…and I don’t think it’s fair.
and his suicide cant be justified by the… er… something something.
To be fair, its not a very good song.
It goes far beyond that. The OP–like many others decrying the death of one sort of “culture” or other–is looking in the wrong place. They’re not looking at culture, they’re looking at products. Products are what happens when culture has been shot, stuffed, and hung over the mantlepiece.
Meanwhile, all around them, the landscape on which culture lives has changed almost beyond recognition. It’s like the end of an ice age, with the glaciers retreating and opening up vast swaths of territory and lines of communication between previously isolated groups. Culture is undergoing an extraordinary evolutionary surge, filling the new niches and carving out more.
And they can’t see it because they’re too caught up in whether hemlines are going to go up or down next season.
I don’t understand what you did to my dog! All in two beats or so. Now that was a mashup!
That was the first thing I thought of upon seeing the words youth culture. And, like Hello Again says, not one of their best. But now it’s going to be stuck in my head for DAYS. Curses.
Actually, no. The geek is strong in my younger daughter (my older daughter has grown to be a sensible young woman just like her mother) and she is aware of Japanese weirdness. She shares things with me which I do not understand or appreciate, but I smile, nod, and encourage her to follow her interests.
There was a radical shift in the 50s and 60s where youth gained a new power, and went a bit crazy with their radical reassessment of their world point of view. It settled into a reasonable balance, but it goes through a minor upheaval every few years, some more visible than others.
Those young people of the 60s are now the decision makers of today, and that’s partly why there may seem like there’s been no change. It possibly could be argued that the era of the 1910s to the 1940s was very homogenous* for the same reason, and also the majority of the 1800s. A radical change happens in culture, and the youth of that time are influenced by it in all that comes after.
My theory is probably heavily flawed, but I’m sure somebody’s done a dissertation on it anyway.
*Or is it homogeneous?
Someone alert the home, a rambling old man is on the loose.
TRANSLATION: I have no idea what you’re getting at, grandpa.
Did you somehow miss grunge, gramps?
I’ve been coming back to this thread just waiting for someone to make the reference.
No, wait, he’s fine.
minor variations on well established themes, often there are revivals of past sound and fashion
=grunge
Something tells me that none of them think the OP (or the_diego) is a righteous dude.
Here’s the thing.
Before the 50s, there was no such thing as “youth culture”. Kids worked on the farm, or at their parent’s workshop, or at a factory, or in a coal mine. As soon as they were capable they were thrust into adult roles. Then along came the depression, and then along came World War II.
And then people came home from World War II, and a gigantic wave of prosperity rolled over the United States. The adults who were kids in the 30s and 40s decided that this was paradise. The kids in the 50s who never experienced 30s and 40s were the beneficiaries of this wave of prosperity, and were now expected to go to school, and have free time, and enjoy themselves, and have spending money.
This was a radical change. We think of the 50s as “conformist” but it wasn’t, it was a radical new social organization, all fueled by high-wage jobs for every man, which meant the wives and teenagers didn’t have to work anymore.
So the youth culture was born. Kids listened to music and danced and dressed up and watched movies and hung out rather than slaving 12 hours a day in a factory like their parents did when they were teenagers.
And this pattern has continued to 2013. Kids still don’t have work in factories, they can go to school and hang out.
But the youth culture of the 50s and 60s seemed radically different than the oldster culture of their parents because there was no youth culture before that. If kids listened to music or wore clothes in the 20s and 30s and 40s it was the same sort of music and clothes that adults wore.
But youth culture has been around for 60 years now. The teenagers who grew up with the first wave of youth culture in the 50s are now in their 70s. There are very few people left who grew up without youth culture.
And so this is the new normal. The expectation that youth culture would be fresh and new and something parents wouldn’t understand was true in the 50s and 60s, but is no longer true. We no longer have dads who stormed the beaches at Normandy when they were teenagers shaking their heads and the kids today with their rock and roll and long hair. We don’t even have the kids who grew up with rock and roll and long hair shaking their heads at the kids today. THAT WAS THE 80s. Baby boomers don’t have teenage kids anymore, the teenage kids of the baby boomers have grown up to have teenage kids, the baby boomers are grandparents and the guys who stormed the beaches at Normandy are in their 90s.
So why should we expect youth culture to always be shocking and innovative and radical? Youth culture was innovative back when it was created, now it is no longer innovative because it’s been around for as long as almost everyone alive can remember. Yeah, it’s not the same as when you were a kid, but it’s still the same sort of stuff. The kickass music you remember from the 60s? Yeah, it existed. But look at the actual sales charts from the 60s! The kickass music of the 60s that we remember here in 2013 was a tiny sliver of the music of the 60s. Most of it was predigested pap and bland nonsense.
And the teenagers of the time ate that shit up, just like the teenagers of 2013 eat the shit of 2013 up. And why? Because they’re dumb kids who don’t know any better. The movies that kids like today are formulaic crap? Yeah, the kids like the formulaic crap because they haven’t had to watch formulaic crap for 30 years, they’re just started watching formulaic crap and haven’t got sick of it yet. They LIKE the formula, because the formula works. Old-ass people like us who’ve seen the formula 10,000 times are sick of it, but so what?
I was kind of thinking the same thing yesterday actually. It was triggered by the rather strange experience of listening to what’s supposedly the “alternative” radio station in Dallas, and after a few songs I didn’t recognize, I heard 1995-vintage Cranberries belting out of the stereo and wondered just how this was “alternative” and not “Oldies” on a station aimed at teenagers and young adults.
Today’s teenagers would be insulted that you think there’s music they shouldn’t listen to. Good music is good music to them. It’s downright fucking refreshing.
Who said they shouldn’t listen to it? I was just surprised that something playing about the time I got done with college was still in mainstream rotation (5 pm) on a major market radio station aimed at people considerably younger than me.
I’d have thought it would have been on one of the neo-Oldies stations out there (80’s and 90’s music), not on the “alternative” station.
So not so much a matter of me thinking they shouldn’t listen to it, but being surprised that they would actually want to.
“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”
Why wouldn’t they (aside from it being the Cranberries)?
This is a part of my earlier point: that music is more accessible now than it has ever been, even when it was newly released. Moreover, the older the music, the more true that becomes, as long as recordings of it have survived. Once upon a time, most people only heard a piece of music if it happened to air on the radio while they were listening; now they can find nearly any piece they hear of in moments, anywhere they can get a data connection, and they can stumble across it in any number of ways–all it takes is one bizarre leap of Pandora logic to be exposed to a whole new genre.
It no longer matters when music was made. I have friends in their teens and twenties who love everything from swing to rap to trance to heavy metal string quartets. The time filter is gone: they can be exposed to anything in the entire history of recorded music with equal ease. Why wouldn’t they pick and choose the bits they like?
As I have said many times on this board, if you want to point to a force that represents a Generation Gap that is a result of Youth Culture, look no further than the Internet. If you asked a parent what they don’t understand and are afraid of, given that their kids know more about it, the Internet is today’s answer.
This is what I was getting at. The release date might as well not exist. Good music is good music to teens today.
There’s your problem. An “alternative” station is aimed at young adults 25-35. The station is likely built for the kids who loved acts like Nirvana, REM, and Beck the first time around and still want to listen to them along with new similar acts.
You’re a decade out of date. The parents of kids today grew up with computers and video games and hippity-hoppity music. I mean, I remember the Before Times, when I was a young child and computers were mysterious boxes kept in locked rooms. I remember when I was in college and people used the VAX terminals to chat with each other and it was all new and mysterious.
But here in 2013 adults know how to use this new-fangled “internet” the kids were learning about 20 years ago, because the kids in 1993 are 20 years older here in the future world 2013.