MC GURU TIM ON THE MIKE ABOUT SUBCULTURE

Human beings need community. Human expressions in the forms of language, song, clothing, dance etc, can serve to identify an individual's membership and status in a community. In order to preserve their corporate standing, the mass media must appeal to a huge population of people. These, as well as all other, institutions of mature capitalism, must do their best to covertly homogenize this huge population, offering them up each month's new pseudo-individualized Headbanger's Ball rock hero or Swim Suit Issue blonde. In turn communities have for the most part actually become one big homogenized global Coka-Cola village. Of course, however, the nation- or world-wide population that they create is actually much too large to fulfill any of the real human need for community and it's cultural signs are often much too expensive to be available to all it's members. Consequently, many smaller groups of people become jaded with this poor simulacrum of a community and have sought to construct their own culture via more personalized and available cultural signs. They become a "sub-culture" or more specifically a real culture. These sub-cultures, using any accessible communication medium, both threaten the economic status of corporate sign makers and stand in direct opposition to the hegemony which preserves the existence of such money-deities.

For this reason, society has evolved mechanisms that depoliticize subcultures, sucking them back into the mainstream and into compliance with the current dominant hegemony. Evidence of this phenomena can be seen in advertisements. Why is it that advertised images of urban gang members who in reality declare "fuck the police" instead demand "wear Starter clothing"? Why are leather-clad "live to ride" bikers selling 200-dollar department store booties? How can images of drug and sex experimenting beatniks come to symbolize the ideal Toyota driver?

The production of such decontextualized and distorted images of these subcultures serves to fulfill what Dick Hebdige classifies as the two methods of "recuperation": "the commodity form," turning the signs of these subcultures into "mass-produced objects," and "the ideological form," "re-defin[ing] the actual "deviant behaviour." In hundreds of ads we see what were the unique and usually inexpensive folk-art creations of those in the subculture turned into commodities for those with the cash. Such ads also show one type of the ideolog ical form: all of these deviant subcultures are turned into safe fashion possibilities. While using the subculture's unique "otherness" to sell the pseudo-individuality of their products, companies empty the signs of any of their really volatile or threatening denotations. Hence, sales pitches like "Radical" and "Disorder," (conditions that, if manifested, are fundamentally opposed to the very institution of corporate production) come to mean no more than "Red" or "Double-stitched." Such terms actually, in fact, come to mean nothing extending beyond sartorial signs. The threat is neutralized by co-opting the signs into fashion hegemony.

In order for this phenomena to exist however, there have to be certain desires in the consuming audience. The rebellion, community and identity-deprived members of the mainstream will thrive as long as there is some "other" whose styles can be stolen, whether it be from the mythic past or the contemporary streets. Those who live within the sign-constructs of the capitalist main stream, (in America: the white upper class) decorate their voices and bodies with the commodified artifacts of these othernesses: hobos, blues guitarists, street hustlers, gamblers, etc.

This theft of style does not always occur in one giant leap; there are many steps between the ghetto rap act and Vanilla Ice. Whenever a group of people borrows the signs of another group of people they are decontextualizing it. If the borrower has other ideals or experiences than the previous owner, the signs original intent becomes diffused or reshaped. When independent 'punk' record labels became established companies with a small staff of 'workers' relying on it for survival, the negating and nihilistic signs of it's enlisted bands took on new meanings. Punk has become, since the 'No Future' days of the Sex Pistols, a 'constructive' subculture consisting of pacifist, vegetarian members who resemble the Jefferson Airplane more than Crass. In an article for the New Republic, David Samuels, gives evidence of a similar phenomena. He shows that while hip-hop may have originally been the product of a ghetto culture, for the most part, it's only real recorded form, from the earliest small-scale bands to the most overtly political contemporary bands, was a stolen style.

A lot of what you see in rap is the guilt of the black middle class about it's economic success, its inability to put forth a culture of it's own. Instead they do the worst possible thing, falling back on fantasies of street life. In turn, white college students with impeccable gender credentials buy nasty sex lyrics under the cover of getting some kind of authentic black experience. (Samuels 1991:29).

Listings of rappers' origins tend to support this claim. The militant rap group Public Enemy formed in the radio station of a university campus on Long Island.