ABSTRACT
Black expressive culture has decisively shaped youth culture, pop culture and the culture of city life in Britain’s metropolitan centres. The white working class has danced for forty years to its syncopated rhythms. There is, of course, no contradiction between making use of black culture and loathing real live black people, yet the informal, long-term processes through which different groups have negotiated each other have intermittently created a ‘two-tone’ sensibility which celebrates its hybrid origins and has provided a signifi cant opposition to ‘common-sense’ racism (Gilroy 1993b: 35.)
At least since the emergence after World War II of the spectacular fi gure of the teenager, British youth culture has been a space of encounter and dialogue across lines of ethnicity. These lines of ethnicity have been perhaps less carefully patrolled than in adult culture, and thus youth culture has also been the site onto which adult culture has projected anxieties about ‘race’ and difference and Britain’s ‘multicultural drift’ (Hall 2001: 231). This story has been the focus of much writing about youth culture since Dick Hebdige’s seminal work at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (1974a, 1974b, 1979, 1982, 1983). In a series of important occasional papers and in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige explored the subterranean dialogue between black and white young people which took place in the spaces of youth culture, and in particular in skinhead style which was based on a passion for Jamaican and African-American music. Skinhead culture has been defi ned both by the profound infl uence of Jamaican ska and rocksteady and by periods of identifi cation with far right and fascist politics.1
