I have been involved in the sociological study of youth culture since the early 1990s. I commenced this work during the era of transition between analog and digital media. The academic world which I entered was still dominated by hard copy material, most of which was accessed via university libraries. At the time I began my academic career, the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was collectively celebrating its 30th anniversary. Even at that time, many people in youth research who I spoke to suggested that the work was dated, while colleagues from other countries whom I met largely at conferences at that time suggested that the work was very Anglo-centric and made no sense in national contexts where socioeconomic histories were qualitatively different from those of Britain. Mike Brake (1985) argued that even the climate could have a significant effect on everyday manifestations of youth culture in different local contexts. Despite such critical observations, however, there was little in the way of a counter-discourse of conceptual theory. Steve Redhead's (1993) edited collection Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth had tentatively set the stage for what would later be termed post-subcultural studies. But beyond that, there was little in the way of work that contested the dominance of subculture as a meta concept in the cultural study of youth. Towards the end of the 1990s, I published an article that, along with work by other sociologists, namely David Muggleton and Steven Miles, would begin to flesh out the conceptual territory of post-subcultural studies. Influenced by the work of French sociologist Michel Mafessoli (1996), my article ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between Popular Music and Youth Culture’ (Bennett, 1999) used Mafessoli's concept of tribus to take subculture by its conceptual horns, proclaim what I considered to be its overly deterministic, class-based interpretation of youth cultures and argue instead for a more reflexive, fluid, and cross-class interpretation of youth culture. This paper continues to be my most highly cited article and also the most contentious piece I have published, sparking at one stage an academic debate that largely took place in the academic journal Journal of Youth Studies (see Bennett, 2005; Blackman, 2005; Hesmondhalgh, 2005; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2006).