ABSTRACT
The preceding chapter has sketched some aspects of the consumption of popular music, and its fans. A related area of study has been the nature and signifi cance of youth subcultures, the initial focus of this chapter. Emerging out of the earlier study of ‘youth culture’, subcultural analysis was prominent in popular music studies through the 1980s and 1990s. Its theoretical utility was then challenged, and, some would argue, displaced by greater attention to musical sounds and scenes, the focus of the second part of the chapter.
