ABSTRACT
Pop music studies undertook its most sophisticated engagement with cultural theory (and its first break with traditional sociology) not through a study of the sounds, but through an analysis of style-dress style, hair style, life-style. The roots of this work were at first sociological and arose from research in the 1970s undertaken by British sociologists in the National Deviancy Conference. In their studies of the meaning of social “deviance” these researchers inevitably looked at the emergence of youth subcultures in Britain-the teds, the rockers, and the mods (the latter were to be celebrated in the Who’s album/film Quadrophenia). The key book was Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, an analysis of the social function of deviancy that beat a path for numerous later studies of political deviance, crime, homosexuality, hooliganism, drugs,…and pop.1
