You know you are part of a subculture when… (Sunday Sociological Song)

Emo-goths, campus jocks, hardcore rockers, leather queers, computer geeks, superhero buffs… you probably know at least one member of a subculture. Hell, you probably ARE a member of a subculture.

Well, in social sciences we’ve been studying you and your friends for years. We even have a set of established theoretical references. Antonio Gramsci’s ‘cultural hegemony’ (1930). David Riesman’s cultural majority/subversive subcultures split (1950). Dick Hebdige’ ‘style’ as an identity-building device (1979). Serious stuff, you see. And then we have Pixies frontman Black Francis, who in 1991 wrote this song, which pretty much summarizes the entire research field in a simple message: “It’s all about the clothes you wear to impress the person you fancy, and the drugs you use to facilitate sexual intercourse”. Damn straight social analysis.

Title: Subbacultcha

Artist: Pixies
Album: Trompe le Monde (1991)

This is a song about something there
There is something about this song
We did the clubs what ass
I was hoping to have her in the sack
I was looking handsome
She was looking like an erotic vulture

I was all dressed in black
She was all dressed up in black
Every thing was fine down here
What you call it here
Call it what you will here
Way down down down in this subbacultcha

Her warm white belly in the life i’d lived had seen nothing
Finer she shakes and she moves me or something
She’s like jellyroll like sculpture
I was wearing eyeliner
She was wearing eyeliner

It was so good down here
Saving for my scrapbook here
Way down down down in this subbacultcha

Now we live on the sea and relax and ride the tack
Drug running on this panamanian schooner
She walks the deck in a black dress
And me i dress up in black
And we listen to the sea
And look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
What you call it
When you look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
You know when you grope for luna.