“The punks were not only responding to increasing joblessness , changing moral standards, the rediscovery of poverty, the Depression, etc, they were dramatising what had come to be called ‘Britain’s decline’ by constructing a language which was, in contrast to the prevailing rhetoric of the Rock Establishment, unmistakably relevant and dow to earth (hence the swearing, the references to ‘fat hippies’, the rags, the lumpen poses)”

What Hebdige is saying is that the Punks took the doom and gloom that was filling the airwaves and magazines/editorials at the time and made it into something visible - they personified the misery and decline by presenting themselves as degenerates. They made themselves into the living embodiment of broken Britain.

Subcultures are not privileged forms; they do not work outside the circuit of production and reproduction which link together, if only symbolically, the fragmented pieces of the social totality. Subcultures represent noise, as opposed to sound.

Stuart Hall argued that the media were responsible for the way groups and classes respond to other groups and classes by providing them with images and information of said classes, often detailing their practices and values, which then led people to form opinions on them that they might not have had previously. Hall described the media as having ‘progressively colonised the cultural and idealogical sphere’.