A salient aim of this chapter is to tune into lived cultural practice, focusing on how mediated and fictional cars are cultural reference points and become meaningful at the level of personal biography. This chapter therefore makes use of various popular cultural reference points (film, television, popular music and childhood play) in which the car is used and represented in specific ways to produce meaning and value, some of which is subsequently fed back into lived cultural practice. At the same time, cultural practice is discussed in relation to advertising and especially commodity fetishism, a system through which we consume objects in ways that reinforce our consumption. In order to add to and develop some of these points, however, it is necessary to discuss the salience of representation, particularly in the domain of mass media. Subsequently, how cars are used within hip-hop-oriented popular music and videos is explored. For many working-class youth cultures, hip-hop – regardless of its articulation and aesthetics – features existentially, often cross-referencing and integrating the car, wherein articulations of power, identification and taste flow. Quotations, field notes and deconstruction of popular songs add to the analysis as it develops.

Media, representation and meaning

There is an abundance of academic inquiry attending to the processes within and impacts of mass media in relation to youth subcultures, whether defined according to class, ethnicity, gender or their intersections. Research has also examined the extent to which certain ethnicities, when mediated, become hyper-visible, often couched as a feature within white-majority societies.

Relevant to the many fields of mediated identities is representation, an ‘essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture’. Representation operates at literal and symbolic levels, with the former referring to how objects are described in concrete, rather than abstract, terms: book, car, house – in essence, all these words reference unambiguous, clear and usually shared meanings. Symbolism, however, occurs when one thing stands for, or symbolises, something else. Here, there may be no logical connection between the ‘signifier’ (a car) and the ‘signified’ (happiness).