Sociological treatments of the reproduction of social inequality in South Africa largely focus on its historical, political and economical aspects while references to popular culture are commonly used to describe differences, often in combination with racial discourse, rather than explain them. As a result much of South African cultural sociology, especially with regards to youth culture, is entailed in in-depth ethnographic descriptions of particular subcultures. Less common is scholarly work dealing with the role of taste and cultural preferences in the reconfiguration of common perceptions of ‘otherness’, both in class and race terms. This dissertation shifts the focus towards the structural aspects of popular culture and, particularly, youth culture. First, inspired by Bourdieu’s work on distinction, it explores the segregating potential of contemporary youth culture in South Africa, especially where class and race connotations meet. It then follows this thread of adapting Bourdieu’s work to contemporary South African youth by identifying the media as a crucial factor alongside family and school for the preservation of racialised class characteristics. In a third step it takes the observations made in the South African context and compares them to youth culture in Brazil in order to establish the existence of common structures of difference that exist in different countries as a result of glocalization.