Jersey Shore and Subculture

Youth subcultures have always fascinated the mainstream. If reality TV had existed back in the 1950s and ’60s in the days of greasers, teddy boys, mods, rockers, hippies and skinheads, surely some enterprising someone would have pointed a camera at those crazy kids with their curious fashion. 

We did get peeks via films starring James Dean and Marlon Brando, which were praised for their realism and decried for ruining impressionable youth. Kind of like Jersey Shore. The breakout MTV series, although on a new shore, since its cast has become infamous tabloid fixtures, gave us a glimpse of the strange and little-seen subculture of Urban Italians. It wasn’t an anthropological documentary, per se, just an MTV camera crew following a bunch of young, sexed-up, worked-out and super-tanned Italianish-Americans with the greatest set of nicknames in the history of nicknaming (Snooki, JWoww and The Situation are justification alone for the show’s existence). Here is definitely a reality television subculture, and the networks seem to exploit them. As it states in the textbook, “ As we have seen, the way in which subcultures are represented in the media makes them both more and less exotic than they actually are” (p 357).  I feel that even though this type of subculture as exposed on Jersey Shore, it has elements about looking a certain way as the guys and gals do on this show. Really buff, greasy black hair, too tan, and that accent. It seems to be a trend in to look, speak, and act this way in order to be considered part of the Guido culture. So, why do these folks have big muscles? I’ll tell you, even though you already know, because if they had to rely on their wit and intellect, they probably wouldn’t receive half as much attention that this show and these people are getting. But you know what’s scarier? These folks aren’t acting at all; they’re actually being themselves. Since we enjoy this type of programming so much, why not overload us with as many reality shows that we can tolerate? This has also caused another subculture. These are the ones that don’t understand the subculture and fail to realize what the allure to these types of shows is, they prefer to go out and live instead of watch others do that. However, there will always be viewers, such as myself, who will glue themselves to a reality TV series like Jersey Shore and ponder upon how such subcultures became part of popular culture.