Agency in UK hip-hop and grime youth subcultures – peripherals and purists

Abstract

This paper addresses the rejection of subcultural collectivity by postmodern scholars in the field of youth studies. The fluidity of neo-tribes does not fully reflect the lived experiences of many young people today whose subcultural being is neither transient nor irrelevant. Moving away from the notion of spectacular subcultures, this paper identifies cultural knowledge and creative engagement as significant factors in youth group affiliations. This inevitably causes problems for the researcher as such identifiers of subcultural belonging are almost impossible for an ‘outsider’ to appreciate. An attempt is made to incorporate the term subculture back into academic discourse whilst also investigating aspects of agency within hip-hop and grime cultures. Qualitative research was undertaken in five sites in and around the south-east of England. This work identified variations within a cultural form that is often homogenised by scholars. Distinctions are made between the relative passivity of consumers of youth culture, here termed ‘peripherals’, and those at the centre of their localised musical scenes. The ‘purists’, as they are identified in this paper, exert significant degrees of autonomy over their cultural participation and openly reject mainstream sensibilities in favour of claiming a sense of ownership and connection to their personalised variant of this globalised form.