‘I Like My Shit Sagged’: Fashion, ‘Black Musics’ and Subcultures

Focus group methodology is used to study the ways in which ‘black’ Americana, particularly ‘black’ musics and fashion, are consumed by young people in London as part of the ongoing process of nomadic identity formation. Globalization processes in the sense of ethnically-inflected diasporic identification and localization processes in the construction and maintenance of difference are discussed. The multicultural nature of London, coupled with the availability to all for consumption of black American cultural artefacts, is shown to lead to distinctive strategies (characterized as the ongoing assertion of ‘heterogeneity within homogeneity’) to maintain the ethnic specificity of subcultures. One phenomenon for special comparative focus is the musically-based subculture, ‘jungle’, which was discussed by the cohort alongside their enthusiasm for American rap and hip-hop. The former's heterogeneity is explicitly described in multiethnic and multicultural terms, while nevertheless being celebrated as British.