ABSTRACT
It is this subversive power of punk style which fascinates Dick Hebdige, and which he sets out to interpret in Subculture: The Meaning of Style.3 First published in 1979, the book has been reissued annually since then, a fact which testifies to its theoretical and political significance within studies of youth subcultures. In fact, Subculture can be seen as a signpost to some of the central approaches that have been used in cultural studies to come to political terms with the emergence of post-war ‘spectacular’ youth subcultures. Like its street counterpart, Dick Hebdige’s book points in two directions: ‘backwards’ towards a theorisation of youth subcultures developed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s, which stressed the continued significance of social class as the basic structural framework shaping the political importance of subcultural groups; and ‘forwards’ to theories of discourse, increasingly influential in literary and cultural studies during the 1980s, which sought to understand cultural meanings as forms of language which possessed their own internal logic.4
