ABSTRACT
The concept of subculture has been criticized a great deal in recent research on youth. Some writers, such as Muggleton and Weinzierl (2003), seem willing to hold on to the notion of subculture in a revised form, but one thing is nearly always made clear: the conception of subculture associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) is off limits. The critiques of Birmingham subculturalism go back many years and, as is occasionally pointed out, some of the most trenchant and signifi cant came from other researchers who worked in the Centre or who contributed to its publications (this includes writers such as Simon Frith, Angela McRobbie and Graham Murdock). But the backlash really came in the 1990s, when a critical deluge came pouring out of youth cultural studies. In reading academic work published over the last few years in this fi eld, it sometimes feels as though there is some kind of collective obsession with this thing called Birmingham. Amusingly, many of these accounts speak of Birmingham subculturalism as an ‘orthodoxy’, as a dominant approach to youth culture. Never can an orthodox approach have been so unanimously condemned in the fi eld it purportedly dominates.
