultural theory that moves beyond style to how objects, actions, and identities are communicated, interpreted, and acted upon. Such a refinement, the author argues, provides for an analysis of plurality within the subcultural in relation to multiple structures of meaning. An increased focus on the prefix sub and its relation to the root cultural allows for a discussion of how the subcultural is symbolically extended and more so, how this involves both conflict and alternative interpretations.

Keywords: mainstream, punk, scene, subcultures, subcultural theory

Erik Hannerz, research fellow, Department of Sociology, Lund University. [email protected]

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Introduction

There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses. [...] What we see, neutrally, is other people, many others, people unknown to us. In practice, we mass them, and interpret them, according to some convenient formula. Within its terms, the formula will hold. Yet it is the formula, not the mass, which it is our real business to examine (R. Williams 1960:319).

In his book on subcultural theory, Patrick Williams (2011) argues that instead of just applying the term “subculture” to classify groups and social networks, we need to approach subcultures as a cultural phenomenon based on a shared meaning. Although I agree with Williams, the fact that he feels compelled to make such a claim is more revealing than the actual statement: The theoretical developments that have marked the concept of subculture during its seventy years of existence within social sciences have done little to strengthen the concept’s applicability. Instead the concept of subculture has largely become reduced to what Andy Bennett calls “a convenient ‘catch-all’ term for any aspect of social life in which young people, style and music intersect” (1999:599). Part of this is due to the increasing terminological inflation of the last three decades with concepts such as “communities,” “underground,” “neo-tribes,” “post-subcultures,” “club-cultures,” and “scene” often being used simultaneously and interchangeably with that of “subculture,” without clarifying the difference between them (cf. Fox, 1987, Lull 1987, Thornton 1995, O’Connor 2002). It is in the light of such a development that Williams’s call for a cultural approach to subcultures should be seen. Williams’s point is that if theoretically clarified, the concept of subculture can very well be used alongside for example “scene,” the latter to capture a social and vernacular aspect of subcultural participation and interaction, whereas “subcultures” refer to a cultural and theoretical aspect (2011:33ff). Accordingly, in this article, my point of departure will be the simple question: What constitutes the subcultural? What does it mean when we address an object, practice, identity, or meaning structure as subcultural? Second, how does the prefix “sub” relate to the root “cultural”? In other words, how are differences and similarities structured? Third, I want to explore the potential plurality of the subcultural, that there can be

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multiple definitions within the same subculture. Not only in terms of what the subculture is and should be, but also in regards to what it is not and what it should be separated from; what is in subcultural theory addressed as the mainstream. I start by outlining three dominant strands in subcultural theory in regards to difference, arguing that although subcultural difference is differently approached, it has similar consequences for how subcultural authenticity and subcultural meaning are approached. I argue that this is due to a preoccupation with subcultures as being a response to external structural problems rather than as having a relatively autonomous structure of meanings. The result of the former is that it renders both the “sub” and the “cultural” as dependent variables, that emphasis has been on style rather than meaning, and that the potential plurality of subcultural meaning becomes a theoretical blind spot: we cannot see that we cannot see it. In relation to this, I make use of the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane, to point to the subcultural as best understood as a meaning-focused, deeply existential boundary work between a differentiated sacred whose purity must be protected against a profane and profaning undifferentiated mainstream. Drawing from the empirical findings of my previous work on punks in Sweden and Indonesia, I provide a definition of the subcultural that relates to a structuring of both similarities and differences among participants as to how the subcultural and the mainstream are defined, interpreted and lived out. I refer to this as a matter of different subcultural positionings of the mainstream, one pointing to what is external to the subcultural, the other to a mainstream conceived of as internal to the subcultural. In so doing, I show that such a definition of the subcultural does not have to stray far from previous subcultural theories.

Subcultural difference If there is one unifying trait throughout the development of subcultural theory, it is that subcultures are articulated as different from the conventional or normal, termed as the mainstream in later works on subcultures. How this difference is approached, however, differs significantly: For the major part of its existence within sociology, subcultural theory has centered on difference as being ascribed. Such

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an idea of subcultural participants as being already different due to their class position, ethnicity, age, or to spatial dimensions can be traced from the seminal work on the urban, deviant, and lowbrow conducted by the Chicago school in the early 20th century. Among others (cf. Thrasher 1927, Cressey 1932), Robert E. Park (1915) argues that the physical geography of the city—in terms of its advantages and disadvantages, and its proximities and distances—gives rise to social groups being physically delineated by ascribed characteristics, geography, vocation, or class. To Park, this gives rise to different moral milieus within which each individual, including the deviants and marginalized, can locate oneself, feel at ease, and develop and pursue his or her individual dispositions. Hence, these moral worlds constitute a means for an inclusion of marginalized individuals as well as a means for solving problems associated with being marginalized. Albert Cohen (1955) furthers this claim in his work on delinquent gangs by suggesting that delinquency is a consequence of nonconformity in the sense of a norm-guided rejection of societal goal. Based on the assumption that all human action “is an ongoing series of efforts to solve problems” (1955:50), Cohen’s definition of subcultures is equated to their function to provide a solution to the inability to meet social norms and aspirations by replacing them with an alternative morality among others with similar problems and from similar circumstances. The response, argues Cohen, is to invert the moral standards of the larger society, making nonconformity a positive characteristic. Even though it is highly critical of Cohen and in particular of functionalism, the theoretical work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham builds on a similar idea of an ascribed difference as being the foundation for subcultural formation. Following from a Marxist conception of culture as a way of experiencing life, albeit in a way defined from an already given and historical past, their major work Resistance Through Rituals (Clarke et al. 1976) defines subcultures as ideological reactions to material conditions experienced by the working class. Subcultures, this way, emerge as a response of the working class youth to the struggle through which the parent culture is defined and contained through the interests of the dominant culture. The reference to subcultures as part of a larger parent-culture also points to subcultures as the response to what

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Phil Cohen ([1972] 2007:539) refers to as a “generational conflict.” Subcultural difference is thus ascribed not only on the basis of class but also in terms of age, with the working class youth resisting the dominant culture through consumerism—appropriating and subverting commodities and their meaning while at the same time differentiating themselves from their parents. Subcultural style, this way, becomes a symbolic solution to material problems experienced within a hegemonic order. Subcultural authenticity then becomes directly linked to this ascribed difference from the dominant. Dick Hebdige (1979), for example, argues that it is this initial difference from the dominant that is the primary determinant of style, as well as the fundamental bearer of subcultural meaning: Subcultures enact the search for and expression of the forbidden aspects of the dominant—primarily a consciousness of class. Consequently, for the CCCS subcultures become the signifier of what cannot otherwise be signified, or as Hebdige has famously put it, “Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence” (1979:90). Similar to Cohen’s (1955) argument, subcultural identities for the CCCS become a re-adjustment rather then a maladjustment: a solution to problems encountered by the parent culture yet lived out by the youth (cf. Gelder 2007:42, 89). The second approach to subcultural difference retains the inversion of the positive and negative ends of the conformist/nonconformist binary and agrees that subcultures are fundamentally a matter of solving problems. Yet, this approach argues that subcultural difference is achieved rather than ascribed. Howard S. Becker (1963) argues, for example, that subcultures are defined as arising in response to the collective experience of problems, but this difference is not imposed on participants, rather it is by choice: The isolation and self-segregation of subcultural groups work to create boundaries to protect the subcultural participants and defend the collective from outside interference (1963:95f). For the jazz musician in Becker’s work this comes down to choosing between conventional commercial success, or “to stay true to artistic standards and then likely fail in larger society” (1963:83). Becker’s focus on the maintenance of subcultural boundaries to the commercial, as well as the individual participants’ strategies to isolate and protect the creative and deviant, is crucial in understanding the development of subcultural theory as centered around style and commitment. The subcultural studies that ensued in the 1980s and

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1990s challenged the CCCS’s assumption of a stable and homogeneous subcultural style. Michael Brake (1985:15), for example, points out that subcultures are not static or homogeneous, but rather they include both complexity and diversity. His argument is similar to Becker’s, although Brake starts with the assumption that subcultural participants share the same collective problem due to contradictions in the social structure. Varieties in subcultural styles are for Brake then a consequence of how these problems are lived out by the individual. This approach to subcultures as being structured through an achieved difference also represents a slight change in what the subcultural is opposing. Whereas in the work of the CCCS, Becker, and Cohen subcultures are placed in opposition to the dominant, normal, conventional or square, Brake’s focus on the lived-out part of the subcultural places the subcultural as juxtaposed to the mainstream (cf. Hebdige 1979:102). Further, following from Becker’s claim of staying true to artistic standards, authenticity is again tied to consistency throughout this difference, yet it is achieved through commitment to maintaining the opposition to the mainstream. As I argued above, for Hebdige, as well as for the rest of the CCCS (cf. Clarke et al. 1976, Clarke 1976), subcultural authenticity lies in the formation of style. This first “authentic” moment of resistance creates a distinction between the “originals”—the “self-conscious innovators” to whom style made sense—and the “hangers-on”—attracted by the mass mediated defusion and diffusion of this meaning (Hebdige 1979:122). Following the shift to approaching difference as being achieved rather than ascribed, subcultural heterogeneity is instead ordered through the extent to which participants resist the mainstream society. In relation to punk, for example, James Lull (1987), Kathryn J. Fox (1987), Stephen W. Baron (1989), and Lauraine Leblanc (1999) all argue that although all participants share punk’s resistance to the dominant culture, what differs is the consistency between behavior and punk beliefs: To behave rightly is to prove commitment, and this in turn decides the social positions within the subculture, making stylistic diversity a matter of differences in commitment. The more radical style is in relation to the mainstream, the more committed participants are said to be. Subcultural difference to the mainstream is thus achieved through radical hairstyles, tattoos, giving up school, housing and employment, or through politics.

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The third approach to subcultural theory builds on subcultural difference as achieved by the actions of subcultural participants, yet it does so by calling into question the objective status of both difference and the mainstream. This approach was largely initiated by postmodern subcultural theorists critical of the previous subcultural research for having constructed subcultural boundaries and authenticities, such as Steve Redhead (1990, 1993). Redhead (1990:25, cf. Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995:19ff) proposes that authentic subcultures area product of subcultural theories focused on resistance. Similarly, David Muggleton (2000:100f) argues that commitment as a basis for stratification risks obfuscating individual interpretations of style. The postmodern approach to subcultures and the call for a deconstruction of the boundary between an innovative inside and an exploitive outside resonate well with another major question of 1990s subcultural theory: whether subcultures can be seen as existing independently from, and in absolute opposition to, mass media and commercial interests. Ulf Hannerz (1992) and Sarah Thornton (1995) both question the objective status of the mainstream, as well as that of resistance. Thornton (1995:116ff), for example, argues that subcultures do not rise and grow mysteriously in isolation from the mass media (cf. Osgerby 2013). Rather, she argues that the media is part of creating subcultures. Hence, instead of presupposing a homogeneous conventional mainstream that the subculture is different from, Thornton (1995), followed by Muggleton (1997, 2000) and Ryan Moore (2005), argues that the mainstream is merely a subcultural other used to differentiate between the heterogeneous in-group and the homogeneous out-group, affirming its own distinctive character. Subcultural difference, in this sense, is neither ascribed nor achieved, but instead constructed and narrated (Gelder 2007). Subcultural difference becomes a matter of taking positions, of drawing boundaries between the conceived different and the equally conceived undifferentiated. As Hannerz puts it, “subcultures tend to be collectivized perspectives toward perspectives” (1992:78). The stress on difference as narrated also marks a break with the postmodern approach by focusing on the similarities that draw participants together, rather than emphasizing difference, individuality, and heterogeneity. Paul Hodkinson refers to this as a “cultural substance” (2002:29); meanings and symbols might very well differ between participants, as well as their reasons for subcultural

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participation in the first place, yet what ties these people together is a shared set of values and tastes. This is how cultural substance is contrasted to fluidity: through a focus on similarities rather than differences in terms of style, identity, commitment, and relation to the outside world. A central consequence of this perspective is the break with the CCCS’s focus on youth, as subcultures as well as their participants are increasingly addressed as ageing (cf. Hodkinson 2011, Bennett and Taylor 2012). Williams’ (2011) call for a cultural approach to the subcultural that opened this article refines this narrated difference further in addressing subcultural difference as a constructed and narrated boundary that exists in the shared interaction and beliefs among participants. This interaction among participants, however, is still based on a shared similarity that gives rise to discursive structures affecting how participants experience their world. Subcultural authenticity is thus still tied to commitment, albeit not to a subcultural core or resistance, but rather to subcultural identification. As Williams (2011:9f) puts it, authenticity is an ongoing process that is negotiated by individuals and groups.

The subcultural fallacy in regards to plurality Building on the more recent developments in subcultural theory outlined above, I want to address what is still lacking in subcultural theory—that is, the failure to deal with plural mainstreams and plural structures of meanings within the same subculture. Unsurprisingly, this fallacy follows from how subcultural difference is defined: For the CCCS (Clarke et al. 1976; Hebdige 1979) and Cohen (1955), subcultures arise in order to solve a particular problem based on general causes. Accordingly, what are investigated are the forms of this reaction, as subcultural difference is ascribed a priori. Hence, the particular problem gives rise to a particular form of resistance. When plurality does appear it can similarly be dismissed as merely a sign of the subculture’s destined decline due to the arrival of participants whose ascribed status differs from that of the “original” members (cf. Hebdige 1979:91, 103). Subcultural heterogeneity is thus explained away in terms of maintaining a single subcultural core established in relation to existing socio-economic structures, most often class (cf. Worley 2013).

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Although the ensuing critique against the work of the CCCS focuses on the restriction of the subcultural to the working class, the definition of subcultural difference as achieved merely substitutes class with commitment. Subcultural heterogeneity is effectively explained away by pointing to a perceived consistency to a single authentic core. Punk studies constitute a striking example of this: Baron (1989:299) notes, for example, that the punk subculture is heterogeneous, and that the rebel is but one attitude, the subcultural allowing for plural responses to different goals and problems. However, on the same page he reduces these differences to one single meaning in defining them as a matter of different levels of commitment to resisting the dominant culture. Fox’s (1987) distinction between core and peripheral participants based on their commitment is another example of explaining differences through a single uniform meaning. Fox differentiates here between “hardcores,” who incorporate and embody punk as a permanent way of life by endorsing a radical style and a rejection of ‘normal’ life, and “softcores,” who look the part but are not as ideologically committed and loyal as the hardcores. Leblanc makes a similar distinction, as she argues that “punk was, and is, about living out a rebellion against authority” (1999:34), while simultaneously ordering differences among the punks she studied by combining radical style with subcultural commitment, stating that “punks with mohawks and tattoos were deemed to be more committed to the scene than those who had ‘convertible’ haircuts” (1999:86, cf. Wallach 2005). Even when this stress on radical style is called into question, heterogeneities are ordered in relation to a single subcultural path of development (cf. Andes 1998, Dowd et al. 2004). The third approach to subcultural difference breaks with the idea of authenticity as equaling commitment, defining subcultural styles and heterogeneities as a matter of fluidity and individuality. From such point of view, differences among participants are addressed first as a matter of style surfing and individual meaning (Muggleton 1997, Polhemus 1997) and second as the consequence of postmodern conditions such as the hyperinflation of images (Muggleton 2000, Clarke 2003). Collective differences among subcultural participants are thus explained as remnants of different reactions to socio-economic changes stemming from this postmodern condition (Moore 2004). The

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more recent development of subcultural difference as narrated is in part a reaction to, and in part a continuation of, the work of postmodern subcultural theorists. Retaining that the boundary to the mainstream is constructed and far from fixed, internal differences are then linked to individuality and personal strategies within a similarly shared subcultural substance (Thornton 1997, MacDonald 2001, Hodkinson 2002, Williams 2011). Style is similarly tweaked as part of a process that delineates the authentic and the inauthentic at the same time (Force 2009). Counter to all of the above, my argument is that these differences, both among theoretical approaches and among the participants in their data, point to the impossibility of maintaining a single uniform subcultural logic. Having said that, I now turn to how these approaches can be combined so as to include heterogeneity in terms of how the subcultural and what it opposes are structured.

The sub of the subcultural Thornton (1997:4) notes that traditionally, the “sub” in subcultural studies has referred to the subordinate, subaltern, and subterranean. This particularly relates to the work on subcultures in which participants are seen as included in “society” yet considered deviant and thus beneath it. The definition provided by Clarke et al. (1976:13), for example, is that the sub refers to subcultures as a part of larger cultural structures. This definition of the sub harks back to the initial definitions of subcultures as sub-societies (Green 1946, Gordon 1947), and remains an important implicit reference to the prefix sub as embedded in a wider whole. Unsurprisingly, for much of the work that followed from the CCCS, the sub has come to stand for the subversive as in the rebellious and resistant, in line with a definition of difference as achieved. The more recent work on subcultures adds to this in its emphasis on how the distance from the mainstream is constructed and communicated. Nancy MacDonald (2001) for example argues that the prefix sub refers to a contrastive dimension used to define and separate participants’ identities. Agency is then on the part of the participants, that they construct, portray and perceive themselves as a boundaried isolated group. The sub, MacDonald notes, is less a matter of being

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different from or beneath other groups, but rather of a constructed separation. The sub, similar to authenticity, is thus being worked (cf. Williams & Hannerz 2014). In my work on how punks in Sweden and Indonesia define and make sense of what punk is and should be, what it opposes, and what it should be against (Hannerz 2013, 2015), I show how punks mobilize and authenticate identities and styles through a boundary work that ensures that the mainstream remains both different and out of reach of the subcultural. Such an analysis draws from Hebdige’s (1979:102) claim that a communicated and significant difference from the mainstream constitutes “the ‘point’ behind” both the representation of the collective as well as the division of the world according to this distinction between the different and undifferentiated. Yet, instead of combining this with the theories of Saussure and Gramsci, as Hebdige does, I suggest that we look to Emile Durkheim’s (1915) idea of the foundation of religious thought as a division of the world into a sacred and a profane domain. Similar to how Durkheim speaks of the sacred and the profane as interrelated—the sacred is set apart by collective ideals specifying what must not come in contact with it—the mainstream and the subcultural are thus treated as relational by definition. Such a perspective combines Hebdige’s idea of difference as the point behind subcultural structuring with Becker’s stress on the maintenance of a boundary to what is perceived as threatening the subcultural, and finally with MacDonald’s definition of the sub as a separation that is being continuously worked. By analyzing how punks mobilize and authenticate styles and identities, I point in total to six different definitions of the mainstream, each referring to a particular articulation of the subcultural sacred and with different consequences that enable some performances of punk to be authenticated while limiting or excluding others (Hannerz 2015:196). Drawing from extensive fieldwork and interviews with punks in nine different cities in two countries over the course of ten years, I show that how the mainstream is defined, communicated, and acted upon has direct consequences for how subcultural styles and identities are mobilized. When the mainstream is defined as an encompassing normal and undifferentiated outside, participants enact a script of a shared sense of always having been different so as to, one

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the one hand, authenticate their own style and identities, and on the other, to establish and strengthen the definition of, and separation to, a mainstream characterized by a desire to be like everyone else. The consequence is that conspicuous style and standing out are seen as representative of the subcultural sacred: the consistency of an extrinsic display to a communicated intrinsic difference. (Hannerz 2015: 39-54) Such a mobilization of difference contrasts deeply with that of the boundary to the mainstream as being worked internally to punk. This definition of the mainstream refers to the shallow punks, obsessed with conspicuous style and being different. This separation is in turn established and strengthened through a script of development by which the subcultural sacred is established as the conscious move beyond the mere being of punk to becoming part of a collective depth. This involves the active distancing from the shallow as participants invalidate their own initial subcultural participation as something superficial and embarrassing, so as to prove an achievement of depth. Authentications of styles and identities thus concern an absence of style, articulating dress and appearance as being practical and something that participants are largely oblivious to (Hannerz 2015:85-99). The introduction of the Durkheimian notion of the sacred and the profane in relation to this communicated difference specifies that the binary distinction between the subcultural and the mainstream is not only meaningful, but that its structuring aspects penetrate social structures and categorizations, specifying who is in and who is out (Alexander 2006:569). It is this very differentiation that creates and defines what constitutes the undifferentiated “others” from which the subcultural is separated. Consequently, I want to refine the definition of the mainstream so that it refers to the negative outcome of such a perceived and portrayed difference, rather than being reduced to everything that is not subcultural. Instead of dividing the world into subcultural participants and a non-subcultural outside, the focus on the communicated part of both the subcultural and the mainstream means that the mirage of subcultural homogeneity can be abandoned, as focus is on the contrastive dimension of the relationship to the mainstream, rather than the mainstream as being something physically out there (cf. Hannerz 1992:81).

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Further, if the mainstream is defined by the articulations of difference that set the subcultural apart, it means that it negatively represents such a distinctive status rather than everything that is not subcultural. This brings an important aspect to the subculture/mainstream binary, as prohibitions are not confined to ideological assumptions—e.g., the mass media and commercial forces diluting the authenticity of the resistance against the dominant—but rather refer to the formlessness of the profane that is seen to threaten the sanctity of the form (Douglas 1966). Among the punks I followed, for example, the commercial was differently defined and acted upon; whereas to some participants it was defined as institutions outside of punk seeking to capitalize on punk and turn it into another commodity, to others it was entirely kept within punk and referred to bands and participants that desired individual profit rather than a collective cause. Neither of these communicated and acted upon the commercial in terms of an anti-capitalist or anti- consumerist stance, but rather so as to order and secure the boundary between the set apart sacred and the undifferentiated mainstream. Different definitions of the mainstream thus gave rise to different mobilization of actions, styles and identities. My point here is that it is the same pattern of meaning that defines both the set apart and the undifferentiated; in this sense, the mainstream can only be traced by investigating how subcultural participants communicate their difference. This way, the “sub” of the subcultural should be refined so as to point not so much to a subset of meaning within something larger, but rather to a defined subset of meanings that includes that which it opposes. The subcultural defines the mainstream at the same time as it communicates and portrays its separation from it. It constructs and communicates what the undifferentiated others stand for. Rather than being embedded in a larger whole, the “sub” refers to the embedding of the mainstream in this distinction (Hannerz 2015:23). The mainstream is thus disenthralled from an inherent meaning as “the outside,” but also from a single meaning. Instead, it points to the mainstream as belonging as much to the subcultural as does the articulated difference. Having said that, I now want to move on to the similarities in structuring subcultural heterogeneities.

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The cultural of the subcultural Rather than centered on a single uniform core, the punk subculture in both Sweden and Indonesia were held together by similarly structured differences based on how the mainstream was positioned as either internal or external to punk. These similar differences were sustained regardless of participants’ gender, class background, ascribed ethnic background, age and years of involvement (Hannerz 2015:81, 99). In mapping out these differences, I show that an exploration of subcultural meaning thus has to involve an examination of the subcultural formulas of classification and interpretation through which objects, actions, space, and identities are communicated, interpreted and acted upon. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (2003:12) refer to this as the relative autonomy of culture: to analytically separate the meanings from the objects, investigating the supraindividual ”interpretative grids” that symbolically structure what we experience emotionally, cognitively, and morally (Alexander 2003:31). Accordingly the root “culture,” in relation to the prefix sub, is best understood as an adjective—cultural— rather than as a noun. The cultural is not a thing or a dependent variable to be studied or grasped physically or metaphysically, but a contrastive dimensional thread that runs through all subcultural communication and interpretation (Appadurai 1998:12f, Alexander 2003:7). This means not only that subcultural difference is communicated, but that it refers to the communication of a significant difference, in the sense that it works to establish and strengthen the mobilization of subcultural identities and actions. To merely argue that the subcultural is that which is conceived and communicated as different from an unspecified “other” would not be a satisfactory definition, as it would then be only another empty categorization. Moore (2005:250) notes, for example, that our contemporary society is obsessed with differentiation from the mass. Swimmers might, for example, define themselves as different from walkers and joggers, but this alone does not make them a subculture. What needs to be added is a patterned similarity in terms of adherence to a subcultural structure—that in order for a subcultural distinction to be significant, it requires depth. This is similar to what Hodkinson (2002:30) refers to as a cultural substance: subcultures are defined by a shared and distinctive set of tastes and values shared by participants.

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Yet, whereas Hodkinson focuses mainly on substance as pointing to subcultural objects, identities, commitment, or relative autonomy, I want to focus on the subcultural structure of meaning within which objects and identities, as well as commitment and autonomy, are made subcultural; in short, how subcultural meaning is extended and materialized. This must include a dialectic approach to subcultural difference and similarity, investigating how different boundary works converge into similarly shared patterns of meaning within which the communicated difference to a mainstream is both meaningful and reproduced (cf. Geertz 1973:211ff, Lamont 2000). It becomes a combination of what Arjun Appadurai refers to as the differences that express and mobilize group identities, and the similarities Clifford Geertz talks about in terms of extending these through analogies and metaphors. To Geertz metaphors and analogies work to extend the boundaries of the cultural system; subcultural actions and objects are thus performed as having a resonance with, and extending the binary logic of, the background. Action and objects then become “an act of recognition, a pairing in which an object (or an event, an act, an emotion) is identified by placing it against the background of an appropriate symbol” (Geertz 1973:215). To argue that actions and objects are subcultural is to say that they are based on, refer to, and contribute to a collective understanding of the separation from a defined mainstream. If validated as successful, they then work to extend the patterned representations of the background as the performance is fused with it, and thus mobilize subcultural identities or styles (Alexander 2004). Hence subcultural representations are used to establish boundaries between real and fake along the subcultural/ mainstream binary as they draw upon an internal meaning that is part of the boundary work to the outside (Fine 1998:138). It is through this relation between the prefix sub and the root cultural that the different definitions of the mainstream within punk outlined above should be assessed. What these definitions of the mainstream, as well as their associated scripts, have in common is that they work to separate the set apart sacred from the undifferentiated profane, the particular from the general. Where they differ is in how this distinction is perceived and portrayed: different definitions of the mainstream bring different articulations of the subcultural sacred, as well as of the prohibitions meant to protect the latter. By combining

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the similar consequences of different enactments of punk in my more recent work (Hannerz 2015), I point to how punk is structured through interrelated patterns of meaning. The first of these patterns combines different definitions of the mainstream as the normal, the obedient, and the commercial through a consistency in terms of how the subcultural binary is worked and extended: Regardless of whether the mainstream is people in general who strive to be like everyone else, the homogeneous mass that is too afraid to break free from the restrictions that keeps them in place, or if it concerns institutions that seek to profit from punk, these definitions identify the boundary to the mainstream as concerning what is perceived as external to punk. Punk in this sense is the absence of outside agents, be they passive consumers or active exploiters. This pattern works to extend the subcultural scripts that mobilize the exclusion of these mainstreams as well as set the groundwork for subcultural identification, communication, and authentication to become a quest for individual rights. To be punk in this sense is to physically and symbolically take on the mainstream in order to secure a number of basic individual rights: the right to be different, the right to be yourself, and the right to do what you want. Beside the analogous extension of punk to the freed individual, there is a similar analogy to that of standing out; the subcultural sacred is established, secured and defended in a direct confrontation with the mainstream, either on the street, in school, or in media. Indeed, the most revered bands in relation to this subcultural pattern were those who had made a career, sold a lot of records, and still refused to sign to a major label, participate in morning TV shows, or if they had done so, refused to change or give up their subcultural ideas, style and identities. I have referred to this pattern as a convex subcultural pattern because it bends towards the outside (Hannerz 2015: 82-5). In sharp contrast to this subcultural pattern stands a second subcultural pattern that instead combines the distinction against a shallow, style- centered, hedonist and dependent mass of punks: Punks in general are here perceived to have destroyed what punk should be through their focus on standing out, having fun, and thinking of, and doing for, themselves. Calls are made to establish a physical separation from the mainstream punks through an emphasis on a collective freed space: the scene. The definite use ofthe scene is also used to capture a translocal character of the subcultural sacred (Hodkinson 2002, Moore 2007): it

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 65 ERIK HANNERZ refers to all participants in the world who fight to achieve distance from the mass of punks. Politics are here claimed and authenticated as a vital tool for ensuring an equal and emancipating space, yet at the same time they are predominantly used to separate between participants, rather than liberating them. Freedom, in this sense, is defined as a collective freedom from, rather than a freedom for. When this pattern is enacted there are no distinctions or prohibitions aimed at what is deemed as external to the subcultural. Instead, the scripts through which participants mobilize and authenticate their subcultural identities rest on a reactive stance towards punk: Dress, appearance, objects, politics and actions are authenticated as not dressing, looking, doing, and thinking like the defined mainstream punks. At the same time as this draw upon the boundary against an internal mainstream, it establishes and strengthens the point behind such a boundary work. As long as the defined non-subcultural remains outside of the subcultural, it has little, if any, meaning within a concave pattern. Lastly, the internal distinction of the background and its foreground scripts all have the consequence of subordinating the individual to the collective: individual consistency becomes something polluting as a continuous development, and allegiance to the rules and regulations of the collective are to ensure the maintenance and protection of the scene. I refer to this as a concave subcultural pattern as it bends inwards (Hannerz 2015:131-3). This similar structuring of the subcultural heterogeneities is the cultural dimension of the subcultural. There were no difference for example between how punks in Sweden and Indonesia defined, communicated, and acted upon the mainstream, despite the extensive socio-economic, geographic, and infrastructural differences between the two cultures. This cultural dimension extends the meaning of the prefix sub as it involves what Derrida (1988:18) refers to as the “citational” and “iterable” quality of speech, success being a matter of repeating that which is already coded and established. Geertz (1973:211) makes a similar note in arguing that the success or failure of symbolic extensions of the known to the as of yet unfamiliar depends on whether they manage to represent an analogous relation to a patterned set of meanings that are already ordered. If the analogy appears, the already known is extended to include the unfamiliar, and if it does not appear then it has failed (cf. Alexander and Mast 2006). To act within the subcultural is to enact the subcultural pattern that precedes

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or is superimposed on the act. It becomes a performance against these background representations of meaning (Alexander 2004:529). Hence, to return to the matter of depth, to argue for a subcultural structure to be significant is to say that it extends the distinction from an undifferentiated mainstream to a pattern of articulated differences that address a variety of styles—including actions, objects, appearances, and tastes—interpreted and validated through a shared language (i.e., a patterned set of meanings within which actions and objects are seen to fit) (Fine 1998:102). The argument that extensions of the binary are what distinguish the subcultural means that if we are to speak of male-, class-, or youth-based subcultures it is because these distinctions are articulated as analogous to the distinction between the subcultural and the mainstream. As Macdonald (2001:150) notes, what goes for one subcultural group does not have to be the same for another, nor, in the light of the discussion above, does it have to be the same within the same subculture. The deeper the subcultural structure, the more areas of everyday life are integrated and made to fit, making it possible to differentiate between shallower or deeper subcultural structures in terms of salience and extension (Hannerz 1992:72f). Swimmers’ possible distinction from walkers or runners would thus be significant if that distinction was extended analogically to, for example, prohibitions regarding dress and action: e.g., not eating land-living animals, not wearing colors other than shades of blue and green, not having a wet hair look, etc.. Consequently, rather than Paul Willis’ (1978:198ff) famous reference to objects being homologous depending on their objective possibilities, the analogous extensions of something symbolically representing something else rather points to such successful extensions appearing as if they had these possibilities (Trondman et al. 2011:584).

Concluding remarks Throughout this article I have sought to argue for a refinement of subcultural theory that moves beyond style to how objects, actions, and identities are communicated, interpreted, and ultimately acted upon. The foundation for this subcultural structuring rests on an articulated difference to the undifferentiated, or what is here referred to as the mainstream. It is a boundary work that defines the set apart sacred

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by its distance from the undifferentiated profane. This distinction is extended through prohibitions concerning the profane, specifying who and what can come in contact with the sacred. These prohibitions, and the sacred characteristics that they specify, are the deep meaning structure of the subcultural. The articulation of these prohibitions, and thus also the characteristics that are set apart as belonging to the sacred, are dependent on the distinction between the subcultural and the mainstream: What is conceived of as constituting the latter has consequences for what needs to be protected and from whom. In relation to this, I have argued that subcultural identities and authenticities as performances rely on these structures to be claimed, validated, or refuted. This implies a dialectic process between difference and similarity, a definition of a shared subcultural sacred through the prohibitions to the profane mainstream. Hence, both the sacred and the profane are constructed through these prohibitions. This, I argue, has consequences for how we can approach how subcultural participants perceive, interpret, and act upon a defined mainstream, but also how objects, actions, and identities are authenticated or invalidated. Further, different interpretations and definitions of these analogies bring differences in terms of subcultural structures. Different patterns can be differently symbolically extended, fusing some actions while dismissing others. When extended through analogies these differences bring about different subcultural authenticities. Given Bennett’s claim that the subcultural risks becoming a watered down catch-all phrase, my aspiration with this article is to prove the opposite: That the subcultural as a concept has a important place in the analysis of the ordering of styles, identities and actions. In so doing, it relies on Williams’s claim that the cultural aspect of the concept needs to be further stressed. As Matthew Worley (2013:626) argues, whereas focus has been on the meaning projected onto the subcultural, we must not forget the meaning drawn from it. The refinement presented here does not deviate much from previous subcultural theory; instead, by focusing on the prefix sub and its relation to the root cultural, I have shown how the concept can be developed so as to explain differences between subcultures in terms of these structures of interrelated meanings: Participants extend the subcultural binary through analogous binary correspondences that mobilize action, objects, and

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identities as subcultural. At the same time, this approach provides for an analysis of plurality within the subcultural in relation to multiple structures of meaning, allowing for a discussion of how the subcultural is symbolically extended and how this process is far from given as it involves both conflict and alternative interpretations. From such a point of view there are no subcultural objects, only meanings; thus, the same object can have a number of possible meanings even within the same subcultural structure. Consequently, such an approach is, unlike previous subcultural theories, able to address and assess subcultural heterogeneities without having to champion the individual, fluidity of style, or one group’s commitment and authenticity.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2003). The meanings of social life: A cultural sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004). Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. Sociological Theory, 22 (4), 527-573. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2006). The civil sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. & Mast, Jason L. (2006). Introduction: Symbolic action in theory and practice: The cultural pragmatics of symbolic action. In Alexander, Jeffrey C., Giesen, Bernhard & Mast, Jason L. (eds.) Social performance: Symbolic action, cultural pragmatics, and ritual (pp. 1-28). New York: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. & Smith, Paul (2003). The strong program in cultural sociology: Elements of a structural hermeneutics. In J.C. Alexander, The meanings of social life: A cultural sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 11-26. Andes, Linda (1998). Growing up punk: Meaning and commitment careers in a contemporary youth subculture. In J. S. Epstein (ed.) Youth culture: Identity in a postmodern world. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 212-231.

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Appadurai, Arjun (1998). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Baron, Stephen W. (1989). The Canadian West Coast punk subculture: A field study. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 14 (3), 289-316. Becker, Howard S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press. Bennett, Andy (1999). Subcultures or neo-tribes? Rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. Sociology, 33 (3), 599-617. Bennett, Andy & Taylor, Jodie (2012). Popular music and the aesthetics of ageing. Popular Music, 31 (2), 231-243. Brake, Michael (1985). Comparative youth culture: The sociology of youth culture and youth subcultures in America, Britain and Canada. London: Routledge. Clarke, Dylan (2003). The death and life of punk, the last subculture. In Muggleton, David & Weinzierl, Rupert (eds.) The post-subcultures reader (pp. 223-236). Oxford: Berg. Clarke, John (1976). Style. In Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson (eds.) Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain (pp.175-191). London: Routledge. Clarke, John, Hall, Stuart, Jefferson, Tony & Roberts, Brian (1976). Subcultures, cultures and class. In Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson (eds.) Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain (pp. 9-74). London: Routledge. Cohen, Albert K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Glencoe: Free Press. Cohen, Phil [1972] (2007). Sub-cultural conflict and working class community. In Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hansen & Helen Wood (eds.) CCCS selected working papers vol. 1 (pp. 536-559). London: Routledge. Cressey, Paul G. (1932). The taxi-dance hall: A sociological study in commercialized recreation and city life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Douglas, Mary (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Ark Paperbacks. Dowd, Timothy J., Liddle, Kathleen & Nelson, Jenna (2004). Music festivals as scenes: Examples from serious music, womyn’s music, and skatepunk. In Andy Bennett & Richard A. Petersen (eds.) Music scenes: Local, translocal, and virtual (pp.149-167). Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Durkheim, Emile (1915). The elementary forms of the religious life. London: George Allen and Unwin. Fine, Gary Alan (1998). Morel tales: The culture of mushrooming. Oxford: Harvard University Press. Force, William Ryan (2009). Consumption styles and the fluid complexity of punk authenticity. Symbolic Interaction, 32 (4), 289- 309. Fox, Kathryn. J. (1987). Real punks and pretenders: The social organization of a counterculture. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 16 (3), 344-370. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Ideology as a cultural system. In Clifford Geertz The interpretations of cultures (pp. 193-233). New York: Basic Books. Gelder, Ken (2007). Subcultures: Cultural histories and social practice. London: Routledge. Green, Arnold. W. (1946). Sociological analysis of Horney and Fromm. American Journal of Sociology 51 (6), 533-540. Gordon, Milton. (1947). The concept of a sub-culture and its application. Social Forces, 26 (1), 40-42. Hannerz, Erik (2013). The positioning of the mainstream in punk. In Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, and Jodie Taylor (eds.) Redefining mainstream popular music (pp. 50-60) London: Routledge. Hannerz, Erik (2015). Performing punk. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hannerz, Ulf (1992). Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Hebdige, Dick (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Routledge. Hodkinson, Paul (2002). Goth: Identity, style, and subculture. Oxford: Berg. Hodkinson, Paul (2011). Ageing in a spectacular ‘youth culture’: Continuity, change and community amongst older goths. British Journal of Sociology , 62 (2), 262-282. Lamont, Michèle (2000). The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Leblanc, Lauraine (1999). Pretty in punk: Girls’ gender resistance in a boys’ subculture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lull, James (1987). Thrashing in the pit: An ethnography of San Francisco punk subculture. In Thomas R. Lindlof (ed.) Natural audiences (pp. 225-252). Norwood: Ablex Publishing. MacDonald, Nancy (2001). The graffiti subculture: Youth, masculinity and identity in London and New York. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Moore, Ryan (2004). Postmodernism and punk subculture: Cultures of authenticity and deconstruction. The Communication Review, 7, 305–327. Moore, Ryan (2005). Alternative to what? Subcultural capital and the commercialization of a music scene. Deviant Behavior, 26, 229– 252. Moore, Ryan (2007). Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock: Punk as a field of cultural production. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36 (4), 438–474. Muggleton, David. (1997). The post-subculturalist. In Steve Redhead (ed.) The clubcultures reader: Readings in popular cultural studies (pp. 185-203). Oxford: Blackwell. Muggleton, David (2000). Inside subculture: The postmodern meaning of style. Oxford: Berg. O’Connor, Alan (2002). Local scenes and dangerous crossroads: Punk and theories of cultural hybridity. Popular Music, 21 (2), 225-236.

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Osgerby, Bill (2012). ‘Bovver’ books of the 1970s: Subcultures, crisis and ‘youth-sploitation’ novels. Contemporary British History, 26 (3), 299-331. Park, Robert E. (1915). The city: Suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the city environment. American Journal of Sociology, 20 (5), 577-612. Polhemus, Ted (1997). In the supermarket of style. In Redhead, Steve (ed.) The clubcultures reader: Readings in popular cultural studies. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 148-151. Redhead, Steve (1990). The end of the century party: Youth and pop towards 2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Redhead, Steve (1993). The end of the end-of-the-century party. In Steve Redhead (ed.) Rave off: Politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture (pp. 1-6). Aldershot: Avebury. Thornton, Sarah (1995). Club cultures: Music, media and subcultural capital. Cambridge: Polity. Thornton, Sarah (1997). General introduction. In Ken Gelder, & Sarah Thornton, (eds.) The subcultures reader (pp. 1-7) London: Routledge. Trondman, Mats, Lund, Anna & Lund, Stefan (2011). Socio-symbolic homologies: Exploring Paul Willis’ theory of cultural forms. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14 (5), 573-592. Thrasher, Frederic (1927). The gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallach, Jeremy (2005). Underground rock music and democratization in Indonesia. World Literature Today, 79 (3-4), 16-20. Widdicombe, Sue & Wooffitt, Rob (1995). The language of youth subcultures: Social identity in action. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Williams, J. Patrick. 2011. Subcultural theory: Traditions and concepts. Cambridge: Polity. Williams, J. Patrick & Hannerz, Erik (2014). Articulating the “counter” in subculture studies. M/C Journal, 17 (6).

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Williams, Raymond (1960). Culture and society 1780-1950. Garden City: Doubleday & Company. Willis, Paul. E. 1978. Profane culture. London: Routledge. Worley, Matthew. 2013. Oi! oi! oi!: Class, locality, and British punk. Twentieth Century British History, 24, (4), 606–636.

74 EDUCARE 2016:2 Theorizing Power, Identity and Hip Hop: Towards a Queer, Intersectional Approach

Kalle Berggren

Power and identity are central themes in hip hop scholarship, whether it is race and class that are in focus, or gender and sexuality, or a combination. Yet power and identity are contested concepts that are used with varying theoretical outlooks. This article seeks to outline some key differences between different understandings of power and identity, and their consequences for the study of hip hop. Four models are identified. In the expression model, hip hop is understood as the cultural expression of a specific group. In contrast, the catalogization model and the two-plane model both acknowledge the existence of different dimensions of power and identity, but treat these either in a list-like manner or according to a base-superstructure dichotomy. The limitations of these two models can be overcome, it is suggested, by turning to the complexity model, which builds on contemporary feminist, intersectionality and queer theory.

Keywords: hip hop, identity, intersectionality, power, queer theory

Kalle Berggren, Lecturer in sociology, Uppsala university [email protected]

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Introduction In the last few decades, hip hop has grown into a popular subculture and genre of popular music worldwide. Consequently, hip hop studies are no longer limited to the U.S. (Forman & Neal, 2012). Instead, they now address hip hop culture and related aspects in many different contexts. This international and transdisciplinary area of research includes not only analysis of hip hop aesthetics – whether in the form of rap, dj:ing, graffiti or breakdance – but significantly, also addresses aspects such as linguistics (Alim, Ibrahim, & Pennycook, 2009; Terkourafi, 2010) and pedagogy (Porfilio & Viola, 2012). Many scholars of hip hop would agree that hip hop is, at least in some important ways, about power and identity. This can entail possibilities of empowerment for groups that are disadvantaged in terms of race, ethnicity or class, as well as the often contradictory politics of gender and sexuality within hip hop. Yet, power and identity are contested concepts that defy any self-evident definitions, and whose use varies with the disciplinary and theoretical attachments of scholars. In this text, I want to consider some of the most widely circulated models of theorizing power and identity, and their consequences for the study of hip hop. Conversely, the richness of rap lyrics, in terms of discursive statements about identities such as race, class, gender and sexuality, renders the hip hop genre a useful case for illuminating some of the benefits and shortcomings of available theoretical repertoires about power structures and related identity formations. I identify four different models of theorizing power and identity. The expression model treats hip hop as the cultural expression of one specific group such as blacks or youth, and is often used in hip hop studies. The catalogization model recognizes different identities and distinguishes between them in a list-like manner, and is often used in masculinity studies. The two-plane model, often used in critical social theory, also recognizes different identities, but divides these into more structural and enduring forms on the one hand, and more fluid ones on the other. Finally, the complexity model of feminist, queer and intersectional scholarship treats power and identity as performed, negotiated, and intersecting. It is the theoretical resources of this model tradition that I have found most helpful and convincing in theorizing power and identity within and beyond hip hop.

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The expression model The first model I want to consider is what I callthe expression model. The basic assumption here is that hip hop can be usefully understood as the cultural expression of one specific cultural group. This model is widespread in hip hop studies, and the view is typically manifested in book titles such as “Black noise” (Rose, 1994) or “The vinyl ain’t final – Hip hop and the globalization of Black popular culture” (Basu & Lemelle, 2006). Here, hip hop is designated as black music and culture. What does it mean to say that hip hop is black? Describing hip hop as the cultural expression of a group – black Americans – has the merit of situating hip hop in a tradition of black cultural expression in the U.S., an important move which hip hop scholars such as Michael Eric Dyson have emphasized:

Rap expresses the ongoing preoccupation with literacy and orality that has characterized African-American communities since the inception of legally coerced illiteracy during slavery. Rap artists explore grammatical creativity, verbal wizardry, and linguistic innovation in refining the art of oral communication. (Dyson, 2004, p. 66)

The discussion on ‘black music’ is complex and revolves in different ways around the importance of naming race on the one hand, and the theoretical perspectives associated with anti-essentialism, creolization and hybridity on the other (Gilroy 1993, Radano 2003). While situating hip hop in a history of racial politics is important, I would argue that there is a drawback to the idea of describing hip hop as the cultural expression of one group – the need to delineate this very group. In fact, in the U.S. there have always been a variety of participants involved in hip hop music and culture (McFarland 2008). From this perspective, describing hip hop as black could render a variety of other participants invisible. However, this conclusion is not inevitable, and as Imani Perry points out, to say that hip hop is black is not necessarily to say that it does not have multiracial origins and influences. For Perry, hip hop is black music because

(1) its primary language is African American Vernacular English (AAVE);

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(2) it has a political location in society distinctly ascribed to black people, music, and cultural forms; (3) it is derived from black American oral culture; and (4) it is derived from black American musical traditions. (Perry, 2004, p. 10)

Even if this argument were accepted for the U.S. case – to what extent is this view valid regarding hip hop in its myriad expressions around the world? While few would deny that hip hop in important respects stems from black American cultural traditions, it would be reductive to describe hip hop outside the U.S. as merely derived from its American counterpart. Tony Mitchell, for instance, suggested almost 15 years ago that hip hop is

just as ‘rooted in the local’ in Naples, Marseilles, Amsterdam, the Basque region, Berlin, Sofia, Sydney, Auckland, or the Shibuya district of Tokyo as it ever was in Compton, South Central Los Angeles, or the South Bronx. (Mitchell, 2001, p. 10)

John Hutnyk, on the other hand, argues that the discussion on American origins vs. European originality is unproductive, and should give way to different sorts of questions:

Conventional discussions of hip hop in Europe begin with ritual acknowledgement of the derivation of the form from the United States, soon followed by equally ritual insistence that local versionings of hip hop have their own character and autonomy. […] it may be that a more interesting analysis would address something other than provenance or autonomy (Hutnyk, 2006, pp. 119-120)

Thus, hip hop across the world draws on influences from local and American traditions. In many contexts, hip hop is not dominated by black participants, and its language is not primarily English at all, whether vernacular or not, and so does not fulfill Perry’s abovementioned criteria for being black music. Moreover, since hip hop participants differ not only in their racial positions, but also in terms of other identities such as class, gender, sexuality and age, describing hip hop as black gives racial identity a centrality over other identities, which may or may not be the case empirically. Similarly, labeling hip hop as a “youth culture” follows

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the same expression model. In this case, it is an age segment which is foregrounded, which renders invisible participants from other cohorts, as well as the many different and intersecting identities which members of a particular age group also occupy. In sum, the expression model takes as its fundamental assumption that hip hop is the cultural expression of one particular group. While this strategy is useful in highlighting important emphases among participants, it is also reductive in casting a significant minority of hip hop participants as representative of the whole genre/subculture. This is why Nira Yuval-Davis, in her analysis of social justice movements, argues that the notion of the representative should give way to that of the advocate (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Since any one group or category consists of asymmetrically positioned members, the idea of representatives runs the risk of reinforcing intragroup power hierarchies by promoting some bodies more than others. In my view, hip hop scholars should therefore be wary of buying into the expression model, in order not to construct other participants as marginal. The Swedish white female rapper Heli, for instance, engages in her lyrics with the somatic norm for a proper hip hop subject:

Hip hop is made by black guys in the USA, fuck that Being a paradox, a rapping white mom (Heli, “1:stå”, 2002, my translation)

The catalogization model We have seen that expression models are important for highlighting the history and context in which hip hop takes place, but also that the need to specify the group of which hip hop culture is taken to be the expression and property, involves the risk of reducing the complexity of identity formations within hip hop to a single master category. I now want to turn to another model, which is often found in research on men and masculinity, and which I call the catalogization model. Critical studies on men and masculinity have developed as a transdisciplinary branch of gender studies since the 1980s. Previously, questions about men and masculinity had primarily been theorized in terms of a “male sex role” (David & Brannon 1976). The publication of Raewyn Connell’s work, and in particular Masculinities, entailed

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a shift of perspectives and terminology (Connell 1995). One of the central features of Connell’s work is the recognition that there is not only one male sex role, but rather different masculinities, in the plural. Connell’s theory distinguished between “hegemonic masculinity” as the dominant patriarchal form of masculinity, “complicit masculinity” as a less explicit form of masculinity that nevertheless has most of the advantages of gender inequality, “subordinated masculinity” which refers to non-heterosexual configurations of masculinity, and “marginalized masculinity” denoting unprivileged forms of masculinity in terms of race, ethnicity and/or class. This fourfold division of masculinities has been widely popular, and in addition, the idea of “masculinities” in the plural has led researchers to invent a series of varying masculinities in different contexts. I call this idea of differences in the plural the catalogization model. Compared to the expression models with their mono-categorical orientation, the catalogization model has the advantage of recognizing multiplicity. There is not just one form of masculinity, since there are variations associated with the identities of sexuality, race and class. However, how effective is this model in accounting for the ways these identities intersect? According to C.J. Pascoe, while such models acknowledge diversity, they have also

spawned an industry of cataloguing “types” of masculinity: gay, black, Chicano, working class, middle class, Asian, gay black, gay Chicano, white working class, militarized, transnational business, New Man, negotiated, versatile, healthy, toxic, counter, and cool masculinities, among others. (Pascoe, 2007, p. 8)

In a study of rap lyrics in Sweden, it was found that a catalogization model can lead to an unfortunate reification of differences (Berggren, 2013).The study showed that rap lyrics by male artists often contain a radical critique of class and racial inequalities in Swedish society, but simultaneously tend to reinforce normative notions of gender and sexuality. The use of a catalogization model here would have implied conceptualizing this phenomenon in terms of a marginalized masculinity, or possibly an urban masculinity, given the stress on geographical belonging in many lyrics. However, the analysis revealed that the normative notions of gender and sexuality were circulated

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widely among white male rappers as well. While there were important differences in terms of class and race positions and experiences, norms of gender and sexuality seemed in the study to a large extent to be shared across such differences. Against this backdrop, the idea of different masculinities appears less helpful. I would argue that the catalogization model here under-communicates how gender norms can be shared across other identities, and that this is not a very productive theoretical resource for thinking about how different forms of power and identity are intertwined in complex ways. In sum, a catalogization model takes as its fundamental assumption that different identities can be understood in terms of a catalogue of different forms. While this idea has the overall merit of recognizing the existence of different identities, it is also reductive in slotting complex intersections into a neat catalogue of entries that are assumed to be mutually exclusive.

The two-plane model Having considered the expression model of hip hop studies as well as the catalogization model from masculinity studies, I now turn to a model of understanding power and identity often associated with critical social theory. I refer to this way of thinking as the two-plane model. The popularity of this model stems in part from Karl Marx’s influential distinction between base and superstructure. The core idea is that different forms of power and identity exist, and that these are best understood in terms of a binary division between the structural and enduring forms of power on the one hand, and the more fluid and secondary ones on the other. For Marx, it is class which is the primary and structural identity, located in the economic base of a society. Other identities and power dimensions are not necessarily non-existent or unimportant, but are understood to be superstructural, that is not primarily related to the economic base of society. The strict distinction between the economic base on the one hand and the social, political and cultural sphere on the other has been criticized for a long time. Max Weber argued that social and cultural norms are not ephemeral to the economy, but are instead prominent factors in shaping economic activity (Weber, 1992); the Social

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Democratic “revisionism” of Marxism was essentially directed against the assumption that politics cannot transform economic arrangements (e.g. Berman, 2006); and the rise of post-Marxism similarly rejects the idea that the ‘economic’ can constitute a ‘base’ unaffected in the last instance by social, cultural and political forces (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). However, despite this well-known critique, the two-plane model remains influential. While the base-superstructure dichotomy may today be less popular in itself, the very idea of two different planes keeps returning in influential theories of power and identity. The cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, distinguishes between class position and cultural meanings in his influential work Distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Cultural meanings become the means through which the end of class distinction operates, and the content of cultural expressions is thus rendered secondary to struggles between groups having different forms of capital. This is particularly unfortunate in relation to hip hop, where rap lyrics are often rife with statements about power structures and formations of identity, not least concerning class, race, gender and sexuality. In addition, Bourdieu characterizes music as a cultural form which, compared to drama or theatre, appears as ‘purer’ from its social embeddedness (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 19). This is a view which is arguably less appealing for hip hop scholars engaged with the connections between music, power and identity. In contrast, Jeffrey Alexander has developed a “strong program” of cultural sociology (Alexander, 2003). He insists that cultural meanings be taken seriously on their own terms, and not reduced to a simple derivate of an underlying social structure. However, while being at pains to stake out cultural meanings as a legitimate object of sociological inquiry, Alexander maintains the strict distinction between structure and culture. While these authors may thus be seen as adversaries on one level, Bourdieu and Alexander nevertheless share a fundamental commitment to the two-plane model: it is either “power, not culture”, or “culture, not power”, and never culture and power, or power in and through culture. In political philosophy, on the other hand, Nancy Fraser has developed a theory of justice which differentiates between

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redistribution and recognition (Fraser, 1995). Class is understood to be about redistribution, and sexuality about recognition, whereas gender and race occupy a more ambiguous and bivalent position. Thinking about different dimensions of power, justice and oppression can be an important and fruitful exercise, although often relatively inconclusive, and Iris Marion Young, for instance, distinguishes between five “faces” of oppression (Young, 1990). However, employing a binary distinction between redistribution and recognition reinforces a two-plane model which in effect distinguishes between base and superstructure and relies on speculation about how different identities can be distributed onto this scheme. In popular debate, this model recurs in numerous shapes, for instance by Marxist feminists who situate class and gender as structural but treat race and transgender issues as superstructural “identity politics”. Judith Butler has been perhaps the most important critic of some of the modern day base-superstructure incarnations. Where Bourdieu maintains a distinction between social positions (class) on the one hand and cultural expressions on the other, Butler argues that Bourdieu “fails to take account of the way in which social positions are themselves constructed through […] performativity” (Butler, 1997, p. 156). And where Fraser distinguishes between the two planes of redistribution and recognition, that is between economy and culture, Butler contends that the economic is always already infused with that which is taken to be cultural, or to put it more precisely, that it is not possible to draw a stable line of demarcation between the two (Butler, 1998). Similarly to Butler’s arguments, the version of cultural studies developed by Stuart Hall in Representation offers a much more productive way of handling questions of power and identity, where we are not asked to choose between one or the other (Hall, 1997). Hall draws on Foucault’s ideas on discourse, and applies them to the arenas of popular culture – such as hip hop – which allows us to investigate how power and identity are constructed, sustained, but also subverted and challenged discursively. How this can be done will be considered next as the complexity model.

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The complexity model To recapitulate the argument so far, the expression model presumes an already constituted group of which hip hop is the cultural expression, a group which is often described in terms of a single category such as “black” or “youth”. The catalogization model and the two-plane model mark a shift in that they recognize the existence of plural dimensions of power, of different identities and positions. However, this recognition is in both cases too speedily coded into a conceptual scheme. Either it is in the form of a list of different “masculinities” or it is in the form of a reinvented base-superstructure dichotomy, both of which are unnecessarily rigid. At this point, one may add that the expression model could also be considered as a form of two-plane model, where the group is constituted on one plane and its expressions operate on another. What could a better model look like? It would a) treat cultural groups and identities not as always already in place, but rather as socially and culturally accomplished in an open-ended process, and b) recognize that social positions are multiple and affect one another in complex ways that cannot always be reduced to either a list of differences, or to a simple economy–culture dichotomy. These are the key assumptions of queer theory and intersectionality, the fusion of which I will refer to here as the complexity model. Intersectionality and queer theory have become two of the most important features of feminist theory in the last fifteen years, although they both have longer histories. They both involve a critique of the sorts of feminist theory which neglects consideration of the power dimensions of race and class (intersectionality) and sexuality (queer theory). They are also both used in what could be called a primary as well as an extended sense. The concept of intersectionality was developed within black feminism in the USA in order to highlight the structural location of black women as marginalized in relation to both a white-dominated feminist movement and a male-dominated anti-racist movement (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 1990). The primary sense of intersectionality, then, refers to critical analysis foregrounding the lived experience of non- white women in different settings, and theorizes the interrelated nature of primarily gender, race and class (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992; Davis, 1981). In recent years, intersectionality has also acquired an

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extended sense, and is often used to denote critical analyses which take into account the intersections of two, three or more power structures or identity categories. The use of intersectionality in the extended sense has both been cherished as “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far” (McCall, 2005, p. 1771), and criticized for once again marginalizing the group of black women which the very concept of intersectionality was designed to foreground (Crenshaw, 2011). Queer theory developed out of an encounter between lesbian- and gay studies and poststructuralist theory (Butler, 1990; Sedgwick, 1985). Central here is the critique of compulsory heterosexuality as a system of power operating both in society at large and within feminist thought. Furthermore, queer theory insists that gender and sexuality categories are not given, stable and universal, but on the contrary, are socially constructed, performatively accomplished and permanently contested. The primary sense of queer theory, then, refers to a critical analysis which reveals how the taken for granted nature of gender and sexuality categories are in fact unstable and accomplished. In a study of rap lyrics in Sweden, queer theory was used to interpret the use of expressions such as “no homo” (Berggren, 2012). It was found that male rappers often expressed much more love for their male peers than for women, while simultaneously constructing themselves as not homosexual. This was interpreted as an ideological dilemma, which had to be managed through repeated boundary work. It is in response to this that we can see the point of expressions such as “no homo” – they operate as a straight inoculation which places a subject within the boundaries of heterosexuality despite the prevalent expression of same-sex desire. In an extended sense, to queer something has also come to mean the troubling of binary categories in general, by showing how they are always already blurred and unstable. For instance, “queering ethnicity” may refer not only to analysis of how ethnicity intersects with sexuality, but also to a critical analysis which calls into question the presumed stable nature of ethno-racial identities (El-Tayeb, 2011). There are different opinions on the pros and cons of using the word ‘queer’ in its primary and extended senses, but both uses are by now fairly well-established.

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Sometimes, intersectionality is presented as an analysis of race, gender and class, whereas queer theory is presented as an analysis of gender and sexuality. In these instances, one could say that intersectionality is given a straight genealogy, and queer theory a white one. However, this division has become increasingly obsolete. Important contemporary theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Fatima El-Tayeb incorporate both strands of thinking, and have developed approaches that are both queer and intersectional (Ahmed, 2006; El-Tayeb, 2011) – and their work also points to earlier work that had similar engagements (Lorde, 1984). I thus refer to the combination of queer theory and intersectionality as the complexity model. How does the complexity model of feminist, queer and intersectional theory relate to hip hop? These are by no means unrelated. In fact, Kimberle Crenshaw’s groundbreaking article on intersectionality from 1991 featured analysis of the obscenity charges against black male U.S. rap group 2 Live Crew (Crenshaw, 1991). Crenshaw took issue with those who in the surrounding debate focused only on gender and failed to see the racism involved in pinpointing a specific black group for their sexism – but made equal criticism of those who were critical of the racism but failed to take the sexism into account. An intersectional approach was called for which could address the complexity of these intersecting power dimensions. Similarly, other prominent intersectional and queer scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and Fatima El-Tayeb have written about hip hop (El-Tayeb, 2011; Hill Collins, 2006). There is also a significant amount of hip hop feminist research in the U.S. which makes use of various forms of intersectional analysis (Durham, 2013; Pough, Richardson, Durham, & Raimist, 2007; Rose, 1994). Queer theory has been less prominent, but Andreana Clay, for instance, develops an instructive analysis of how queer women of color make use of black masculinity on the queer dance floor (Clay, 2007). This is a complex way of analyzing power and identity as involving several different dimensions that cannot be reduced to simplistic models – as would be the case with the expression, catalogization and two-plane models. On the one hand, I believe that this more complex, feminist, queer and intersectional approach deserves wider appreciation in hip hop research, not least outside the U.S.A. On the other hand, I would also argue that the complex intersections within the hip hop genre/

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culture show us the limitations of some of the most widely circulated models of theorizing power and identity, and thus demonstrate the benefits of a queer, intersectional approach to power and identity in general.

References Ahmed, Sara. (2006). Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2003). The meanings of social life: a cultural sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alim, H. Samy, Ibrahim, Awad, & Pennycook, Alastair. (Eds.). (2009). Global linguistic flows: hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. New York: Routledge. Anthias, Floya, & Yuval-Davis, Nira. (1992). Racialized boundaries: race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle. London: Routledge. Basu, Dipannita, & Lemelle, Sidney. (Eds.). (2006). The vinyl ain’t final: hip hop and the globalisation of black popular culture. London: Pluto. Berggren, K. (2012). “No homo”: Straight inoculations and the queering of masculinity in Swedish hip hop. Norma - Nordic Journal for Masculinity Studies, 7(1), 50–66. Berggren, K. (2013). Degrees of intersectionality: Male rap artists in Sweden negotiating class, race and gender. Culture Unbound - Journal of Current Cultural Research, 5, 189–211. Berman, Sheri. (2006). The primacy of politics: social democracy and the making of Europe’s twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith. (1998). Merely cultural? New Left Review, 227(1), 33–44. Clay, Andreana. (2007). “I used to be scared of the dick”: Queer women of color and hip-hop masculinity. In Gwendolyn. D. Pough, Elaine Richardson, Aisha Durham, & Rachel Raimist (Eds.), Home girls make some noise: Hip hop feminism anthology. Mira Loma: Parker Publishing. Crenshaw, Kimberle. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. Crenshaw, Kimberle. (2011). Postscript. In Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, & Linda Supik (Eds.), Framing intersectionality: debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies. Farnham: Ashgate. Davis, Angela. (1981). Women, race & class. London: Women’s press. Durham, Aisha. (2013). The stage hip-hop feminism built: A new directions essay. Signs, 38(3), 721–737. Dyson, Michael Eric. (2004). The culture of hip-hop. In Murray Forman & Marc Anthony Neal (Eds.), That’s the joint! The hip- hop studies reader. London: Routledge. El-Tayeb, Fatima. (2011). European others: queering ethnicity in postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forman, Murray, & Neal, Mark Anthony. (Eds.). (2012). That’s the joint! The hip-hop studies reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “post-socialist” age. New Left Review, 212(1), 68–93. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. Cambridge: Blackwell. Gilroy, P. (1993). The black atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso. Hall, Stuart. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage. Heli. (2002). Öronknark. Gallery music

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Hill Collins, Patricia. (1990). Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Hill Collins, Patricia. (2006). From Black power to hip hop: racism, nationalism, and feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hutnyk, John. (2006). The nation question: Fun^da^mental and the deathening silence. In Dipannita Basu & Sidney Lemelle (Eds.), The vinyl ain’t final: hip hop and the globalisation of black popular culture. London: Pluto. Laclau, Ernetso, & Mouffe, Chantal. (2001). Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Lorde, Audre. (1984). Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press. McCall, Leslie. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs, 30(3), 1771–1800. Mitchell, Tony. (2001). Introduction: Another root - Hip-Hop outside the USA. In Tony Mitchell (Ed.), Global noise: rap and hip-hop outside the USA. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Pascoe, C. J. (2007). Dude, you’re a fag: masculinity and sexuality in high school. Berkeley: University of California Press. Perry, Imani. (2004). Prophets of the hood: politics and poetics in hip hop. Durham: Duke University Press. Porfilio, Bradley J, & Viola, Michael. J. (Eds.). (2012). Hip-hop(e): The cultural practice and critical pedagogy of international hip- hop. New York: Peter Lang. Pough, Gwendolyn D., Richardson, Elaine, Durham, Aisha, & Raimist, Rachel (Eds.). (2007). Home girls make some noise: Hip hop feminism anthology. Mira Loma: Parker Publishing. Radano, R. (2003). Lying up a nation: Race and black music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, Tricia. (1994). Black noise. Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1985). Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Terkourafi, Marina. (Ed.). (2010). The languages of global hip-hop. London: Continuum. Weber, Max. (1992). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Routledge. Young, Iris Marion. (1990). Five faces of oppression. In Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. (2011). The politics of belonging: intersectional contestations. Los Angeles: Sage.

90 EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE – vetenskapliga skrifter

Utgivning

EDUCARE 2016:1. Tema: Barndom, ungdom, kultur och lärande. Nils Hammarén & Anette Hellman, Barndom, ungdom, kultur och lärande; Cecilia Wallerstedt, Cecilia Björck & Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt, Bandformering och genus på 2010-talet: Förändrade villkor för att spela i band?; Jennie Sivenbring, Man vill skrika ut det över världen, jag kan lika gärna skriva det på Facebook. Ungdomar och vänskap on-line; Björn Haglund, Fritidshemmets vardagspraktik i ett nytt diskursivt landskap; Helena Ackesjö, Ulla Karin Nordänger & Per Lindqvist, ”Att jag kallar mig själv för lärare i fritidshem uppfattar jag skapar en viss provokation”. Om de nya grundlärarna med inriktning mot arbete i fritidshem; Jonas Lindbäck, Johannes Lunneblad & Ove Sernhede, Skolan och den territoriella stigmatiseringen – Om två skolor i den urbana periferin; Johannes Lunneblad, Nils Hammarén, Thomas Johansson & Ylva Odenbring, Från mobboffer till brottsoffer. Diskurser kring kränkande behandling i den svenska skolan; Natalie Davet, Barnbruden ”Thea” – om barnbloggen som utställning och samtidsarena för konstruktioner av barndom; Cecilia Björck & Anette Hellman, Japansk populärkultur bland unga i svensk kontext: Lolitastilen som förhandling om ålder och genus.

EDUCARE 2015:2. Tema: Kritiska perspektiv på bedömning och dokumentation. Lisa Asp-Onsjö, Gästredaktören har ordet! Kritiska perspektiv på bedömning och dokumentation; Christina Osbeck & Olof Franck & Annika Lilja & Annika Lindskog, Challenges of Assessment in Ethics – Teachers’ reflections when assessing national tests; Frank Bach & Birgitta Frändberg & Mats Hagman & Eva West & Ann Zetterqvist, De nationella proven i NO åk 6. Skillnader i resultat mellan olika grupper; Johan Nyberg, Professionalism in action – music teachers on an assessment journey; Lars Holm, Kan du tage pige op af kufferten? En analyse af sproglig evaluering i daginstitutioner; Mats Oscarson, Bedömning på systemnivå – En komparativ studie av stegsystemet i språk i den svenska skolan och språknivåer i Europarådets Common European Framework

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 91 of References for Languages (CEFR); Camilla Svens-Liavåg & Johan Korhonen & Karin Linnanmäki, Elevbedömning, motivation och uppförande. En studie av skolvisa skillnader i bedömning och diskrepans mellan vitsord och testresultat i årskurs 9 i finlandssvenska skolor; Pia Thornberg & Anders Jönsson, Sambedömning för ökad likvärdighet?; Ingela Andreasson & Maj Asplund Carlsson & Marianne Dovemark, Bedömnings-, dokumentationspraktiker och pedagogiska identiteter; Åsa Hirsh, IUP i praktiken. En skolreforms formande i skärningspunkten mellan yttre styrning och professionell autonomi.

EDUCARE 2015:1. Artiklar: Lena Sjöberg, The Construction of Mathematical Knowledge and Learning in and Through Individual Education Plans; Peter Håkansson, Folkbildningen och det sociala kapitalet; Pia Sundqvist & Christina Olin-Scheller, Engelska på fritiden och engelska i skolan – en omöjlig ekvation; Marie Nordlund, Vocabulary in textbooks for young learners; Eva Änggård, Gåturer som forskningsmetod med barn; Anette Svensson, ”New technologies” and ”old values”: The function of various text and media forms in literary studies; Niclas Månsson & Ali Osman, Lärarutbildningen och miljonprogrammets skola

EDUCARE 2014:2. Tema: Childhood, Learning and Didactics. Ingegerd Tallberg Broman, Preface; Susanne Thulin & Agneta Jonsson, Child Perspectives and Children’s Perspectives – a Concern for Teachers in Preschool; Annika Månsson & Lena Rubenstein Reich, Democracy in Research Circles to Enable New Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Didactics; Mats Bevemyr, Childrens Use of Every Day Mathematical Concepts to Describe, Argue and Negotiate Order of Turn; Dorota Lembrér & Tamsin Meaney, Socialisation Tensions in the Swedish Preschool Curriculum – Scaffolding and Challening Conversational Skills; Carina Hermansson, Tomas Saar & Christina Olin-Scheller, Rethinking ’Method’ en Early Childhood Writing Education; Camilla Löf, Didactics for Life?

EDUCARE 2014:1. Artiklar: Helena Andersson, Elevers berättelser om sina upplevelser av högstadiet; Magnus Persson, Blåst? Från kulturindustriell manipulation till entreprenöriellt lärande;

92 EDUCARE 2016:2 Per-Åke Rosvall, Programarbetslag som stöd för nyexaminerade kärnämneslärare etablering som gymnasielärare; Michael Tengberg, Konstruktion och bedömning av förmågan att läsa (och förstå) skönlitterär text. Två nedslag i det nationella provets läsförståelsedel, åk 9

EDUCARE 2013:2. Tema: Samhällsfrågor i skolans matematik- och NO-undervisning. Mats Lundström, Förord; Per Hillbur, Good to Be Different? On Cosmopolitanism, Pluralism and ‘the Good Child’ in Swedish Educational Policy; Jonas Dahl & Maria C. Johansson, The Citizen in Light of the Mathematics Curriculum; Thomas Lundblad, Claes Malmberg, Mats Areskoug & Per Jönsson, Dialogic Manifestations of an Augmented Reality Simulation.

EDUCARE 2013:1. Artiklar: Monica Lindgren & Claes Ericsson, Diskursiva legitimeringar av estetisk verksamhet i lärarutbildningen; Anita Norlund, ”Varför tycker du man ska ha dödsstraff, då?” Ett sociologisk- didaktiskt verktyg för analys av klassrumsdebatter; Elsa Foisack, Claudia M. Pagliaro & Ronald R. Kelly, Matematikprestationer och elever med dövhet eller hörselnedsättning. EDUCARE 2012:1. Artiklar: Thom Axelsson, Att konstruera begåvning – Debatten om IQ; Hans Larsson & Claes Nilholm, Att utmana eller återkskapa traditionen – Sex skolors arbete med elever i relationssvårigheter; Jonas Lindbäck & Ove Sernhede, Från förorten till innerstaden och tillbaka igen – Gymnasieskolan, valfriheten och den segregerade staden.

EDUCARE 2011:3. Tema: Tvåspråkig undervisning på svenska och arabiska i mångkulturella storstadsskolor. Anna-Lena Tvingstedt, Inledning; Berit Wigerfelt, Undervisning på svenska och arabiska tar form i ett mångetniskt område; Berit Wigerfelt & Eva Morgan, Balansgång mellan två språk. Lärares berättelser om tvåspråkig undervisning på svenska och arabiska; Anna-Lena Tvingstedt, ”Barnen talar två språk och har två kulturer” – Föräldraperspektiv på tvåspråkig undervisning; Anna Sandell, ”Vi förstår, du behöver inte översätta” – Elevperspektiv på tvåspråkig undervisning i den svenska

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 93 skolan; Helen Avery, Lärares språkbruk i tvåspråkiga klassrum; Eva-Kristina Salameh, Grammatisk och fonologisk utveckling på svenska och arabiska vid tvåspråkig undervisning; Eva-Kristina Salameh, Lexikal utveckling på svenska och arabiska vid tvåspråkig undervisning; Anna-Lena Tvingstedt & Eva-Kristina Salameh, Läs- och kunskapsutveckling hos elever som fått tvåspråkig undervisning på svenska och arabiska; Anna-Lena Tvingstedt, Avslutande reflexioner.

EDUCARE 2011:2. Tema: Välfärdsstat i omvandling: regelerad barndom – oregerlig ungdom? Ove Sernhede & Ingegerd Tallberg Broman, Förord; Patrick J. Ryan, Discursive Tensions on the Landscape of Moderna Childhood; Lisa Asp-Onsjö, Dokumentation, styrning och kontroll i den svenska skolan; Ann-Marie Markström, ”Soft Governance” i förskolans utvecklingssamtal; Ingela Kolfjord, En skolas implementering av kamratmedling; Philip Lalander & Ove Sernhede, Social mobilization or street crimes: Two strategies among young urban outcasts in contemporary Sweden; Johan Söderman Vem är egentligen expert? Hiphop som utbildningspolitik och progressiv pedagogik i USA.

EDUCARE 2011:1. Tema: Svenska med didaktisk inriktning. Lotta Bergman, Förord: Svenska med didaktisk inriktning; Magnus Persson, Den friska boken och den sjuka läsaren: Om litteratur som medicin; Kent Adelmann, Lyssnandets århundrade? Att lyssna till den talande boken; Cecilia Nielsen, Kroppen läser och skriver? Läsandets och skrivandets kroppslighet i ljuset av Merleau-Pontys kroppsfilosofi; Annbritt Palo & Lena Manderstedt, Texter, språk och skrivande med utgångspunkt i de nya ämnesplanerna i svenska; Cecilia Olsson Jers, Den retoriska arbetsprocessens betydelse för möjligheten att framstå med starkt och trovärdigt ethos i muntlig framställning; Lisa Källström, Vad kan vi lära oss av berättelser? Det fiktivas funktion i svenska som främmande språk.

EDUCARE 2010:1. Thomas Johansson Etnografi som teori, metod och livsstil, Sara Irisdotter Aldenmyr Förvaltningsarbete för mångfald och konkurrens: En studie av den kommunala skolförvaltningens ansvar

94 EDUCARE 2016:2 att främja mångfald i den konkurrensutsatta grundskolan, Maria Simonsson & Mia Thorell Att börja på förskolan: Exempel på barns sociala samspelsprocesser under inskolningen, Lena Sjöberg ”Same same, but different”: En genealogisk studie av den ’goda’ läraren’, den ’goda’ eleven och den ’goda’ skolan i svenska lärarutbildningsreformer 1940-2008, Ann-Louise Petersen Studieförbundens institutionella förutsättningar skapar möjligheter på utbildningsmarknaden

EDUCARE 2009:4. Lena Lang Förord: Att infånga praxis – kvalitativa metoder i (special)pedagogisk forskning i Norden, Dianne L. Ferguson Introduction: Honoring and celebrating diversity in educational research, Dora S. Bjárnason Walking on eggshells: Some ethical issues in research with people in vulnerable situations, Lena Lang & Lisbeth Ohlsson Ytterst berörd - sällan hörd: Att som forskare lyssna till berättelser, Susan Tetler & Kirsten Baltzer Læring i inkluderende klasserum: Når eleverne gives stemme, Lotta Andersson & Anna-Lena Tvingstedt Med fokus på samspel: Att använda video i specialpedagogisk forskning, Anne Morin Praksisforskning: På tværs af almen- og specialpædagogik, Inger Assarsson Att skapa mening i en skola för alla: Ett diskursanalytiskt förhållningssätt, Birgit Kirkebaek Efterord: Kontrol betyder ikke nødvendigvis kvalitet. EDUCARE 2009:2-3. Mångkontextuell barndom. Ingegerd Tallberg Broman Inledning, Pauline Stoltz Styrning, barndom och skola, Berit Wigerfelt En likvärdig skola? Tomas Peterson Barndomens reglering via skol- och föreningsidrott, Camilla Löf Livskunskap – en gränsöverskridande praktik i skolan Ingela Kolfjord Alternativ konflikthantering: Hur kamratmedling kan påverka elevers relationsskapande, Ann-Carita Evaldsson Verbal mobbning och normerande praktiker i flickors relationsprat, Angerd Eilard Barndomsbilder i förändring i grundskolans läseböcker, Ann-Christine Vallberg Roth Styrning genom bedömning av barn, Ingegerd Tallberg Broman ”No Parent Left Behind”: Föräldradeltagande för inkludering och effektivitet, Mats Trondman Slutkommentar: Mångkontextuella och gränsöverskridande läroprocesser - Om barn som självreglerande och egenansvariga subjekt.

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 95 EDUCARE 2009:1. Redaktör. Idrottsvetenskap: Kutte Jönsson Fysisk fostran och föraktet för svaghet: En kritisk analys av hälsodiskursens moraliska imperativ; Anna Fabri & Torun Mattsson Betydelsen av praktisk-personlig färdighet i idrottslärarutbildningen; Lars Lagergren & Jesper Fundberg Integration i förening: Kritiska reflektioner kring ett projekt; Susanna Hedenborg Till vad fostrar ridsporten? En studie av ridsportens utbildningar med utgångspunkt i begreppen tävlingsfostran, föreningsfostran och omvårdnadsfostran; Ingegerd Ericsson, Patrik Grahn & Erik Skärbäck Närmiljöns betydelse och hur den kan påverkas.

EDUCARE 2008:3 CiCe/CLaD: Jens Qvortrup, Childhood and politics; Annika Månsson The construction of “the competent child” and early childhood care: Values education among the youngest children in a nursery school; Nanny Hartsmar & Maria Sandström, The right of all to inclusion in the learning process: Second language learners working in a technology workshop; Tomas Peterson, When the field of sport crosses the field of physical education; Alistair Ross, Human rights and education for citizenship, society and identity: Europe and its regions.

EDUCARE 2008:2. Redaktör. Artiklar: Thomas Johansson Fostran till kulturentreprenörer, Ylva Wibaeus Historiedidaktik, Anders Jönsson & Gunilla Svingby Underlag till ramverk för en provbank i grundskolan. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2008.

EDUCARE 2008:1. Redaktör. Artiklar: Maj Asplund Carlsson & Johannes Lunneblad ”När han är arg är han turkisk”: Identitetsskapande i Lin Hallbergs kompisbokstrilogi; Jonas Aspelin och Sven Persson Lärares professionella/personliga utveckling; Ann-Marie Markström Förskolans utvecklingssamtal – ett komplex av aktiviteter i tid och rum. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2008.

EDUCARE 2007:2. Redaktör. Artiklar: Johan Söderman, Claes Ericsson & Göran Folkestad Traditionsbärare och fostrare – samtal om lärande med två amerikanska rappare; Lars Berglund, Lise-Lotte Malmgren, Bim Riddersporre & Ingrid Sandén Profession, forskning

96 EDUCARE 2016:2 och praktik: 30 rektorers syn på specialpedagogisk professionalitet; Boel Westerberg ”Jag tar varken kristendom eller islam på allvar, jag går efter vad jag själv tycker”. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2007.

EDUCARE 2007:1. Redaktör. Artiklar - tema kreativitet: Lars Lindström Kan kreativitet läras ut? En bildpedagogisk översikt; Li Bennich-Björkman Universiteten, kreativiteten och politikens aningslöshet; Feiwel Kupferberg Läraruppdragets egenart och rollmodeller: Kreativitetsregimer i hybridmoderniteten. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2007.

EDUCARE 2006:6. Redaktör. Rapport: Rune Jönsson & Bodil Liljefors Persson Religionskunskap i årskurs 9. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2006.

EDUCARE 2006:5. Redaktör. Rapport: Lars Berggren & Roger Johansson Historiekunskap i årskurs 9. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2006.

EDUCARE 2006:4. Redaktör. Rapport: Maja Lundahl, Anders Olsson & Inge-Marie Svensson Hållbar utveckling och geografi i årskurs 9. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2006. http://dspace.mah.se/ bitstream/2043/3392/1/Geografirapport SG 12 dec.pdf

EDUCARE 2006:3. Redaktör. Rapport: Anna Henningsson-Yousif & Haukur Viggósson Lärarstudenters bidrag i skolutvecklingen. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2006. http://dspace.mah.se/bitstream/2043/3391/1/ partner9dec.pdf

EDUCARE 2006:2. Redaktör. Artiklar: Ingegerd Tallberg Broman Att förändra den sociala ordningen; Eva Änggård Förskolebarns bildaktiviteter utamanar vuxenvärlden; Annelis Jönsson och Lena Rubinstein Reich Invandrade lärares arbetssituation och läraridentitet – efter fyra år som lärare i den svenska skolan. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2006. http://www.mah.se/upload/LUT/ Publikationer/EDUCARE/artikelnummer 6 dec.pdf

EDUCARE 2016:2 EDUCARE 2016:2 97 EDUCARE 2006:1. Redaktör. Artiklar: Anna-Lena Tvingstedt & Gunilla Preisler Children with Cochlear Implants in Different School Settings; Fredrik Lindstrand Gestaltning, konstruktion och meningsskapande i ungdomars arbete med film; Ingegerd Ericsson Koncentrationsförmåga ur ett relationellt perspektiv. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2006.

EDUCARE 2005:1. Redaktör. Rapport: Specialpedagogik i två skolkulturer. Lena Holmberg, Annelis Jönsson & Anna-Lena Tvingstedt. Malmö, Lärarutbildningen, 2005.

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EDUCARE 2016:2

‘Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi! Matthew Worley

The performance and meaning of punk in a local Swedish context Philip Lalander & Jonas Qvarsebo

Redefining the subcultural: the sub and the cultural Erik Hannerz

Theorizing Power, Identity and Hip Hop: Towards a Queer, Intersectional Approach Kalle Berggren

EDUCARE VETENSKAPLIGA SKRIFTER

Lärande och samhälle, Malmö högskola ISBN 978-91-7104-700-7 (tryck) ISBN 978-91-7104-701-4 (pdf) 2016:2 Conference Issue: Politics of identity, activism and pedagogy in punk of hip-hop studies