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Monday, July 19, 2010

Sweden's Redneck Greaser Subculture

The Faster Times and The Guardian report on a thriving youth subculture in Sweden called “raggare” that Katie Natopolis describes as:
[...]a delightful mix of the style of a’50s greaser, the corpulence and bad hygiene of a biker, the love of the Confederate flag of a southern redneck, and the enthusiasm for drinking of a British soccer hooligan. Basically, every stereotype about poor white trash spanning both time and globe, rolled into one.
The Faster Times then presents a gallery of fourteen photos of raggae folk. Conor Creighton of The Guardian further describes the subculture:
The raggare have always tended to be drawn from country folk: farmers, petrol station owners, low-skilled workers. The growth in their numbers is the result of the differing fortunes of the US and Swedish economies over the decades: successive oil crises and a poor exchange rate saw Americans trading in gas-guzzlers for more economical models; the Swedes, relatively rich in comparison, bought their cars for a song.
For young Swedes, these giant American cars, which contrasted with the safe, boxy Volvos their parents drove, were the ultimate symbols of rebellion. And they were dirt-cheap. “They were stupid,” Georg says about the Americans. “Some of the cars were limited edition. They built maybe 70 of them and they were selling them to us for a few thousand when they were collector pieces.”

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