ABSTRACT
Music is vital to youth culture, and it is difficult to imagine many popular cultural contexts without it. Music often defines a scene, even an era, from the earliest Blues and Jazz through Folk and Rock and Roll, to Hip Hop and Grime (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1972; Hebdige, 1979). One reason for its centrality is that music makes connections with feeling, emotions, affect, intensities, moods, and “vibes.” In The Republic, Plato famously had musicians and poets banned on the grounds of their dangerous power to evoke an emotional rather than rational response from the populace. Music often defines identity, friendships, interests, memories, and moods; in short, who you are. Your music taste “says something about you.” This kind of musical meaning has most often very little to do with linguistic or graphic representation or what is conventionally understood as signification; Anahid Kassabian states the failure to interpret music in this way: “Somehow, ‘representation’ and ‘meaning’ come to be synonymous, and arguments that music is ‘nonrepresentable’ are (implicitly, at least) understood as proving that music does not ‘mean’ in any recognisable sense of the term” (2001, p. 6). The importance of music for youth cultures—and youth studies—is its power to open up a corridor of communication outside image and text.
