Essays on Commercial Culture

Question 2: Definitions of Subcultures

Undoubtedly, no particular cultural studies texts have been widely read than the Subculture books written by Dick Hebdige in 1979. Hebdige (121) defines and analyzes subcultures based on specificity and conjuncture. His definition indicates that subcultures arise from symbolic and communal engagements with a larger form of industrial culture. They are expressed as the emergence of styles and not class or age. Modzelewski and Abramson (145) outline different definitions or ideologies of subcultures that arose from Chicago School Tradition, the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Post-subcultural era. This essay attempts to understand how the definition and ...

Culture is one of the most important variables that define a civilization. In this paper, the author focuses on the different types of culture that exist in the country of Puerto Rico. Here, the author talks about popular and official culture, and authentic and commercial culture, citing some concrete examples along the way. In terms of differentiating popular and official culture, the best way to simplify it is to say that an official culture can be both an official and a popular culture but a popular culture may not always be both the popular and official culture. Popular culture ...

‘The wheels ground and the car flew forward. My neck pulled backwards and I was glued to my seat. The car had been engineered for speed. Feeling the speed, I was thrilled and then scared. I screamed, but it was not a scream I expected: it was an ugly howl of fear’ -Heli Vaaranen (Vaaranen and Wieloch 44). There you have it, a typical experience of any first time street racer, a subculture that has been slowly growing in the most parts of the world since the early 1990s pioneered mainly by the Asian Americans in the American State of California. Actually, ...