Subculture: the meaning of style

During the lecture we watched a documentary based on subcultures and their styles through time in relation to Fred perry's clothing, Don Letts was the presenter of this documentary.

This documentary was very interesting because it covered a subject I worked on previously relating to my graphic project working in college. I have looked through Hebdige's "Subculture: The meaning of style" I was very familiar with the movements through the 60's till 70's because I had done my research previously and have family members that grew up around those times that to tell me about the subcultures and what happened.

Subcultures is a cultural youth styles that have expanded through time expressing symbolic changes towards society. Some of these subcultures were ; Teddy Boys, Rude Boys, Mods, Rockers, New Romantics, Skin Heads, Hippies. Each and every Subculture was a movement in its form, some like Punks, rockers and mods were a rebellion to society and where the youths ways of expressing the sleeves through a symbolic dress sense, each look was unique in its own way. People followed styles based on people they idolised e.g. Mick Jagger, John Lennon and David Bowe and many more musicians from the 60's to 70's period.

Subculture was regarded as a modernisation  and a lot of the looks/dress senses were defined by the boys. skin heads were said to be the refusing subculture because they dress how how ever they liked and did not take any notice of any other subcultures. The sales originally derived from the caribbean settlers during the 60's because britain didn't really have a style until they noticed the different between dress sense between them and the west Indians which is where the the subculture Rude Boys was established. These subcultures later on merged over time the more equality took place in Britain when whites began to except blacks crossing both subcultures and cultures together which is what created the the Two Tone subculture which was a mixed race group of people both blacks and whites that dressed differently but united together.

Music is what started to develop more subcultures like the girl Band "The Slits" which at this point a lot of previous subcultures like e.g. the Mods and Rockers had died out over time. Now there are still subcultures but not as open because time and technology are said to have changes society where people now stay in and communicate over line where as before subcultures would have been their public social group back in the past where they would communicate.

Punks

Rude Boys

Rockers

    

The Slits 

Northern Soul

Animation can be compared to subcultures because they all possess different styles, based on the artist and animators that create them because they are also animated differently. Like the Japanese created their own style of cartoon and comic which are called manga and anime. Anime follows a different style to west cartoons their characters features are always the same and never change that much where as west cartoons are different all around because it all depends on who is developing the characters and the style they tend to work with.

Mods and Rockers were fierce rivals mainly because they did not like each other for who they were as people and how they dressed but bother were types of people with own styles, a given name as a form of identification and way of doing things which is also the same with in the animation industry everyone has their own style and works with different types of animation placed in category e.g. 2D, 3D, Stop-motion which are known for their different traits and the way they work.

In other words subcultures and animations can be compared to each other because they both present styles and features which are symbolic to them and can be identified as a sense of style or a type of practice.  

Censorship and truth

This lecture was talking about the revealing of truth through history and time. How we generally believed points provided by sources regarded as truthful e.g. Newspapers, Articles, which are always seen to be reliable with telling the truth. We looked at quotes relating to peoples reception of truth and how they saw thing themselves,

 Elliot Aronson in Pratkanis and Aronson, (1992), Age of Propaganda, p. xii talks about how he believed that world war based on school education involved the Germans were evil and the Japanese had been depicted as sneaky and treacherous, while the white americans were regarded as the clean and honest, fair minded and trusting heroes that came to the rescue.

This subject is similar to the one of slavery and orientalism, white Americans create a heroic and positive images of themselves and depict others races as low and interior to whites. In the orientalism book written by Edward W. said he talks about how the west depict both East asian and Africa as exotic and use other demeaning terms to classify anyone outside of Europe or the USA. These teachings are passed down through generation so that more people can go on through life believing that this information is truthful and factual.

The main focus in this was not about just what information is provided, but the photograph used to make these pictures seem true, sometimes being taken during the time of a tragic incident or the worst period of time an image can be captured which could be used to paint image of a person or place negatively when this is not the case. Words are also used to sometimes describe a situation like it is in an image.

Simulacrum - An image or representation of someone or something.

This is basically a word to describe what I have been talking about previously to do with pictures and the representation.

In the past animations have been used to tell both lies and truthful stories sometimes obvious or hidden. With animation lies are often told using the characters and the ideas the people have who make them. For instance the west, mostly america used to make up a lot of lies about African Americans being lustful, dumb, sexual and dim-witty, they were often made to look like this with in animation around the 1950's with america. These lies and tales told about black people have been past through generations and where also placed into animation to laugh at the issue of racism towards African Americans.

Phrenology was something which was used to distinguish black people from white Americans. This was an biological analysis of human body based on characteristics like race, body shape, looks and many more features. A lot things were often said about black peoples features being monkey like could be the reason why they were often unintelligent and their brains always being driven towards crime, which is ludicrous and untruthful, but people believed that this was factual information, these same facts were eventually animated and were depicted worse especially when the characters looked like monkeys, these lies were animated like the video below.

"Africans were thought to be sub-human, uncivilised, and inferior to Europeans in every way. And as they were ‘not one of us’, they could be bought and sold. The development of racism is linked to the slave trade."

Racist ideas (no date) Available at: http://discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/after-slavery/wider-world/black-white-in-britain/racist-ideas/ (Accessed: 22 April 2016).