Representations of the alternative in Madrid during the transition to democracy: the case of free radios’ mediatic (counter)culture (1976-1989)

Abstract

In the 1980s, a multitude of small radio stations proliferated in the Spanish ether, posing a new way of doing and understanding communication, and constituting a new social movement: that of free radios. A movement that was born and grew within an alternative subculture, close to the radical left, for which it played the role of an instance of ideological production and reproduction. In these pages we will see how the media counterculture that surrounded these stations generated a subcultural style based on the transformation and resignification of language that helped to build an identity and a representation of the alternative in Madrid during the Transition to democracy. Keywords: free radios, alternative communication, subculture, Spanish Transition