Reviewed by: Youth Culture and Social Change: Making a Difference by Making a Noise ed. by Keith Gildart et al. Kyle Chattleton Youth Culture and Social Change: Making a Difference by Making a Noise Edited by Keith Gildart et al. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xii + 289 pp. Cloth $99.99, eBook $79.99. Youth Culture and Social Change is the textual culmination of a series of academic events that took place between 2013 and 2015, beginning with a symposium in Bristol, England. The introductory chapter explains that the volume makes an intervention in the study of public unrest and popular culture, specifically by investigating the “networks, communities, shared interests and mediating role played by music and social media” in riots, rebellions, and resilience (8–9). The authors keenly recognize these three as part of “an ongoing continuum . . . that helps communities stick together and pick up the pieces once the riot vans and news reporters are gone” (9). This awareness intentionally and explicitly counters traditional narratives of “unrest” that follow moments of resistance, and I find this approach refreshing (8). The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Roger Ball and Louis Rice study the impact of subculture networks in relation to the Bristol riots of 1980 and 2011 in the United Kingdom and how information relating to the riots was influenced by the context in which that information was received. Sarah Attfield then examines musical responses to the riots, emphasizing how these reactions provided more accurate representations of what took place in the city [End Page 313] than accounts from British media and politicians. We get to hear some of these perspectives from musicians in chapter 5 as part of a roundtable discussion conducted during the 2013 symposium. The second section is dedicated entirely to music and its relation to rebellion. Rosalind Watkiss Singleton complicates our understanding of the 1960s counterculture by showing how teenage girls in the West Midlands chose music and magazines that reinforced a traditional lifestyle. The most theoretical entry is David Wilkinson’s chapter on post-punk, which follows the work of Raymond Williams in order to clarify the dynamics of British post-punk—at once a key element of counterculture movements, yet also self-contradictory in its reliance on popular and artistic cultural forms. We then travel to America and its punk scene in Tara Marin Lopez and Michael Mills’s retrospective chapter on Bad Brains’s influence on the hardcore punk genre, and the complicated racial reception surrounding this all-black band. The final section turns to the subject of gangs. Angela Bartie and Alistair Fraser analyze the “variability in gang research,” specifically as affected by the “politics of representation”—how geography, methodology, and epistemology influence our understanding of gang culture (207). The following chapter by Tara Young and Loretta Trickett is an investigation of women in gangs and provides evidence of the calculated agency women employ within a patriarchal subculture. In the final chapter, William “Lez” Henry and Sireita Mullings-Lawrence explore the physical and virtual lives of gang culture, offering a lens into “a new mode of connectivity created by young people,” where emotions can be expressed and, more importantly, heard (277). The text as a whole, therefore, covers a wide range of subjects and employs a variety of sociological, ethnographic, and historical methodologies. This breadth is an excellent asset. It also allows for a holistic approach to the complexity of moments of resistance. From an ethnomusicological perspective, certain claims about music were overstated or generalized, particularly in relation to genre, which steadily worked against the initial desire for contextualization explained in the first chapter. I see the subtitle and its reappearance in chapters working in a similar manner. Definitions of “noise,” genre, and other sounds should be approached with caution and a desire for nuance, rather than with claims that extol the positive transformative potential of music or the subversive qualities of “making a noise.” On the other hand, certain chapters shine. Lopez and Mills’s treatment of Bad Brains, for example, is welcome as a significant piece of historiography. The roundtable discussion of chapter 5 is invaluable in its conversation between a scholar (Paul Gilroy) and musicians...