1980s subcultures
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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History of subcultures and underground cultures in the 1980s.
In American urban environments, a form of street culture using freeform and semi-staccato poetry, combined with athletic break dancing, was developing as the Hip hop and Rap subculture. In jazz jargon, the word rap had always meant speech and conversation. The new meaning signified a change in the status of poetry from an elitist artform to a community sport. Rappers could attempt to outdo each other with their skillful rhymes. Rapping is also known as MCing, which is one of the four main elements of Hip hop: MCing, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing. From the early to mid 1980s, poetry culture in a broader sense caught the same kind of energy as rap and so began the first of the Poetry slams. Poetry slamming became an irregular focus for the latest wave of poetry aficionados.
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New Romantics
At the beginning of the 1980s some of the followers of punk rock began to be bored with it and wanted to make it more stylish and introduce elements of glam. By 1981 this trend had become New Romantics and the music was synthesiser electro-pop.
New Romantics tended to be slightly camp and gay of behaviour regardless of whether they were gay or not. There was a bisexual vibe generally, regardless of the individual's actual sexual orientation. The clothes style was a return to the freak scene's roleplay of fashions from previous eras or imagined future ones. It was like using fashion to create a time warp. According to the music press at the time, there were some alternative names New Romantics wanted to call themselves. One was Futurists and another was the cult with no name.
There was an unsuccessful attempt to manufacture an artificial subculture around the pop group Adam and the Ants. Supposed to be called Antpeople this remained merely a fictional subculture and didn't catch on in reality.
After the New Romantic fashion broke and had been around for a lot less than the five years they talked about, the trend moved on. There was a brief abortive fashion which was called Urban vagrants but which failed to become a true subculture. Urban vagrants was too artificially manufactured by the media.
Punk
Other punk rock followers took the genre and culture further underground, where it evolved into a faster, harder genre coined as "Hardcore" or "Hardcore Punk". Some early hardcore bands are Black Flag, Minor Threat and The Bad Brains, Weirdoz, Sf's Flipper, and Youth Brigade.
Straight Edge
Along with the Hardcore Movement came the "straight edge" Movement. Many associate "straight edge" with hardcore punk rock, perhaps because the founder of straight edge, Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat, owns Dischord Records, a label that supports the DC hardcore scene. However, this is a misconception: even McKaye states that he was not initially a punk. In contrast, Straight Edge is a progressive lifestyle in response to the "live fast, die young" associated with Punk Rock or Hardcore. Straight Edge is a lifestyle and (counter cultural) subculture, existing worldwide, but most notably in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. It advocates abstinence in relation to tobacco, alcohol and recreational drug use (especially psychoactive and stimulant drug use), and for some people in relation to promiscuous sexual behavior.
Goth subculture
Other former punks searching for a new direction around 1979 eventually developed into the nucleus of what became the Goth subculture. Gothic culture developed naturally enough, without too much media forcing. The goths are a sub-culture of dark dress and gloomy romanticism. Unlike the New Romantics goth has become a permanent part of the sub cultural scene still going in the 21st century with some claiming their roots reach backwards to the gothic-romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the UK goth reached its popular peak in the late eighties with goth bands achieving chart success but went underground after that.
Post punk
Post punk and post hippie elements continued and a particular type of anarchist-pacifist subculture centered around the records being put out on the independent Crass label by Crass themselves and other bands including The Poison Girls. Crass records was a very independent operation enabling bands with an extremely raw sound to put out records when the major labels might not have bothered with them. Crass also organised gigs around the country for themselves and other bands and campaigned politically for the anti-nuclear movement and lots of other causes they believed in.
Hip hop
In American urban environments, a form of street culture using freeform and semi-staccato poetry, combined with athletic break dancing, was developing as the Hip hop and Rap subculture. In jazz jargon, the word rap had always meant speech and conversation. The new meaning signified a change in the status of poetry from an elitist artform to a community sport. Rappers could attempt to outdo each other with their skillful rhymes. Rapping is also known as MCing, which is one of the four main elements of Hip hop: MCing, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing. From the early to mid 1980s, poetry culture in a broader sense caught the same kind of energy as rap and so began the first of the Poetry slams. Poetry slamming became an irregular focus for the latest wave of poetry aficionados.
Yuppies
A subculture relishing free enterprise capitalism sprang up in the mid 80s and were branded by the tabloid press with the name of Yuppies (the first two or three letters intended to mean either Young Urban Professional or Young and Upwardly mobile and the remainder to sound like hippies). In the USA the yuppie style was contemporaneous with the Valley girl stereotype which was all about outer flash and cash at the apparent expense of any inner spirituality or gravitas.
Wine bars gained popularity over the traditional pub as a meeting place in Britain of the 80s. Wine bars in fact gained such popularity that many pubs converted part of their premises to a wine bar style. Along with this trend was a resurgence of jazz, especially in the forms of Jazz funk and Smooth jazz. In the late 80s and 90s this would lead to a subdued back-lash, seeing many independent establishments and chain pubs re-assume a more traditional decor, in the spirit of the end of Thatcherism.
From free festivals to raves
The free festival movement was still going in the 80s and, in fact, expanded to create different types of events.
In 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival was disrupted by a massive police presence attempting to prevent the festival and break up the Peace Convoy. The resulting Battle of the Beanfield was the largest mass civil arrest in English history.
Free parties and raves began from the mid-80s and became a flourishing subculture. The music was electronic dance music which developed from Techno, pioneered in Detroit and Chicago by people like Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, as well as electronic music, pioneered by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and others, taken by way of progressive rock bands like Hawkwind, filtered through the sounds of dub-reggae and the electro-pop bands like Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode and given a different twist via Art of Noise and early hip hop and recycled psychedelia. Towards the end of the 80s rave culture had diversified into different forms connected to music such as acid house and acid jazz and would continue to diversify into the 90s. Rave culture thrived from the mid-80s to the end of the century and beyond.
Technology
The Usenet and BBS subculture had developed an element called Slashdot subculture which involved its own forms of etiquette and behaviour patterns both social and anti-social and the phenomena of trolling, spamming, flaming etc. The computer subculture was also influenced by fictional subcultures of the future to be read about in cyberpunk literature.
See also
