Subculture to Clubcultures: An Introduction to Popular Cultural Studies by Steve Redhead

Subculture to Clubcultures: An Introduction to Popular Cultural Studies Reviews

• 
  Tara Brabazon

  This is the high Steve Redhead - leaving the party with a bang rather than a whimper - and his final book-length theorization of youth culture. He offers the trajectory from subculture to clubcultures as specified in the title. But through example he shows the narrow, middle class rendering of culture - even popular culture - configured by early cultural studies scholars. And the insularity and consequences of it.
  
  We don't know what we don't know. But this book - and Steve's career up to this point- asks the key questions about cultural studies and why it did not outreach into sport, leisure, clubs, drugs and dancing. Why were the disciplinary interventions only playing between literature, history and sociology? Where was the 'deep groove' - the deep engagement with popular music? And - as Stuart Hall once admitted in his personal disconnection from popular culture - where was the passionate understanding of the complexity of popular culture and the deep critique of cultural value?
  
  Popular Cultural Studies, if a space had been found for it in Cultural Studies, would have changed the humanities. Instead, tired and dull discussions of 'cultural value' still permeate. Tired and dull discussions of 'representation' still permeate. The disconnection from life, sweat, patrolling of behaviour, disdain, the streets, and disquieting and disturbing pleasure has had an impact in our classrooms, our research and our universities.
  
  This book gave us the guide, theoretically, through prose and through example. Our way forward is here. In 1997. And we missed it. We returned to safe discussions of women's representation in the media, or simplistic discussions cultural policies. Yawn.
  
  If we want to dance away from intellectual safety, then - to cite the late Tony Wilson - we need to "read more." Here is the book to start that process.
• 
  Felipe

  ... I feel like I missed something here.