In Moby-Dick: Then and Now, Rudy's comparison of regional differences in "swagger" offers us a way into thinking about the important concept of subculture.
When they write about culture as a "total way of life" or as a "shared
set of meanings," cultural scholars tended to oversimplify the lived
experience of culture. Increasingly, it became clear that no two
individuals relate in exactly the same way to the traditions and
materials of "their" culture and that a society as diverse as the United
States is shaped by the interactions of many much smaller cultural
communities. For many outsiders, hip hop might
be understood as a subculture while within hip hop, hip hop breaks down
into distinctive local subcultures. Keep in mind the term, "sub" here,
doesn't suggest something that is "subordinate" (less valuable or
powerful) or "subterranean," (below other aspects of the culture). It
might be better to think of a subculture as a subset, a specialized set of practices drawn from the totality of the culture, given specific meanings for a local community.

Early
on, writers on subcultures discovered that youth were particularly
innovative borrowers from their "parent culture," ascribing new meanings
and uses to pre-existing symbols, words, and fashions (Gelder 1997).
The British punks, for example, took the swastika not as a sign of
"Aryan superiority" but as a rejection of their parents' values and
lifestyles: they chose this particular symbol because they were children
of the generation which had defended Great Britain against the Nazis.
The Goths constructed their subculture through borrowings from Victorian
horror literature. Within a subculture, symbols, gestures, words, or
fashions serve a double purpose: on the one hand, they signal the
connections between those inside the community, allowing them a way to
recognize each other and to express their shared values and meanings; on
the other hand, they distinguish the members of a subculture from the
general population.

Subcultures are elective in
the sense that their members choose to participate, often opting out of
other identities available to them by virtue of their birthright;
increasingly, these elective cultural identities crisscross other
notions of racial, ethnic, or religious heritage. For many young people,
choosing to embrace a subculture signals a move towards greater
autonomy from their parents, though participation in subcultures may
also become the source of intense conflict between youth and adults.
Some recent work on subcultures has argued that the term may have
outlived its usefulness in so far as it is defined in opposition to
"mainstream culture” (Bennett & Kahn-Harris 2004) They argue that as
the mainstream has fragmented, breaking down to a series of niches and
subcultures, there may no longer be a center against which these new
cultural communities define themselves. Becoming a member of a
subculture may have less to do with breaking with parent culture and
more to do with finding a group within which one feels "at home." Street
gangs represent one such "tribal affiliation," one way of forging a
community which is more powerful than its individual members, though in
doing so, the gang members also often are pushed outside of the law and
often outside the family.

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