Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 5:30pm | Cesar E. Chavez Building, Room 110
Lecture: From Anarchy to Otaku-Youth Subculture Thirty Years After Punk
In the almost 30 years since Richard Hell et al at CBGB’s in New York and Johnny Rotten & Co. at the Worlds End in London snagged the public’s eye and ear and kicked the corpse of hippy dreaming, the world has witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the internet and the cell phone, the rise and fall of the global economy and the stabilization to permanence of punk as (anti) fashion statement, marketable music genre, and secessionist life-style choice. That same period has also seen the rise and fall of dance club culture and the invasion of the international art-fashion-media scape by Japanese anime and Takashi Murakami. This talk uses Murakami’s work as a lens to look at how ideas about and attitudes towards youth and youth culture, consumerism, appropriation tactics, the power of perversion, the value of negation, the politics of insubordination, sex and love have changed in the three decades since “Subculture” was first published in 1979.
Dick Hebdige has written extensively on contemporary art, media and culture and has published 3 books: “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” (1979), “Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music” (1987) and “Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things” (1988). He taught through the 90’s at CalArts before moving first to UC Santa Barbara then last July to UC Riverside where his title is Director of Arts and Interdisciplinary programs at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Graduate Center. His current interests include writing for performance, writing across media and the emergent interdisciplinary field of Desert Studies.
