Yeah, this is a crucial point. Some people from earlier generations look at the things that they used to define themselves-principally music and fashion-and assume that young people today are doing the same thing. I feel like music in particular occupied a privileged cultural role for people who grew up from the 1950s through the 70s, standing above everything else as the central mode of self-expression and the way they defined themselves against their parents’ generation.
Young people today still care about music of course, but it is just one niche within a larger menagerie of means of self-expression and sub-group identification. Which subreddits someone subscribes to, or what Instagram users they follow, or what gaming communities they belong to are equally important in defining themselves as what music they listen to or what clothes they wear.
Or something like that. I’m old enough that I don’t really know exactly what kids are up to these days, but I do know that anyone who is just looking at changes in music and fashion is completely missing the broader point–that instead of just playing different music, kids today are pioneering entirely new means of expressing themselves.
I can turn on the TV to Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel and have two entire networks dedicated just to the 10-15 set. My cousin has a daughter who’s obsessed with Justin Bieber, who as a singer doesn’t have much crossover appeal. People who aren’t teenagers aren’t picking up a lot of his music. Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas brothers; all extremely popular.
The Harry Potter books have sold 450 million copies. The Twilight books have sold 116 million. The Hunger Games trilogy, 26 million. All these books have had crossover appeal, but they were all written for teenagers, and teenagers made up their main audience.
So, I’m not really seeing that there’s no youth culture. It seems to me the reverse. . .that there’s a lot of media dedicated specifically to young people. You might not like it, but you’re not the target audience.
We may not use the same sites, though, and that helps separate us into subcultures. That’s sometimes because of choice, but also because we Old Fogeys don’t *know *what The Kids are using. We’re still using Facebook, but I’ve heard The Kids are using Tumblr, and I’m guessing if that’s what this Old Fogey has heard, that’s actually two or three web communities/subcultures behind the curve.
And even on Facebook, I’m well aware that my 20 year old sees and says stuff I never learn about. Privacy settings let him control how much of that part of his world/peer group I see.
Facebook, Tumblr, and so forth are platforms. Communities and subcultures–some of which I’m coming to think of as flashcultures–form on them and move around.
Picture the web as an enormous block party. Facebook, Tumblr, and scores of other platforms are houses, each with its own music, decorations, and activities. Clusters of people gather at different houses for a while, drawn by some particular thing, then wander off to another for a change of pace, singly or in groups. Sometimes something draws a lot of attention unexpectedly, and a group forms around it, then splits up to go tell everyone else, and soon you’ve got people in every house talking about it. The houses are just places to gather with some conveniences; culture is what people do there.
(In this analogy, by the way, the YouTube comments section is the basement of the crackhouse. :p)
Exactly. And in this analogy, my son and I might be at Facebook, but I’m in the kitchen and he’s in the den, and we might say hi to one another once in a while in the hallway. I have no idea what he and his friends are doing in the den, and if I accidentally catch a glimpse, I carefully look the other way and pretend I didn’t see the metaphoric bong being passed.
Then he leaves the Facebook house and goes to others, and I don’t even know what neighborhood they’re in, much less what the address is.
I’m 37…when I am out at the coffee house as I was tonight, there are a bunch of 16-17 year olds that hang out there. They don’t seem to say or do anything that screams “generation gap” to me or out of the realm of what I did in high school…other than being far more wired in far more than I was (in 1993-1994 the internet was around, but something you only experienced on a desktop station at the end of a very fussy little modem). There is no music that really pushes any buttons, in fact I suspect if a kid sang out “bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks…” he’d get tagged a neanderthal sexist numbnut by many other kids his age today. The one generational shift I perceive is that - at least middle class - teenage boys seem to be less concerned with seeming hypermasculine and hyperheterosexual now then in the past.
I keep waiting for the moment when some kid wears something that just outrages me, or blasts a song I consider utter racket. Still waiting…
Objective studies concerning whether any given younger generation are actually more ignorant (or worse behaved or more frivolous) than their older generation were when they were young come up negative. It’s just how it seems when you are older.
To believe as you do is like believing your eyes when you see an optical illusion: there are times when - if you want to be wise - you need to put what your senses or instincts tell you to one side and rely upon objective sources.
All very true. As I’ve mentioned before, I shoot concert video, and have done nearly 100 concerts by various locations of the School of Rock, an after-school music program for kids age 7 through 17. And the kids I talk to are musical sponges. They listen to a huge variety of different stuff, and if they get interested in a band or genre, they can explore it completely. Like the Stones? OK, you can read some archived interviews and check out all the music Keith and Mick listened to growing up, as well as all the bands they influenced.
When I was a kid, hearing new music was so much more difficult. You might discover something on the radio, but good luck hearing the DJ back announce it. Then you had to buy the record, and you might like the rest of it or not, but it took a significant investment of your limited funds.
As 3trew said: Robert Johnson will out. Good friends of ours are half our age, and they have built their career playing the music they love - which pre-dates Robert Johnson by two generations. They are playing Charley Patton style Country Blues on the freaking Van’s Warped Tour - and got voted “Favorite Band” by the other bands on the tour. Tomorrow they play the WOMAD festival in England!
The thing is, there is no longer a monolithic “Youth Culture” and that’s good.
Well, there never really was a monolithic “Youh Culture”, even in the fabled '50s-'70s, there were the aforementioned Jocks, the Preppies, the Greasers, the Nerds, or the Freaks, not to mention The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and dickheads.
Before that, even in the '20s, there were kids who listened to jazz and the blues, and other kids who were taught those types of music were sinful. At some point back in time, I imagine the strange kids were listening to music in perfect temper, or wearing pants that went to your ankles, or something else outlandish.
Society is surely always doomed at some point vague point in the future due to this deplorable behavior. When it is all over, we’ll surely blame the animal hats.
I’m not talking about minor reshuffles of old stuff, a slightly different guitar amp, or a mohican that’s been cropped a few inches. I mean radically new, and I mean on a mass level.
Example: metal - no great innovation since late 60’s, a bit of a speed up in the 80’s, but nothing really new. Plastering your hair down and wearing a chain on your britches doesn’t count. Essentially it’s been a stable form for about 50 years. No I wouldn’t count black metal or such as a great innovation, or that of anyone’s favourite band. Sorry.
Same with rap: Anything really new for the last 30 years ? I mean really new ? On a mass level ? Nah.
I’d say rap was a radically new thing at the time, just like massive metal power chords may have been somewhat new in the mid late sixties.
Same with everything else. Society has been too stable for radical change to come about. Depends on technology I guess so I would think that what will be radically new will be network based, direct to brain, implanted, google glass type stuff - because what else is there ?
Millions of people dress like that now. They dressed like that 30 years before that execrable film was made. That’s my point. Jacket, jeans, sneaker they’ve been there since - you tell me ?
If everyone went round in dayglo bodystocking like the power rangers then I’d say there had been a bit of innovation (and I wish they would) - but that stuff is just for comic cons.
You mean “there’s have only been tiny little changes in the last 50 years but I don’t care about that because I feel like those eensy little changes define me and if you say they are not HUGELY important then you are saying that I am not HUGELY important and I will have to put you in your place!!!”
You can be as tribal as you want about your cultural identities, it’s still, on the whole, dead as a doornail.
Yah, I’m amazed Nirvana are still front page magazine news. But then again, when I was listening to them as the records came out the rock scene was highly conservative, repeating old forms, and stuck in the past. Or the kids were, myself included.
With the caveat that I don’t really know what “youth culture” was like in the late 90s or before because I was either a little kid or not alive, as a 23 year old I feel like the concept of “culture” kind of died as any sort of identifiable homogenous entity, with distinct readily identifiable subcultures. There are still a few identifiable cliques and subcultures like hipsters, but in general I feel like especially since the internet took off that culture has had this weird thing where it simultaneously fragmented and homogenized all at once.
While I’m sure that the silly cliques in movies have always been a bit of an oversimplified pastiche, I’ve even seen adults remark on some of the oddness of modern kids/young adults. I’ve never really seen “themed” cliques where everybody likes the same things, everything feels a lot more fluid. The star varsity volleyball player is also a D&D nerd, and the vapid sorority girl who only listens to the Billboard Top 40 is obsessed with Doctor Who, and the horror geek really like '50s Big Band music.
Certainly there’s still a “mainstream culture” to a degree, and fads and trends and things that are identifiably more popular than other things, but it seems incredibly common for almost everybody to have three or four interests completely out of the mainstream, which I suspect is because our exposure to pop culture isn’t dictated by marketing in quite the same way anymore; meaning that what we’re exposed to isn’t limited to what we can find on a shelf in a store and the way we find new interests doesn’t come from the same TV stations and magazines. Because you can log onto the internet and suddenly there’s an entire forum devoted to your fascination with chewing ice or whatever. And Cracked got you really interested in Armenian dramas with a one-off joke, and finding more to watch was just a Youtube search away.
Basically, rather than “fitting in” a subculture, people have a bunch of little fragmented interests and don’t really fit in anywhere, but also kind of fit in everywhere. Kind of a blessing and a curse.
