After about, oh, 1955, as the "teenager" stepped out of the demographer's chart and started slitting cinema seats, the questioner became increasingly suspect.

The acne-covered youth tapping out of rhythm to the coffee-bar sounds of Cliff Richard was as likely to be the new breed of pop sociologist as the standard teenager without a cause.

"You asking?" needed to be qualified. You asking what? You asking what the dance signifies in the formation of an urban cultural politics?

You asking what my three-button suit, Ben Sherman shirt and box-fresh Italian loafers, made from the softest Milanese calf-skin represent in terms of, y'know, a new implicit value judgment of cultural hierarchy?

Strewth, cultural theorists: enough to make you choke on your cappuccino.

Pouring out of grammar schools, out of the redbrick universities, these left-leaning analysts picked up on what was "ordinary".

They checked out the new phenomenon of a vibrant working-class youth culture and began tracking it as it changed shape in the wake of the postwar economic boom.

As younger academics who had grown up with pop culture turned up on the academic scene, the severe critique of the culture industry, the fear that advance capitalism was enslaving working-class minds with its celluloid dreams and bubble-gum music, was replaced by a feeling that some of this stuff was quite good, an articulation of something authentic.

By the late 1960s, the yoof, the street-fighting children of the revolution, were thought by many to have replaced the proles as the main driving force behind revolutionary change.

The pops were on top. What had started as an examination of one aspect of working-class culture had become the main thang.

Dis-Orienting Rhythms, as the title suggests, a collection of essays on the politics of the new Asian dance music, is pretty much part of this cultural studies tradition.

Its writers proclaim their disaffection with the conventions of academia; they reside, they say, on the margins, (that's to say at the Universities of London and Manchester), a challenge and even a threat to white academia. So far, so usual.

The emphasis is mainly on the agit-prop rap attack coming out of the Nation record label - Fundamental, Hustlers HC, Asian Dub Foundation, Joi. Those neo-punk pseudo-situationists Cornershop get a look in, as does recent chart-topper Bally Sagoo.

The mainstream music press, particularly the more liberal-than-thou NME, love this stuff. If every favourable NME review resulted in the Nation crew pocketing a fistful of change, they'd be in LA swapping dance routines with Michael Jackson.

Ashwani Sharma, who teaches cultural studies at the University of East London, makes the interesting point that this can be seen as a way of pacifying the threat felt by the mainstream of the "other", a "stratagem for the containment, mastery and exploitation of cultural difference."

Other essays look at bhangra and its role in the evolution of a positive Asian identity, the lost history of Asian soul, the new music's antecedents, the mobilisation against the much criticised Criminal Justice Act.

The essays are good, worthy, full of stimulating ideas, which, no doubt, will open up new spaces for debate. Perhaps the writing is too dense at times, difficult to fully appreciate for the reader not already initiated into critical theory and its jargon.

And it's still difficult to push down the thought that, yeah, the sociologists might be askin'. But, as ever, we're far too busy dancin' to take too much notice.

As the song doesn't quite go: pump up the volume and just play that funky music - white/black/Asian boy/girl/whatever.