Subculture The Meaning of Style

‘Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style is so important: complex and remarkably lucid, it’s the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige […] is concerned with the UK’s postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.’ – Rolling Stone

With enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic – the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures – approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book – Time Out

This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era – The New York Times