It’s hard to write plausibly about subculture, where writing by its nature means to travel, and subculture tends to, and defends, its place. What are these worlds in their endless inner differentiation to the casual reader? There’s simply too much to capture that eludes the drop-in observation: from the regional grain of in-group lingo to the dizzying array of references, fixing participants in history and space; not to mention the many negative conditions and antipathies that secure a vengeful coziness. And yet, for all this difficulty, the temptation remains. There may be no more literary calling than to draw back the curtain on obscure experience.
At the outset of his influential study, scholar Dick Hebdige identifies subculture with “an Underworld.” This near-synonym bears a whiff of brimstone, where each term implies descent. In this respect, the subcultural enclave provides the perfect setting for noir—a closed and urbanistic genre, typically depicting an illicit company in sordid detail. In the world of noir, all are fallen, or falling; so many dim interiors reflect a narrator’s confinement to a world not of their making—though in every case, inexorably, chosen. Subcultural style, Hebdige affirms, tarries with criminality: its symbols are “the darker side of sets of regulations, just so much graffiti on a prison wall.” Noir too depicts the underside of order, although Hebdige’s particular examples are sociological, not literary; pulled from the seething, antisocial underground of punk.
No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte is a brisk caper set amid the New York garage rock scene of the early 1990s. Lipsyte writes with firsthand knowledge of the odours and informal orders of this bygone milieu, as the former vocalist (“Sam Shit”) of little-documented New York performance-punk group Dungbeetle. The novel centres on the exploits of Jack Shit, bassist of the fictional, fledgling, micro-regionally infamous “neo-proto-art-scuzz” band the Shits. “It’s true, we’ve never been the tightest band,” Jack says. “But some nights we are the weirdest. When we are off, we are terrible. We don’t have competent mediocrity to fall back on. And when we are on, we are still terrible but we are one of the best bands you ever saw.” The Shits, then, are Every Band in aspirational form. This state of grace is fleeting, of course, but Jack’s grandiloquent descriptions of his punk rock imago are performances in themselves.
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