What qualifies as a sub culture?
Not that it matters,but I find it interesting.
Its own music
Its own fashion
Its own drug
Guessing obvious ones are mods,punks rave scene etc
Does New Romantics come under that umbrella?
Think speed was the drug of choice so possibly does
Hippies I guess as well would qualify.
Useless musings that keep me out of trouble
What other scenes would you include?
Prog fans
Lonely
Loathed by everyone
Bad personal hygiene (not that it matters when you live alone)
Drink cheap lager
Agoraphobic
Quite a good series by Stewart Lee on the evolution of counter culture.
Northern soul
Wigan casino etc in the mid to late 70s
Goth
London Batcave, or Leeds & Manchester scenes in mid to late 80s
Madchester
Hacienda late 80s into early 90s
Late 80s I got into Dinosaur Jr which was my entry point in the US rather than UK subculture of the slacker (not that awful media label grunge which no-one recognised). Swiftly followed by Mudhoney, Tad, early Nirvana etc, basically a lot of stuff on SST or Subpop labels.
Dress was flannel shirt over a t-shirt, old knackered jeans, doc martens or converse, greasy long hair to headbang with. Drug of choice weed and bottled beer.
Hel thinks Iāve never grown out of this look (hair excepted) and still own too many lumberjack style flannel shirts.
Would add: art form (expression) , unique language and dance.
Hip Hop would be a fully rounded sub culture (see five elements for clarification)
Punk similarly. Rave also is deserving (in most of itās derivatives all the way to Goa / psy trance) along with metal, goth, new romantic and Mod pre and post revival.
Trying to think what might be the most recent identifiable subculture - and feel like Grime was a big contender. Anything later?
Drill? In London at least.
The internet suggests that an old man like me is going to get into trouble pretending to know anything about the subtleties of the genre.
Same, but Iād say it qualifies given its proliferation and spin-offs.
Iād include Psychobilly 
London had a plethora of stuff - the original dancefloor Jazz scene with Giles Peterson, the Jazz Messengers dancers, et al and the Jungle and Drum 'n Bass scene as a prelude to Grime and Drill.
Iām not sure many movements today look like the fully formed subcultures Hebdige wrote about. Iām a little rusty on the subject but Subcultures have typically lived appart from the mainstream, often in rejection of it before being absorbed over time (Hegemony).
With the speed of the internet, the gestation period feels too short for all the elementsāstyle, language, venues, rituals, art, fashion, etc to glue solidly.
āSelling outā once carried a fierce stigma, commercial gain is now, in the spaces I can see, the goal and itās celebratedā¦ this fucks the chemistry somewhat.
I do see strong offshoots of the mainstream, but fewer that feel sealed and self-contained. Hebdigeās Subculture: The Meaning of Style still reads true. The ecstasy-era raves were a solvent in some ways. Many walls came down then and never fully went back up. At the same time, newer movements grime and drill, hyperpop, online fandoms suggest we didnāt lose subcultures so much as remix them into looser, networked, and highly 15 minute forms.
I know literally nothing about it but Wiki says K-pop is (or was) a subculture. Can someone with a daughter (is it only a girls thing ?) tell me if itās developed a large enough British following to count as a British one ?
I think once something is as mainstream as K-pop it can no longer be āSubā.
The nieces went through a K-pop stage, but I think like Swifties itās globally homogenous. Nothing UK-specific about it.
FoL#1 is into a scene which holds festivals called Bangface. That does seem to have its own look, humour, music etc. He likes BreakCore but that appears to be just one sub division of the whole range of edm styles emerging from Drum n Bass, Jungle, HardCore etc in the late 90ās. The latest iteration seems to be called NeoRave.
Iām not interested, young or energetic enough to look into it too much but can see that thereās enough complexity in the scene to explain itās appeal.
To an extent the sub-culture ācriteriaā often features: political / religious or economic ideologies too.