<p><DEFANGED_div>Hai I am D.Karthikeyan currently a student stipendiary at CSDS sarai. Following is my first urban <br>study posting for the research project. "Music from the Margins: Gaana Songs as a Subaltern </p><DEFANGED_div>
<p><DEFANGED_div>Phenomenon". In this posting I am giving a brief introduction to the concepts of culture and subculture.<br>In the remaining postings I shall discuss on how Gaana music as a form can be called as an <br>sub culture by tracing the genealogy of Gaana songs and how it came into existence and to
<br>look into the cultural aspects of Gaana songs, its lyrics and find out how it helps in the <br>identity formation. </p><DEFANGED_div>
<p><br>CULTURES AND SUBCULTURES A MINIMAL DEFINITION </p>
<p>The word culture can be referred to the level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life<br>and give expressive form to their social and material life experience. The culture of a group or class<br>is peculiar and 'distinctive way of life' of the group or class, the meanings, the values and ideas
<br>embodied in institutions, in social relations in systems of beliefs, in mores and customs, in the uses<br>of objects and material life. Culture is the way social relations of a group are structured and shaped:<br>but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted. (Hall "et al.," 1975,
p.10)</p>
<p>Culture just like different groups and class are unequally ranked in relation to one another and they stand <br>in opposition to one another in terms of domination and subordination along the scale of cultural power.
<br>The classification and ordering of the world through structures is based on the power, position, and the <br>hegemony of the powerful interest in the society.</p>
<p><br>The class, which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the <br>means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental
<br> production are subject to it … Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass<br> of an epoch … they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of
<br>ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling<br> ideas of the epoch. (Marx, 1970) </p>
<p>The dominant culture of a complex society is never homogenous in structure it is layered reflecting different<br> interests within the dominant class containing different traces from the past. Subordinate cultures will not
<br> always be in open conflict with it. </p>
<p>The culture, which becomes the dominant culture, need not necessarily be without any opposition, there are <br>subcultures, which grow within the dominant culture therefore challenging them from within, or what E.P.Thompson
<br>calls as "warrening it from within". (Thompson, 1965) </p>
<p>The Birmingham school also view youth subcultures through the prism of class and suggest they are doubly articulated <br>to a parent culture (the working-class) and the dominant culture. Subcultures are defined here as "smaller, more
<br>localized and differentiated structures, within one or more of the larger cultural networks." (Hall "et al.," 1975, p.13)</p>
<p><DEFANGED_div> There is a distinction to be drawn, however, between subcultures and other resistant or alternative cultures<br>: Working class cultures are the home of subcultures, while middle-class cultures create counter-cultures.
<br>(This can be understood in the case of 'Bharatnatyam' in India how the Middle classes of Madras city especially<br> the Brahmins appropriated the dance through a process of sanskritisation and made it an nationalized cultural identity).
</p><DEFANGED_div>
<p>Subcultures must be understood, foremost, in relation to the hegemonic forces of the dominant culture so class-based <br>correlation can be made. Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony elucidates how a fraction of working-class culture,
<br>youth, comes to have its expressive elements curtailed and its lived reality circumscribed by the operation of <br>hegemony. Society in a much wider sense can never be one-dimensional and the working class is never completely
<br>absorbed by the dominant class. The occupation of these lacunae is understood as "winning space," a negotiated <br>version of the dominant culture's values that the working-class has appropriated as an alternate moral system
<br>permitting legitimization of their means of expression. </p>
<p>Subcultures can also be a set of cultural practices that develop their own history and structure, ones, which <br>are detached from the symbolic and social firmament of the dominant culture. Subcultures must distinctively
<br>exhibit enough shape and structure to identify them selves different from their 'parent' culture. They must <br>be focused around certain activities, values, certain use of material artifacts and most importantly territorial
<br> spaces that significantly differentiates from the wider culture. </p>
<p>The subculture is a symbolic structure, which tries to resolve the contradictions that exist (latent or manifest) <br>in the parent culture. The subculture, although a symbolic structure, depends upon territoriality to anchor
<br>individual members to a collective reality. It is debatable whether the contradictions of the parent culture <br>can be solved. Subcultures merely transcribe terms at a micro social level and inscribe them in an imaginary
<br>set of relations.</p>
<p><br>Music subculture can be defined as a group of identifiable musicians' audiences, groups and participants with shared <br>identities and values. Subculture theory requires attention to look at a music culture, which operates on certain
<br>logics: the symbolic, the social, the spatial, the temporal, and the ideological or political. Subcultures are <br>enunciated through particular symbolic practices and forms of communication: specific styles of dress, music,
<br>speech, textual production, and deportment. Subcultures emerge at particular kinds of geographic locations and<br> material spaces, and engage in particular uses of those spaces. </p>
<p>Gaana songs are a sub-culture of Chennai urban culture. Gaana in simple words is another name for 'Tamil Rap' song(s),<br> which is getting transformed into a viable commodity by entering the market and undergoing a process of sanitisation.
<br> It comes across at issues like Politics, urban poverty, caste, violence and sex. Gaana songs came into existence as<br> part of the urban culture and it has its roots in the slums of chennai. The Gaana as a popular cultural form is distinct
<br>in structure, rhyming verses while talking about the loves and lives of the slum people. Gaana comes from a mixture of <br>different Tamil dialects and other languages the Dalits, fisherfolk of Chennai encounter. </p>
<p>References</p>
<p><DEFANGED_div>Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd 1987).<br>Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchison, 1976).<br>Phil Cohen, "Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community," in eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton The Subcultures Reader
</p><DEFANGED_div>
<p><DEFANGED_div>(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 90-99: 94.<br> </p><DEFANGED_div>