The focus on punk subculture in Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style reminded me of my first introduction to punk rock music in the movie Bandslam. Although this may be considered a cheesy movie, I really love it and I kept thinking back to it during this reading. It was a random movie that I saw without watching the trailer or knowing anything about it beforehand and ended up pleasantly surprised. I still remember seeing it with my dad and sister right before middle school.
The main character, Will, is obsessed with David Bowie (who emerged in 1972, right when all of the scholars mentioned in the reading like Barthes and Stuart Hall were talking about culture, ideology, and subculture). Will himself is an outcast, but he is also a music buff and he ends up in a situation where he is helping a band define their sound and try to win a Battle of the Bands competition in his new town.
The movie does not include any profanities which is typical of subculture, but it does challenge hegemony in that it showcases the typical high school stereotypes, but the main characters— Will and most of the people in his band—are not the typical popular high schoolers. Besides giving me a small taste of the punk subculture, I think this movie shows that capitalism has commodified this subculture…all the way to become incorporated a film produced by Walden Media, a company popular for distributing movies for children such as Narnia, Because of Winn-Dixie, and Holes. “A subculture…communicates through commodities” (132) and is usually picked up by youth culture and naturalized. With this example, this has been achieved to where it is embraced in a kids movie in 2009.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandslam
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