Clearly, it’s vastly divergent. I have observed that differences (of cultures in general) usual apply every 10 years in music, clothing, individuality, etc.
Back to teenage culture. What do you think of the music being listened to such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and so forth? How about clothing? We’re beginning to dress quite racy these days.
What’s your thoughts on it?
Yo.
Dude.
This one has IMHO written all over it.
Errr. I’m not catching on…
I couldn’t care less if people fell like dressing like four-fingered whores. That’s their business.
I really don’t care whether people do drugs, or beat each other up. Again, none of my business.
What I hate, however, is all the excuses being bandied around for teenagers’ supposed behavioral problems.
They are created by adults, they are supported by adults, and then they are criticized by adults. Simple as that.
When was the last time you saw a television executive or a record executive that was 18 or younger? Or a gun manufacturer? Or a drug importer? Or even a clothing designer? That’s right, never.
And the same parents that complain about the degeneration of teenagers, saying “Oh, we NEVER did that when I was a kid”, are the very same group of people that put out the trash that influences behavior. Then they immediately turn around and say to anyone who will listen, “Those rotten, out of control kids…”
So, you want to know what I think? Blame the parents and the others of that age, if you think things are getting out of hand. That’s where it belongs.
And if I EVER catch any child of mine dressing like Britney Spears, I’ll be furious. Teenagers are not old enough for that kind of stuff, IMHO.
Of course, I don’t have any kids, so my analysis is somewhat skewed. Take the above for what it’s worth.
And Kunimitsu, this will probably go to IMHO because you’re soliciting an opinion, not an answer based in fact.
Back when I was your age, kid, we couldn’t even afford our own culture. We had to borrow one from England.
These kids today, no appreciation for what their elders went through…
Well! That explains the 50’s. 
He is telling you in a sarcastic manner that you have posted this thread to the wrong Forum.
I’m about to move this puppy over to IMHO, where it should have been in the first place. Fasten your seat belts, we have to go over Great Debates and that’s sometimes a bit rocky.
Lynn
From whence comes this peculiar notion that the youth of today dress in an oversexed manner?
The girls dress very close to the way they dressed when I was a teenager myself. Belly buttons are back. Tight jeans never disappeared in the first place. Bell bottoms, God help me, are back. Admittedly, the girls in the 1970s didn’t do piercings or tattoos, but aside from that, not much of a paradigm shift going on here.
The boys, meanwhile,…
::giggle::
Oh man, if we’d ever been seen wearing dumpy baggy pants that don’t even come remotely close to clinging to your body, and wearing ::snort:: BOXER SHORTS!!! …and even the swimwear and summer cutoffs look like things we could only have found in a long-forgotten brass bound trunk containing our Dads’ college junk… ::hee hee heee:: um, no, I don’t think anyone could claim the boys these days dress in a manner that screams out raw young sexuality or anything. ::snicker snort::
Um…sorry… <ahem>… so much for apparel…as for music, well, I’m in no position to rant, I’m afraid. I personally was listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Styx and Kansas and whatnot in the 70s, but I’m afraid my generation as a whole is responsible for disco as well as horridly bland and forgettable pop-rock.
Politically, I think the youth of today are actually more responsible and aware than we as a group were in the late 70s. The half-generation BEFORE us was vividly political but by the time I hit high school there wasn’t much of that going on. I know high school kids who have joined Amnesty International and are forming chapters of the ACLU on campus. More than I ever did.
Damned disrespectful, no-good, lazy, juvenile delinquents!
Oh, you were talking about today’s teenage culture, not the one I was a part of. They are oftentimes naive, while thinking they have all the answers. They have their own language. They consider themselves immortal and indestructible. They listen to music that most adults refer to as “noise.” The boys are always trying to get the girls to have sex with them, while the girls are always trying to impress the boys.
Sounds a lot like my generation, and the one before it, and the one after it, etc…
That’s exactly how I feel. Of course the media is always “pushing the limit” when it comes to marketing sex/violence to kids, that’s how they get money. But contrary to what various alarmists will tell you, it won’t ruin the kids’ lives. Take all these complaints about how Britney, Christina, etc… dress. They’re almost exactly the same as the complaints about Madonna fifteen years earlier. And fifteen years from now, my generation will complain about the material that gets sold to our children.
I have to agree with ITR champion and DMC.
I’m 25, and I did the exact same stuff when I was younger, although to a lesser degree. I didn’t care much for rebelling or following the inane trends of the day - I just wanted to be left alone. Still do.
It’s just that people are hypocrites and will condemn or ridicule or say “I never did THAT” when in fact, they did.
No one will criticize themselves, but they are always willing to blame it on someone else, whatever “it” may be. It’s human nature to be this way.
Although I personally think we are on our way to Hell. Behavior becomes more extreme with each generation, and just because we’re human doesn’t mean we’ll be around forever. We really can’t keep going on like this. It’s going to catch up with us eventually.
Compare society today to the Roman Empire right before its downfall, and see what I mean.
If I might pontificate on modern teen culture from a position of ignorance…
I think a friend of mine (30 years old) said it best when he said, “When we were teenagers, we made fun of people like N’Sync. Now they’re putting that kind of band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
Admittedly, Sturgeon’s Law always holds, but I have a little problem with some of the directions things have been taking. When I was a teenager, MTV was very different from the way it is today. First of all, it showed music videos- in fact, that was about 90% of their programming. Secondly, it seemed, in a lot of ways, to be marketing college-kid culture to adolescents. Back in the early 80’s, MTV had a show hosted by Andy Warhol. About a year ago I watched MTV when I was on the road (I don’t get cable at home) and there were no music videos at all, and all the shows were either a) seemingly week-long documentaries about N’Sync or Britney Spears, or b) peas-and-carrots shows about teenagers bonding with their parents by bungee-jumping with them. And, of course, now we have “Jackass,” so apparently the 24-7 peas-and-carrots approach didn’t last long.
I think my main complaint with MTV and corporate teen culture isn’t that there’s too much sex and violence, but that it’s just… unimaginative. I can understand why people would like to have peas-and-carrots shows, but I’d rather have something like Andy Warhol or Aeon Flux, because that’s the kind of thing that can stimulate kids to think. “Jackass” seems to only be stimulating them to set fire to themselves. Not that I’ve seen it, but I don’t get the impression that it really deserves comparison with D&D or EC comics (those being the classic examples of What Is Wrong With Our Society, according to Some Big Expert Who Makes Money Off Worried Parents.)
And while we’re at it, let me decry the sorry state of rap. Why does rap=gangsta rap these days? I remember a great rap by Doug E. Fresh (from my high school years) called “The Show,” which was a great rap full of manic, friendly energy. A year or two ago I heard a cover of “The Show” by some gangsta rappers, and they sounded… torpid. I got the feeling that energy is supposed to be uncool now, and as a result they took a piece of music they liked and drained everything that made it fun in the first place, like turning the William Tell Overture into sleep-inducing Muzak.
But, of course, you can’t really generalize about teen culture, because the idea of a monolithic “teen culture” is itself a product made by corporations. (That’s why I’ve tried to limit myself to criticising MTV and rap.) Thinking back to what I did as a teen, I read Isaac Asimov, as did most of my friends. Does that count as “teen culture”? If I were a teen today, I’d listen to techno, not N’Sync (for that matter, I like the techno I listen to today a lot more than I liked the music that was available when I was a teen. And, thinking back, I listened to proto-techno whenever I got the chance.)
-Ben
I’ve been waiting for weeks for an excuse to post the following story. 
I was out driving one day, and happened to pass by a group of adolescents horsing around in someone’s yard. One lad hid behind a hedge and then jumped out at his friends. But the shock he received was as great as the one he gave to them, as he nearly jumped right out of his baggy jeans! The poor boy ended up standing there on the sidewalk with his trousers down below his knees.
I disagree about the clothes. First of all, it does bug me to see teenage girls wearing clothes that are revealing and skimpy. I think it’s oversexualizing them, as someone else said.
Second of all, I can’t believe fashions were always this sexy. Is my memory that bad? Screw the bellybutton issue; I’m talking about stacked heels, skirts as thin as slips, tiny little tops with spaghetti straps. Maybe it’s not so much that these clothes are more revealing than, say, miniskirts and tight sweaters or halters. But it seems to me that the venues where teens find these appropriate is expanding. I’ve seen girls wear things to church–CHURCH!-- and school that seem more appropriate for a cocktail party or a night out clubbing.
On other aspects of culture, I dunno what to make of it. It bugs me to see what seems to be an overall undercurrent of disrespect for others in it, but I don’t think that’s new.
Like most of the previous posters, I agree that much of today’s teenaged behavior that is merely the same ol’ stuff that kids have been doing since the 50’s – and probably even before that – packaged in a New Millennium Edition box. So, for the most part I’m as unfazed as I am unimpressed by it all.
Except… there is one trend which has me more than a little shocked and concerned: lying.
Granted my random sampling is small and unscientific – so correct me if I’m wrong – but it seems to me that today’s kids lie through their teeth as casually as breathing. They lie to their parents. They lie to strangers. They lie to authority figures. And most of all, they lie to each other. (If every girl who said she was a model, and every guy who said he was in a rock band really was, there’d be nothing special about dating either of them.)
Lying seems to have lost its stigma of decietfulness and has turned into a giggly, adolescent game. That’s a very scary thing, in my opinion.
The rap music that is popular now isn’t really gangsta rap anymore. The general opinion is that gangsta rap died out with the deaths of Tupac and Biggie.
I was a teenager in the 50s. I can only say that the boys wished the girls dressed as revealingly as they do today. Had they done so, they would have instantly been sent home from school and their parents would have been stoned at the city gates. Plenty of girls in the 50s dressed very sexily, but in ways that differ from today.
The baggy pants that boys wear today strike me as comical, but I am sure the boys take them seriously. What I do know is that every generation attempts to establish it’s own individuality in it’s own ways—and so far, we have all seemed to come out okay.
As to the music, I don’t know enough about today’s music to have an opinion–I am hearing impaired (deaf as a post, actually) and simply don’t understand most of what I hear. I do remember that most adults back in the 50s regarded Elvis Presley as the embodiment of pure evil. Jerry Lee Lewis was simply unspeakably wicked. We survived all that, too, and I suppose kids today will do as well.
In my opinion, the mass-produced bubblegum pablum that kids listen to today is inferior to the mass-produced bubblegum pablum of previous generations. Compare N’Sync with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. They’re worlds apart in terms of quality – yet, they basically appeal to the same demographic. And that happens, let’s not forget, to also be the demographic of the early Beatles. And a couple of generations before that, it was Frank Sinatra. Has this generation got a Frank Sinatra in the works? Not so’s I can tell. Mind you, I’ve actually heard Christina Aguilerra and I was suprised to find that she had a very strong, sonorous voice. The songs I heard were garbage, but she could possibly do justice go good ones.
I couldn’t believe how old I felt a few years ago the first time I caught myself saying, "Damn kids today. " I guess the teens today are no snottier than teenagers from any other generation.
As Oscar Wilde put it, “The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.”