“Street culture” is often considered a response to structural factors. However, the relationship between culture and structure has rarely been empirically analyzed. This article analyzes the role of three media representations of American street culture and gangsters—two films and the music of a rap artist—in the street culture of a disadvantaged part of Copenhagen. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates that these media representations are highly valuable to and influential among young men because of their perceived similarity between their intersectional structural positions and those represented in the media. Thus, the article illuminates the interaction between structural and cultural factors in street culture. It further offers a local explanation of the scarcely studied phenomenon of the influence of mass media on street culture, and a novel, media-based, local explanation of global similarities in different street cultures.

“街头文化”通常被认为是对结构性因素的反应。然而，文化与结构之间的关系很少被实证分析。本文分析了美国街头文化和黑帮的三种媒体表现——两部电影和一位说唱艺术家的音乐——在哥本哈根弱势地区的街头文化中的作用。基于多年的民族志田野调查，本文证明这些媒体表征对年轻人具有很高的价值和影响力，因为他们感知到的交叉结构位置与媒体所代表的位置之间存在相似性。因此，本文阐明了街头文化中结构因素和文化因素之间的相互作用。