This thesis focuses upon the amalgamation of two strong and perceivably rebellious subcultures (punk and skateboarding), to create the phenomenon of skate punk. It is widely believed that skate punk culture was formed and promulgated during the early 1980s in Southern California, in a period often labelled the climax of postmodern capitalism. This “Gimme Decade” was fraught with blatant consumerism, inspiring a resistance and deviation from suburban middle class Southern Californian society (Butz, 2012, p15). This resistance subculture is a product of social and political life in Southern California in the early 1980s, setting the tone and understanding of how skate punk was framed, perpetuated and authenticated during this era. The strength of this subculture meant it was able to influence society on a wider level into the future.
Firstly, what is subculture? Subculture is generally understood as “a formation of people whose appearance and actions deviate and differ from the normative values of their environment and particularly from the dominant culture of adults and parents.” (Butz, 2012, p15) As explained in the literature and discourse review, much study has been done on subcultures beginning with the Chicago School of Sociology in the early twentieth century, right through to the hugely influential Birmingham School and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCS) in which Dick Hebdige and Simon Frith made their mark on contemporary sociological discourse with their in-depth studies into subcultures, focusing particularly on youth subcultures in the United Kingdom.
Hebdige expresses his interest in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups – the teddy boys and mods and rockers, the skinheads and the puns – who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons.” (1979, p2)
He focused upon the subversive meaning of subcultural style, even the most mundane of objects take on a “symbolic dimension, becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile” (1979, p2). He explored these subcultures that were prevalent in the United Kingdom, however, much of his theory can be transcribed onto that of punks in America and also within the locale of Southern California, especially within the context of skate punk.
Style is important to focus upon within subcultures as it indicates a form of resistance to the hegemonic norm. The understanding of subculture through style draws heavily upon the theory of Barthes, especially within the context of his work on myths and signs. Barthes exposed the “latent meanings of everyday life” which people understood as “perfectly natural” due to the conditioning of modern mass society whose rituals and performatives were converted into myth. (Hebdige, 1979, p9) Hebdige further explains how
Barthes’ book Mythologies, examines the “normally hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in power) are rendered universal and ‘given’ for the whole of society.” (1979, p9) The way in which punks and skateboarders represent themselves is an integral part of their subculture. When these subcultures amalgamate, their representation as different to the perceived universal norm is even more obvious, and it is in this signified manner that skate punks
represent themselves as an alternative subculture as is further explored in this thesis.
As expressed through Marxist theory and the understanding of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the ruling classes created anonymous ideologies that were perpetuated through everyday life and considered as normality. Althusser’s important work on the understanding of ideology further contributes to how culture is produced subconsciously through the societal structures such as the family, cultural and political institutions, that “impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness’.” (Althusser, 1969) The implicit ideological assumptions are considered mainstream and when facets of these structures are challenged by a group of like-minded people, subcultures emerge.
Recent sociological and cultural theory has expressed a list of seeming criteria that represents subcultural groups. An example of this is Ken Gelder’s six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood. He lists them as being:
• through their often negative relation to work: idle, parasitical, hedonistic, criminal
• their negative or ambivalent relation to class
• their association with territory – the ‘street’, the ‘hood’, the club – rather than property
• their movement away from home into non-domestic forms of ‘belonging’
• their ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation)
• their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and in particular, of massification.
(Gelder, 2007, ppii-iii)
The subculture of skate punk as discussed in this thesis will be analysed within the theoretical understandings and frameworks of Gelder and Hebidge and the focus of essential musicologists, such as Frith and Grossberg to ascertain how the band Suicidal Tendencies promulgated the skate punk subculture. This occurred through the maintenance of authenticity, which continued throughout the creation of their music and their sustained representation of their beliefs and ideologies. A brief history of both subcultures, skate and punk, as independent formations is required to comprehend how they correlated in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural that they amalgamate in the unified subculture of skate punk.
References
Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx, Penguin Press: London
Barthes, R (1964) Elements of Semiology, Hill & Wang: New York
Butz K. (2012) Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American
Skate punk, Transaction Publishers: New Jersey
Gelder, K. (2007) Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice,
Routledge: New York
Hebdige, D (1979) Subculture – The meaning of style, Routledge: New York
[This is an excerpt from my Bachelor of Arts (Sociology) Honours Thesis, submitted to the University of Wollongong Arts Faculty in 2013. I am publishing excerpts from this thesis in multiple posts. The thesis aimed to explore the youth subculture of skate punk, how its expression perpetuated authenticity through the aesthetic form of the music video, and how this was reflexive of society at a deeper social level].
[copyright 2023]