Technikart interview
For you, the beginning of Youth Culture starts in 1875. Is this date as emblematic as 1954, the beginning of rock’n'roll with Elvis?
Well no, because 1954 represents the culmination of various deep cultural and social process while I was trying to go back to the very beginnings. I could have started the book in the second half of the 18th century (with “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and the Romantics) but I wanted to start at the beginning of the modern era, typified by the mass age: urbanization, mass production, the involvement of the masses in cultural social and political life. (These trends were examined by Gustav Le Bon’s influential 1890’s polemic “The Crowd”).
I just found these two autobiographical accounts written by real life adolescents in their own words at about the same time – Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy, summer 1875 – and they seemed to suggest the twin poles of youth: heaven or hell. The media presents the same dichotomy today. A subtheme of the book is the struggle by adolescents to relate their experience on their terms rather than those dictated by adults.
You are very well known for your writings on counter-culture, The Sex Pistols, The Kinks… Why did you decide to write this book which didn’t talk at all about pop and punk ? Which are the connections? Do you think the more you become older, the more you will write about older times?
I wanted to go into a different time. I deplore the trend in music and cultural writing in general that valorizes personal experience above everything else. It’s a corruption of the confessional/ expose impulse, a degraded kind of authenticity that ends up being bathetic and solipsistic. Wouldn’t you say that it’s a massive failure of intellectual nerve?
To not think about yourself is very liberating. It was a great privilege for me to enter different periods and different psychologies and to try to understand what people thought and felt they were doing at any given time. For instance, why did a large proportion of European youth go to war so enthusiastically in 1914? Why did such a large proportion of German adolescents join the Hitler Youth after 1933?
I suppose my counter-cultural interests come out in the fact that I am always interested in the people who embody the future, who make something new happen or envision future worlds. That is a function that our society ascribes to adolescents, so it is highly relevant to the subject. However these visionaries or pioneers are placed against the great mass of youth who hold to the values of their society at the time.
Why was it hard or impossible to be a teenager before 1944? Is it a problem of marketing? The biggest prevention was economic, or politic, or social, or cultural?
The word teenager did not pass into general use before autumn 1944 so it was hard, but not impossible, to be something that did not yet have a name. In fact the Swing Kids were teenagers in all but name and the College Market in the 1920’s – the Sheiks and Shebas – were also. So the biggest prevention was probably conceptual as well as economic. Things were very different in Nazi occupied Europe, where it was near impossible to be a teenager because the Nazi definition of youth was the direct opposite, and enforced with great brutality.
Why was the entertainment’s industry before 1945 a familial entertainment ? Why at that time the adolescents weren’t a profitable target for the industry?
The entertainment industry – as other industries – goes for those with money. Adults had money. Adolescents were seen to be a profitable market in the 1920’s –but that was eradicated by the Depression – so the process to the institution of the Teenage was a long one, that began in the later 1930’s with Swing Culture.
Is the Youth Culture a weapon against society, or is it an industry’s weapon?
It has been both. Particularly in the sixties and seventies: that gives a lot of tension to the hippies and the punks. Not so today in the Western World, I think. That is why the book is a disguised polemic. I would like people to think carefully about Youth Culture actually means today.
You show in “Teenage” personalities and movements who were outside the market economy. Since the fifties, rock’n'roll is part of capitalism. Is it a problem?
See above.
You show that the Youth Culture generally runs with revolt, rebellion. Is it still true or an old fashion point of view at the age of the MySpace Generation?
Not always. Youth can be reactionary, if not fascist: see the Hitler Youth or the Islamic fundamentalists. The idea that youth is automatically progressive is a sixties/ seventies concept. A very valid one, but not always true. I think today that pop and youth culture has won: therefore adolescents today are catered to as never before and indulged by their parents as my generation never were. There are good and bad sides to this.
Was it before 1945 an act of rebellion for a young man to simply assert himself young, or the rebellion came from a structured speech, a voluntarist and provocative step?
The avant-gardists of the 1900’s/1910’s pioneered the idea that the fact of youth was in itself automatically hostile to adults/ elders. This was taken up after the First World War when the discourse was that the old men have sent the young to die in the fields of Flanders. Depending on their temperament, people then erected theories and ideologies to explain and/ or legitimize this basic adolescent impulse.
See this quote from a group of Midwestern adolesecents in Robert S.Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd: Middletown: A Study in American Culture (researched 1924/5 and published 1929):
‘Boy. “Parents don’t know anything about their children and what they’re doing.”
Girl. “They don’t want to know.”
Girl. “We won’t let them know.”
Boy. “Ours is a speedy world and they’re old”.’
You show the courage and innocence of pioneers, it was before the victory of the society of the spectacle… Is it a nostalgic book?
No because people can have courage and be pioneers today. I can’t be nostalgic for something that I did not experience. I am not a particularly nostalgic person anyway: as much of my work has to do with the past, I like to live in the present and the future. Also there is a big difference between nostalgia and history.
You close your book at the end of WWII, “the teenager triumphant”. And after, what counterculture and rock change to Youth Culture?
Well not as simple as that. I might write the story from 1945 to 1954. After then, we all know the story. Don’t we? How many books are there on Elvis or the Beatles? After the full establishment of Teenage Culture in the mid 50’s you have the move to political and social power after the mid 60’s. That’s when rock and the counterculture become powerful. During the 1980’s the music and youth industries become integrated into the mainstream media economy with the effects that we see now: greater visibility and greater acceptance but decreasing meaning and impact.
Since 1945, the date in which your book ended, Teenagers are triumphant. Will it continue like this for a long time ? After this cycle, which could be the next triumph?
I see the Teenage model as being central to Western society today so it will continue as long as that social model continues. What will become dominant next: well that’s the question that the book asks. I don’t have the answer. There is always the possibility that future youth cultures/ organizations will not be benevolent. For all its problems, the consumer youth culture that we have has allowed adolescents a safe enough arena within which to act out. The real ecological damage is only becoming clear now.
Today, the Youth Culture touches everybody, from 3 to 77 years old… Is it a proof that we live now in a progressive society?
I don’t know that the two are automatically linked. There are progressive elements to our societies, in particular in the reduction of religion in national life and greater social tolerance. For all the problems under Tony Blair’s government – in particular the disastrous decision to go to war – there have been steps made towards making life better for citizens, particularly in relation to gay rights to name but one. However underlying this model are the harsh and potentially lethal conditions of unrestrained capitalism.
You still write about youth music, you like Arctic Monkeys… Isthere still rebellion in rock today ? Is still Youth Culture a hearth of subversion?
I don’t write about the Arctic Monkeys in terms of rebellion, but in terms of music. That may seem trite but it is important to be aware that music and youth/ music marketing are or can/be two separate things. Even though much of it is not aimed at me, I still retain enough love for the form to wish to recognize new pioneers. I don’t think that the Arctic Monkeys are subversive – what does ‘subversive’ mean today: I throw this question open to your readers – but they are doing something new musically, something that could not have been made in any other years than 2006/7. So they are saying something about the world today.
In general, I see youth culture today as being a mildly conservative arena. I don’t have a huge problem about this, but let us not pretend it’s anything else.
Your books are very respected, your writing style too: apart of your talent and your erudition, why is it not any more a joke to write about rock and youth culture ? Is today what was called “the subculture” the new official culture?
Well people have been writing well and seriously about pop for fifty years at least, from Colin MacInnes in the late 50’s, to Derek Taylor in the mid sixties (those great sleeve notes for the Beatles and the Byrds) and then to the Rolling Stone mafia (Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Ed Ward etc) in the late 60’s. So it isn’t a question of that. The problem is that there are and have been so many bad books about pop music and youth culture, but then there are bad books about everything.
But to the terms of your question: yes absolutely the margins have become the mainstream. Back when I was a real time teenager I had no doubt that this stuff – pop/ youth culture – was important and was worth covering with the same respect and rigour and love as anything else. This was not a popular view in the late 60’s: for instance, my parents and teachers were horrified. They thought it was worthless.
So in many ways – thanks to the industrial processes detailed above and various generational factors: the ageing of the baby boom – the subculture has become the official culture like you say. But within that transaction there is a downside: namely that the charge and the power that this outsider culture had has been removed from today’s pop culture – all too often a recitatif of stock postures – and from accounts of pop/ culture history, which attempt to present something that was alive and threatening as mere nostalgia, all of bit of a laugh etc.
Are you working on the “Teenage”‘s continuation, from 1946 to 2008?
I would never carry the story up to date. Too much data to get through in a lifetime. I could write a sequel, as I said above, from 1945 to 1954. But I shall probably do something different. The next thing I will work on is making a TV series out of Teenage.
There are a lot of writings about counter-culture. Are you too and still very interested about the sixties period ? Which is the relation between youth culture and counter culture ? What does it mean exactly for you, “counter culture”?
I do think that the sixties and the seventies were the height of mass culture and the youth culture that was so much a part of its genuinely democratizing process. I have to say that counter culture is not a phrase I often use but I would think it to mean a youth or subculture that presents itself in opposition to the status quo, whether political, artistic, sexual or social.
You show that Youth Culture is also a fight for freedom, because the margins wanted recognition. Are today the old margins a new conformism ? Do you think the fight have to continue ? In which ways?
Well we’ve talked about this already. The old margins have become a new conformism, in many ways. The new struggle will be conducted on different terms, and it will concern the next stage of the mass, now the global society. How will this society be run? Under what organizing principle after consumer capitalism? My book aims to show how we got into this situation in the first place.