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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