Suburban commercialism

In relation to the commercialisation of skateboarding, I discovered an Alva skateboard whilst editing my film in the back yard of a student share house in North Sydney. This directly relates to the commercialisation of the Z-boys, particularly Tony Alva, who's branded board can be found more than 30 years later in the back yard of an Australian suburban home.

Developmental points of essay

Resistance through Rituals

Youth subcultures in post-war Britain

Edited by Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson

Culture is the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted. (11)

-link to commercialism and how the initial subculture wasn't correctly interpreted, only the surface was looked at.

These structures- of social relationship and of meaning- shape the on-going collective existence of groups. But they also limit, modify and constrain how groups live and reproduce their social existence.

-link to social circumstances of the Z-boys. Many had bad home life, low-to no income- and this links to their sell out.

Each group makes something of it's starting conditions- and though this 'making', through this practice, culture is reproduced and transmitted. (11)

-again links to what the z-boys started with- surfing in the morning, leading to the development of skateboarding in pools. This further developed into the rise of skateboarding among teens.

Minority group- Z-town boys -turned mass consumed industry-surf/skate industry- and subcultural group recognise around the world- so widely diffused that they loose their distinctiveness.

Subcultures...take shape around the distinctive activities and 'focal concerns' of groups...[some] develop a clear, coherent identity and structure...which have reasonably tight boundaries, distinctive shapes, which have cohered around particular activities, focal concerns and territorial spaces.(14)

-link to the territorial nature of the Z-town boys and the dead wonderland that they reside in, the Zephyr store, the zephyr team dress and style as perceived in the movie and the documentary.

Members of a subculture may walk, talk, act, look 'different' from their parents and from some of their peers: but they belong to the same families, go to the same schools, work at much the same jobs, live down the same 'mean streets' as their parents. (14)

-link to the union of the z-boys, and how this is severed through the purchase of each skater by skateboard companies. The film is more expressive of this, as it shows a more dramatised distintion between the boys- particularily between Tony Alva

Through dress, activities, leisure pursuits and life-style, they may project a different cultural response or 'solution' to the problems posed for them by their material and social class position and experience.(15)

Post-war youth did engage in distinctive cultural pursuits, and this was closely linked with the expansion of the leisure and fashion industries, directed at the 'teenage market'.(15)

Sections of working-class or middle-class youth where a response to their situation took a distinctive sub-cultural form. (16)

Youth groups fed off and appropriated things provided by the market, and, in turn, how the market tried to expropriate and incorporated things produced by the sub-cultures: in other words, the dialectic between youth and the youth market industry.(16)

The term youth culture appropriates the situation of the young almost exclusively in terms of the commercial and publicity manipulation and exploitation of the young.(16)

Youth culture is a result of such 'mindless' imitation by teenagers fostered by a shrewd and 'manipulating' commercial interests.(19)

Tony Hawks father founded in 1981 the National Skateboard Association, which was initially associated with the Boy Scouts of America. Yet todays youth believe Hawks to be a pioneer of skateboarding?

Z-boys introduced surf-style skating in the 1970's, poineering vert skating in empty pools, and through their attitude, antics and promoters changing the popular image of the skateboarder from that of clean-cut gymnast to that of a rebel (Kruse).

Film has effect on consumption.

How commercialism has changed the ideals and values of the surf/skate culture.

Subculture- The Meaning of Style. Dick Hebdige.

Expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonised; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons (2)

We are intrigued by the most mundane objects- a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle which none the less... take on a symbolic dimension, becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self imposed exile (2)

The tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture- in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning (3)

Subculture begins with a crime against the natural order

But it ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signals a refusal.

Cont. of objects quote.

'These 'humble objects' can be magically appropriated; 'stolen' by subordinate groups and made to carry 'secret' meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination' (18)

Only looks at the surface of a subculture- uninterested in the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style.

Albert Cohen stressed the compensatory function of the juvenile gang: working class adolescents who underachieved at school joined gangs in their leisure time in order to develop alternative sources of self-esteem. In the gang, the core values of the straight worlds- sobriety, ambition, conformity etc.- were replaced by their opposites: hedonism, defiance of authority and the quest for 'kicks'. (76)

The leisure styles available to youth were inflected through the contradictions and divisions intrinsic to a class society (77)

the commodity form

It communicates through commodities even if the meanings attached to those commodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown. (95)

It is therefore difficult in this case to maintain any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other, even though these categories are emphatically opposed in the value systems of most subcultures.

The diffusion of youth styles from the subcultures to the fashion market is not simply a 'cultural process', but a real network or infrastructure of new kinds of commercial and economic institutes. The small-scale record shops, recording companies, the boutiques and one- or two woman manufacturing companies- these versions of artisan capitalism, rather than more generalised and unspecific phenomena, situate the dialectic of commercial 'manipulation'. (95)

Subcultures are translated into commodities and made generally available (96)

Once removed from their private contexts by the small entrepreneurs and big fashion interests who produce them on a mass scale, they become codified, made comprehensible, rendered at once public property and profitable merchandise.(96)

the ideological form

The way in which subcultures are represented in the media makes them both more and less exotic than they actually are. (97)

Together, object and meaning constitute a sign, and, within any one culture, such signs are assembled, repeatedly, into characteristic forms of discourse...however when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different message conveyed. (104)

More closely associated with branding than catwalk fashion. But could talk about the z-boys outfits.