#mod subculture

[bassic-ally]

Just came from finishing my finals stuff from school 😅

[belated] Happy Birthday, Pete Townshend!!

It was a coincidence I drew him with Bruce Foxton, because they're not alone on that page so I'll show y'all the complete page later. I'll show you another part tho so here you go-

sorry for the sharpie bleeding on pete~ 😭

I love my birthday white pen [gelly roll] because it shows off from any white surface, I need to buy more of these~ it's pretty neat!

my secret [not anymore] is just school supplies being used as art supplies because 1 I'm broke and 2 why not?

[restingcorpse]

[victusinveritas]

1980s Poland dissects Western subcultures.

[mourntomidnight]

Translated this via google translate, will post original in reblog.

Also fyi this image likely predates the 80s meaning it’s probably from the time before goth and that skinhead culture wasn’t appropriated by n*zis yet so the skinhead in this photo going by his features is likely black. Just a lil disclaimer.

[raw-time]

I don’t get when people hate on someone for having any/an extreme amount of piercings, tats, or any body modifications. Who tf cares?? It’s not like it’s on YOUR body. No one’s forcing YOU to get it. Why get mad at what someone else chooses to do with their own body??

[misterivy]

[x-heesy]

VIRGINIA TURBETT

documentation of the chaotic emergence of British subculture in the 70s

Virginia Turbett photographed punks, rockers, mods, skinnies and New Romantics.

Here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs and the flesh machine

He's gonna do another striptease

Hey man, where'd you get that lotion?

I've been hurting since I bought the gimmick

Something called love

Yeah, something called love

Well, that's like hypnotizing chickens

Well, I'm just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in the ear before

'Cause of a lust for life

'Cause of a lust for life

I'm worth a million in prizes

With my torture film, drive a GTO

Wear a uniform, all on a government loan

I'm worth a million in prizes

Yeah, I'm through with sleeping on the sidewalk

No more beating my brains

No more beating my brains

With the liquor and drugs

With the liquor and drugs

Well, I am just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in the ear before

'Cause of a lust for life (lust for life)

'Cause of a lust for life

I got a lust for life

I got a lust for life

Oh, lust for life

Oh, lust for life

A lust for life

I got a lust for life

I got a lust for life

Well, I am just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in the ear before

'Cause of a lust for life

'Cause of a lust for life

Well, here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs, and the flesh machine

I know he's gonna do another striptease

Hey man, where'd you get that lotion?

Your skin starts itching once you buy the gimmick

About something called love

Oh, love, love, love

Well, that's like hypnotizing chickens

Well, I am just a modern guy

Of course, I've heard it in the ear before

'Cause of a lust for life (lust for life)

'Cause of a lust for life (lust for life)

I got a lust for life

Yeah, lust for life

I got a lust for life

Oh, lust for life

I got a lust for life

Yeah, a lust for life

I got a lust for life

A lust for life

Lust for life

Lust for life

A lust for life (lust for life)

Lust For Life by Iggy Pop

[jstor]

Very Mod anti-smoking poster from 1966! Love the Mary Wells record on the lower left corner! This image, prepared for London's Ministry of Health by the Central Office of Information, is available in the Science Museum Group collection on JSTOR, which features nearly 50K open access images.

[plutoniuminjection47]

heyyyy I made alternative/subculture discord server. It's relatively new there might be a few changes, anyway go crazy

https://discord.gg/ggUkSxyg

[thenapalmvault]

You know what I love and find really silly about alternative subcultures (like Rock, Metal, Punk, Mods, Skinheads, Greasers, god knows who else).

A lot of us motherfuckers go into these subcultures and feel some sense like big tough shit because of it and start acting a bit like assholes.

"I don't listen to that sissy pop stuff" was one of the phrases that was uttered the MOST when I was younger as if Metal and Rock was the most masculine thing in the world. "Real men listen to rock, not that rap bullshit" was the next one and I'm just sitting here like if you really want to debate me about this we are idolizing guys with make-up, long ass hairs, tight leotards and overall looking "feminine" -- even though I don't believe that, that's what THEY believe.

Aren't we all kind of goofy? Adopting goofy fashion trends and odd music?? We gotta be real about ourselves here. We ARE Goofy, odd and weird. AND!! that's okay!! We don't gotta take ourselves that seriously, nor do we need to act all high and mighty about what our preferred music and style is. Also, who cares if you're tougher than that group? Who GIVES A SHIT?! WHO CAAAAAAAAARESSSS. Let people enjoy their pop stuff, let people delve into all that kind of media and let them live their life damn it. Even better, when they delve into YOUR world don't be a fucking dickwad about it! And if you are, accept the consequences and stop whining about society and shit. Get real!

Put a sock into your mouth and enjoy your music, enjoy your company, enjoy the culture -- and most important enjoy the fucking variety in the world you dimbag. Stop thinking you're the shit, get a grip.

[saintstab]

I need friends if you like goth subculture nature cats body mods vampires the locked tomb arcane and/or iwtv or anything of that nature pls !!! be mutuals with me

about me

[bassic-ally]

I seem to have a drawing streak nowadays ahaha

[sweetfessions]

as a menhera, im desperately hoping all the anti recovery "haha im a landmine (despite knowing absolutely nothing about what being a landmine type is and the saneist, ableist history behind it)" editblr/mogaiblr accounts never discover what being a menhera is, we're already fucked over by people think menhera = yami kawaii.

anyways daily reminder that menhera ≠ yami kawaii byeee

.

[joemuggs]

Who ARE They?

[motivational thinking klaxon sounds again]

I’ve been really enjoying doing a bit of teaching lately. Last week I did some guest lectures for BIMM Bristol, it was an absolute vibe being part of a Q&A about journalism for the music business students (see my last post), and even more so speaking to the ones doing a more social studies oriented course about subculture. But before I did these sessions, I thought I’d better get my own subjects clear in my head. 

For context: I’m in a major moment of reassessment right now. When I finished the major part of the writing of the fabric book at the end of 2023, I thought I was going to have some space to take stock and look forward to some fun passion projects, but the way 2024 panned out I did NOT get space but I definitely did a lot of stock-taking. 

Everything got very real for me this year – turning 50 would have been stark enough, but my birthday came in a month of three bereavements; add to that plenty more inescapable reminders of mortality and realities of neurodivergence – my own and others’ – and there were very, very few soft edges to anything, anywhere. This means it’s felt more important than ever to be clear about what I’m doing and define my terms as I cue up “fun” projects.

That especially goes for the topic of subculture. Everything I do comes back to subculture, and when I was asked to do the BIMM lectures, as with the nature of journalism practice, I thought I’d better jot down some notes on what I actually mean by that. And in fact, after two hours of back and forth with the students, the ideas became clearer still.

Funnily enough I had put quite a bit of thought over the years into depicting subcultures, without actually defining what subculture meant. As the article below explains, going back to the 00s, I’d consciously studied how it’s possible for writing to depict collectivity, mass movements of people, hypersocial happenings, events that unfold over long durations and myriad interactions. 

It wasn’t until I started prepping what would become Bass, Mids, Tops, in the late 10s, though, that I hit on convincing ways to do this: in short, overlaying lots and lots of individuals’ stories told in a conversational fashion full of everyday detail, and allowing the contours of the broader social movements and occurrences to emerge from the intersecting lives. (That's something we've continued to be conscious of through developing the Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest Substack.)

And it wasn’t until after that that I started to really think about what those movements were. I started joining groups where actual sociologists of subculture congregated, and investigating more of The Literature of the discipline. In this it struck me that a lot of thinking about subcultures is still stuck in a Boomer / Gen X model that thinks of them as “tribes”.

It’s understandable: these are the generations of the mods, rockers, hippies, punks, skinheads and so on. These were times that – and it’s staggering how little people factor this in, or even register it – were significantly more violent than now in the developed world, and it’s natural that youth did band together in localised, easily identifiable groups: for protection as much as anything.

But of course subculture always was, and is now more than ever, a lot more fluid than just joining a group and having that become your identity. As I talked to the students I asked them to name some subcultures: of course “punk” was the first one shouted out, but as we went on, we got into much more detailed discussion about modern identities like “gym bros”, “huns”, “resist moms”, protestors, petrolheads, fandoms and also subsets of things like work-related or sexual identity and how these things overlap and… yes we ended up at intersectionality.

We talked too about who gets to define what a subculture is. Of course there isn’t one line drawn around what a hip hop fan is, what a punk is, what a metaller is, what a Swiftie is, let alone around what it is to be, say, a queer punk. So given that who defines what these things are? Sociologists or anthropologists looking from outside? Specialist journalists? The generalist media? The people within these scenes themselves – many of whom will strongly disagree about what “the thing” actually is? 

Well… the answer is: all of those. The nature of scenes, subcultures, identities – as well as always intersecting in different ways in different people – is to have dynamic boundaries, constantly evolving, and constantly accumulating different and contradictory stories about what they are. Which means that we don’t define them, we negotiate their nature: every time someone talks about or reports on them, they’re adding to the mutating collective definition, shifting assumptions a little bit. The urge to impose thick black lines around areas of this flux is always the Victorian imperial cartographer's urge: it's an act of claiming ownership.

And subcultures and fandoms affect their individual participants. They affect what they know, what they read, how they interact, how they walk and move! I thought about how coming to becoming a hardcore Joni Mitchell fan quite late in life, listening intently to her and reading about her, altered the way I veiwed the history of her era: from my perspective, it actually altered the past. The information available to me about the music I loved and the person who made it altered me. I have written about THIS at some length.

All of which then gives us a choice when we come to talk about something as if we know how it is defined: are we going to be honest that that’s what we’re doing and intentional about the way we do it? Are we going to ask “Who am I to define this?” and accept that the way we in turn are percieved will affect how our attempts to define land and affect current, past and future particpants in the thing we’re talking about? 

None of which is to say don’t define things. We all need working definitions if we’re ever to talk about or interact with anything – but is it possible for we who study culture to accept them as just that: working definitions, contingent, constantly in negotiation? That can be a tough pill to swallow for people who grew up, as I did, on the classic model of pop culture journalism where the guy – it was always a guy when I was growing up – tells you how it was, and you’re expected to build your stories on that solid ground. But maybe, just maybe, have a little humility about it and you might even find your work remains just as valid and “important” as if you’d scrawled your lines around the territory you wanted to mark out…. 

Obviously this applies to all kinds of groupings of people, not just what we think of as subcultures. Clans, cliques, gangs, teams at work (in the BIMM lecture we talked about how particular flavours of humour are often a subcultural identifier, and this led to thinking about specifically health worker cultures for example, who are bonded by gallows humour, in different ways in different departments or specialism) and all the rest.

That might not sound quite like the clarity I hinted at, but trust me – as I plan future projects and go about my day-to-day work – it really is. In the face of never-ending data overwhelm, it's not just blind relativism to look at the mechanisms by which these identifiers evolve: quite the opposite, it's engagement with material realities. And it makes you realise the potential significance of your words and acts. In this never ending negotiation, whether you assume or assess makes a huge difference to where and whether you then choose to add your voice to the negotiation. And what you choose to reinforce or redefine alters things - infinitesimally, yes, but in complex systems who knows which is going to be the grain of sand that changes everything? As I've always said, it's not naive to think you can't change the world: it's naive to think you're NOT changing it.

[tarsiscruz]

[schooloftuneage]

Lesson 2: We're All Punk Here

CLASS IS IN SESSION.

This is my third time typing this damn lesson, so you'll excuse me if I'm a little short.

The image above was just filler for a `zine, but it became emblematic of a movement. The three chords and the truth vibe, the go out and do something call to action. This is a fifteen word manifesto, and it helped to codify what it meant to be a punk. The subculture has deep roots - ridiculously deep - but unlike some, it at least has a pretty clear lineage. Let's delve in.

If this glorious bastard looks familiar, it's because his guitar is my icon. Woody Guthrie was a protest singer back in the day, and in this berk's opinion, the great-great-granddaddy of the punk movement. Let's give it a look.

-Did shit? Yes, he would go from farm to farm trying to get the migrant workers to unionize.

-Stripped down instrumentation? Can't get any simpler than one man and his guitar.

-Sang in support of the common man, damning the powers what be? Just listen to the lyrics. Or the words on his guitar - THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.

Folk was integral to the creation of punk - folk singer Dave Van Ronk famously joined in at Stonewall, not because he knew what was going on or was queer, but because he saw people fighting cops and thought yeah, rock on, let's do this. It was joined by the cynicism of the beat movement. The surrealism of Burroughs, and (unfortunately) the pretentious prose experiments of Kerouac helped to grease the wheels for what was to come. And from here, we have a very clear lineage, particularly in the UK punk scene. From folk and the beats, we got the MODS.

Short for Modernists, not Moderates, the mods were jazz-loving bastards that were known for taking amphetamines and dancing all night, driving around in souped up Vespas with entirely too many mirrors, getting into fights with rockers, and generally being the glorious asshole follow-ups to the beats. The thing is, they also got popular. Real fuckin' popular. And this created a problem. By the mid sixties, the mods had split in two. The larger part of the mods went mainstream, becoming what the others decried as "soft mods" or "peacock mods", while the remainder became "hard mods". These sods were working class folk, blue collar and unpretentious and kickass, and they found kindred spirits in the Jamaican Rude Boy subculture... and a music they called ska.

And from these "hard mods", we got... skinheads.

Yeah, skinheads. And before you say it, no, these weren't the racist neo-nazi fucks that we delight in introducing to the business end of a pipe wrench. That division came much later. These skinheads were basically just proto-punks, enraged at the world, but embracing music that spoke of unity and togetherness.

The fuel for the glorious, angry bonfire that was punk was there in the seventies, but it needed a spark. While 76 was widely considered Year Zero for the punk movement, it was 77 that gave us the watershed moment - the moment that punk erupted into public consciousness. It gave us the Sex Pistols, and "God Save the Queen".

Not too shabby for a band that picked a bassist based entirely on how he looked, right?

Now, I'm not going to say that the Sex Pistols were a great group. Musically they were middling, but the sheer impact they made cannot be understated. They outright called the UK a fascist regime in the second line of their first single, released the week of the Queen's diamond jubilee. "God Save the Queen" was banned from airplay in the UK, and is to this day one of the most banned records of all time.

This attention, and stellar releases from fellow UK punk band The Clash, helped to galvanize the scene. As "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols" hit #1 on the charts, it was obvious that the punk scene was here to stay.

In the US, the scene started with a bar called CBGB, and an extended tenure of two bands - Television and The Ramones, with the latter band becoming sort of the prototype of the American punk band, focused on stripped down rock numbers, and a slightly goofier feel. This berk will argue that the Ramones were never truly punk - they were punk adjacent at a time when Punk was an upcoming genre, Johnny Ramone being a hardcore republican - but that's an argument for another time.

You see, with those bands making the first ripples, other bands soon impacted that turned it into a wave. `77 was the start of the Second Wave of Punk, the first years that punk could be considered a unified genre instead of a couple of bands doing their own thing that sort of fell into the same groove. The Misfits, Black Flag, the Police...

I could follow this rabbit hole all day. By `79 the genre was splintering, branching out into a dozen disparate subgenres, which are still branching out to this day. But instead of exploring every single one - which would be better served as another group of lessons another day - I'll leave you with the track of the week. The Badass Creed for the punk movement. The song that took a stand against the right wing trying to adopt punk in the 80's. The song that set the stage for Hobie Brown, and which arguably serves as the backbone to the punk ethos today... here's the Dead Kennedys, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off".

`NUFF SAID.

CLASS DISMISSED.

And next time, we're going to be looking at a genre which producer Rick Rubin could only process as "black punk rock" when he first heard it... I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip, hip-hop and you don't stop the rockin' to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat…