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Seventeen magazine, 1944

‘You dictate to everyone in music’, Seventeen magazine told its young female readers in September 1944; ‘You are the bosses of the business’. The editors of ‘Seventeen’ had done their research: estimating that there was a youth market out there worth $75 million, they produced the first modern era magazine that helped to usher in the era of the teenager.

Since its full inception at the end of the Second World War, the teenage market has relied on music as one of its biggest hooks: indeed the very existence of the teenage market was predicated, to some degree, on the manic crowd scenes that greeted appearances by the Benny Goodman Orchestra and Frank Sinatra.

So, if you’re going to sell music to teenagers, it seems fairly obvious that that music should contain qualities that will appeal to adolescents. In the 1920′s and the 1930′s, before the terms ‘teenage’ and ‘youth culture’ were coined, the sheer energy and – to adults – atonal noise of hot jazz was enough to demarcate the generation line. But that’s as far it went. If there any Charlestons about acne or swing tunes about school, I haven’t found them.

As teenage marketing was more seriously pursued during the Second World War, it became to some degree self-conscious. Hence the emergence after 1945 of songs about what it is to be a teenager, with all that adolescent angst and potential purchasing power. Naming something helps to bring into being, so all the fifties songs about teens and teenagers reinforced the nexus between youth, music and money.

Ranging from 1940 to the present day, these fifty songs – arranged in chronological order – contain various thoughts and feelings about what it is to be adolescent. Some are shameless cash-ins, others reveal acute insights, others just celebrate peer power. The list is not supposed to be definitive, but organised around various keywords: youth, teen, teenage, adolescent, generation. Any omissions are accidental. (Date given is of first release)

1: Judy Garland, In-Between (1939)

Recorded in the same session as “Over The Rainbow”, this talky show-tune had been already featured in the hit film, “Love Finds Andy Hardy”. Two weeks later, Garland and her co-star in the Andy Hardy series, Mickey Rooney, went to New York for the premiere of “The Wizard of Oz”, and caused a riot. On the 14th of August 1939, Grand Central Station was swamped by a ‘screaming, delirious, roped-in mob’ of 10,000 fans.

When “The Wizard of Oz” was premiered on the 17th, 15,000 fans were thronging the streets around the Capitol Theatre by the time the box-office opened. Alerted by this visible display of peer power, reporters noted that 60% of the crowd were ‘minors’. By the end of the day, Garland and Rooney had played to 37,000 customers, and this pattern – jammed streets and mobbed stars – continued for the rest of the show’s run.

This was one of the events that kick-started teenage marketing in the US: later riots around Frank Sinatra’s appearances at the Paramount Theatre in New York during 1943/4 reinforced the point that here was a large, volatile social group of people that had money, visibility, and clout. At this time, the term denoting young consumers changed from ‘sub-deb’ to the more music specific ‘bobby-soxer’ and the age-derived ‘teenster’ or ‘teen-ager’.

With lyrics by Roger Edens, “In-Between” accurately pin-pointed that adolescent dilemma: are you a child or an adult? Garland looks forward to the day when she’ll become sixteen: then she’ll stop being ‘an awful in-between’, ‘too old for toys and too young for boys’. Echoing Garland’s own confusion – a young woman of sixteen strapped up during “The Wizard Of Oz” to play a child – it remains a haunting document from the very start of teenage culture.

2: T-Bone Walker, Bobby Sox Baby (1946)

Written by longtime LA music industry all-rounder Dootsie Williams, ‘Bobby Sox Baby’ offers an accurate portrait of the new youth world and the generation gap it caused. ‘Bobby Sox Baby, I’ve got to let you go’ moans T-Bone, ‘You’ve got a head full of nothing/ But stage screen and radio’.

In the verses, his charges are specific: ‘you chase all the bands every night/ You write fan mail through the day/ You keep your big head in a scrapbook/ And you’ve thrown the cookbook away’. Born in 1910, T-Bone was obviously too old for all this fol-de-rol, and his slow blues – punctuated by his stinging electric guitar – is a defiantly mature response.

3: Boyd Bennett and his Rockets, Seventeen (1955)

In the slipstream of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around The Clock”, “Seventeen” was one of the first big rock’n roll hits in both the US and the UK. Like Haley, with whom he would share bills in 1955 and 1956, Bennett was on the cusp of his thirties – a professional musician equally at home with swing, country and R&B. After playing on sessions with Earl Bostic and Bill Doggett, he decided to fashion something for the teenage market.

With booting sax and vocals by the 425 pound trumpeter Jim ‘Big Moe’ Muzey, “Seventeen” celebrated the girl ‘young enough to dance and sing/ old enough to get that swing’. Bennett was shrewd enough to itemise all the period’s teenage style signifiers: ‘sloppy shirt, old blue jeans, dirty jeans…patch of blonde, peroxide hair’. And relentless enough to record another song, “My Boy Flat Top” that, aimed at boys, celebrated the rockabilly hairstyle.

Seventeen had long been favoured by writers who wanted to celebrate adolescence. In 1916, Booth Tarkington’s “Seventeen” had been a best-seller, echoed by Maureen Daly’s 1942 examination of high-school mores, “Seventeenth Summer”. Invoking the dark side. Graham Greene had written of his gangster anti-hero, Pinkie: ‘there was poison in his veins, although he grinned and bore it. He had been insulted, they thought because he was seventeen’.

4) Don Julian And The Meadowlarks: Boogie Woogie Teenage (1956)

In the mid 50′s, vocal groups were the currency of the day, the period equivalent of R&B. The style that scored with the young public were slow, unearthly ballads like the Penguins “Earth Angel” – a true teenage swoon. It’s success made Dootsie Williams’ Dootone label a magnet for Los Angeles groups and the Meadowlarks – led by sixteen year old Don Julian – were the smoothest.

One of the group’s few rockers, “Boogie Woogie Teenage” is little more than a standard boogie riff. The lyrics celebrate the new youth world – ‘well if you’re ever on jukebox street, let me tell you about the kids you’ll meet’ – but despite an energetic performance that takes off in the break, the horn-based arrangement is rooted in a style that was becoming obsolete. But the buzzword was out.

5: The Teenagers, I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent (1956)

Featuring the unbroken voice of thirteen-year-old Frankie Lymon, the Teenagers were one of the most popular acts in America during 1956. Entering the charts before “Heartbreak Hotel”, the fresh, stripped-down Doo Wop of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” went all the way up to number six, making the group authentic adolescent deities and an inspiration to their peers.

Recorded for inclusion in the film “Rock Rock Rock”, “I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent” was the Teenagers’ fourth single, and the group’s first flop in the US – although it went top twenty in the UK. With its didactic lyrics – ‘listen boys and girls/ you need not be blue/ life is what you make of it/ it all depends on you’ – the song was designed to reassure adults that these teens were clean: an ironic message in the light of Frankie Lymon’s later experiences.

Although first used in the 1810′s and common during the 19th century, the phrase ‘juvenile delinquent’ came back with a vengeance during the Second World War and the 1950′s. Unlocking the door to a whole of youthful misdemeanour, it was shadow side of the word ‘teenage’: a dichotomy that still persists in today’s news stories about adolescents as ideal consumers and early adopters versus teenagers as feral, uncontrollable criminals.

6: Chuck Berry: Sweet Little Sixteen (1958)

Berry’s biggest hit remains a peerless invocation of the young female consumer upon whom the history of pop culture rests. “Sweet Little Sixteen” begins by name-checking as many cities as possible –a sure fire way of getting territory by territory sales – before elaborating on the themes already established by “Bobby Sox Baby” and “In-Betweens”.

Half a girl and half a woman, sweet little sixteen just ‘got to have about half a million framed autographs’ but still has to ask her parents to go out late. The last verse gets to the heart of the problem, sex: ‘sweet little sixteen, she’s got the grown up blues, tight dresses and lipstick, she’s sporting high-heeled shoes, but tomorrow morning she’ll have to change her trend and be sweet sixteen and back in class again’.

7: Dion and the Belmonts, A Teenager In Love (1958)

More sweet sounds from hardened inner-city kids. Formed in the Bronx and led by nineteen-year-old Dion DiMucci, the Belmonts specialized in the limber Doo-Wop that was the pop currency of the day. Released the month after Buddy Holly’s death – the Belmonts had been on the same tour but could not afford the money for the fatal plane ride – this was their biggest hit to date.

Written by professionals Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, “A Teenager In Love” was sparse, melodic, a prolonged swoon. It the market for adolescent self-absorption fair and square, rising to number 5 in the US charts. Like Frankie Lymon, Dion’s clear and innocent sounding vocal worked against his own experience as a young performer in a very tough neighborhood. Unlike Lymon, however, he survived and continues to record today.

8: Steve Carl with the Jags, The Eighteen Year Old Blues (1958)

After the fantasy, a slice of reality: ‘I’m feeling low down, I’m eighteen, and I don’t know what to do with my future: I’ve got the blues man’. Over a sparse, minimal backing, Steve Carl (born Steven Leuthold) ponders the options open to him as a young man in Minnesota: ‘go to school, work for Uncle Sam, get a job as a factory hand’.

9: The Five Chesternuts, Teenage Love (1958)

With its brutally simple instrumentation and yearning lyric, “Teenage Love” marks the moment when Brits started to make decent pop records. (It was quickly followed by Cliff Richard’s “Move It”.) Real life teens, the Five Chesternuts included future Shadows Bruce Welch and Hank Marvin, who co-wrote this rudimentary Buddy Holly knock off that contains within its lilting energy the first time innocence of a generation finding its voice.

10: Sun Ra, A Teenager’s Letter of Promises (1959)

The word ‘teenager’ was such a hot branding device that the future interplanetary jazz legend Sun Ra turned his hand to the topic. Already experienced in Doo Wop, Sun R (as Mr.V) put together this bizarre, spookily effective mixture of echoed recitatif (‘and now reminiscent of the lover’s voice, I shall be the shadow lying at your feet’) and yearning female vocal by Juanita Rogers.

11: Sandy Nelson, Teen Beat (1959)

What to call an instrumental? At 21 already a maven of the LA music scene – with credits including the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is To Love Him” – Nelson recorded this simple but rousing drum track, added a hot guitar riff, hitched it to the current marketing buzzword, and watched it go top 5 in the US. Tapping into the then current fad for instrumentals (Duane Eddy, Johnny and the Hurricans) Nelson helped to initiate the forthcoming surf style.

12: Mark Dinning, Teen Angel (1960)

With its melodramatic storyline – car gets stalled on railway line, the pair escape, the girl goes back for Mark’s high school ring and perishes – and greetings card sentimentality, this gloulish slice of kitsch went to number one in the US. In the UK, the BBC refused to play it but it hit the top forty nevertheless.

Dinning was a country singer in his mid twenties when he recorded “Teen Angel”. The song’s relentless morbidity tapped right into the Romantic nexus of youth and premature death that had been a staple of twentieth century youth culture – think of Rudy Valentino – and that fifties teens had claimed their own with James Dean and Buddy Holly – to name but two.

13: Bob McFadden and Dor, The Beat Generation (1960)

Like Teenage, ‘generation’ had long been one of the keywords unlocking the key to the 20th century youth world. In the hands of the Expressions and the Futurists during the 1910′s, it tended to take on somewhat of a punkish, crudely ideological flavour – ie we’re young: you’re old: move over – that resulted in its further take up during the 1920′s.

From the Lost Generation to the Beat Generation was not too big a step: a term coined by the junkie hustler Herbert Huncke, ‘I’m beat’ meant ‘beaten’. Taken up by Jack Kerouac and popularized by fellow writer John Clellon Holmes, ‘the Beat Generation’ became national news in the US after the 1957 publication of Kerouac’s “On The Road”. By 1959 the term had become the shorthand to describe a new youth style.

A B movie theme tune, “The Beat Generation” was a collaboration of Bob McFadden, a voice-over artist, and Rod McKuen (Dor), fresh from a whole album of hipster haikus, “Beatsville”. Over a crude burlesque riff, McFadden slurred various beat signifiers – ‘I run around in sandals/ I never ever shave’ – which were interspersed by McKuen’s interjections: ‘weirdsville’, ‘back on the road’ et al. Sixteen years later, Richard Hell stole the riff and the lyric for his manifesto, “Blank Generation”.

14: George Chakiris, The Heart of A Teenage Girl (1960)

Maverick producer Joe Meek described himself as ‘completely pop minded’. Nowhere is his determination ‘to cater to the teenage market’ more apparent on this early attempt. An American dancer and actor, Chakiris was one year away from stardom in “West Side Story” when he cut this formulaic ode to the mythical girl ‘who is only seventeen’. Meek would soon perfect his approach.

15: Helen Shapiro, Don’t Treat Me Like A Child (1961)

A real life teen – 14 when she cut this record, a huge hit UK in early 1961 – Shapiro projected a confidence way beyond her years. Despite being saddled with a Norrie Paramor production – Light Programme strings and brass, those dreadful ‘ye-ye-ye’ female back-ups – she stamps her authority on the lyric: ‘well just because I’m in my teens and I still go to school/ Don’t think I dream childish dreams: I’m nobody’s child.’

This sense of being caught between two ages had been observed by British sociologist Pearl Jephcott in her pioneering 1942 survey of “Girls Growing Up”. She quoted a sixteen year old’s complaints about her parents: ‘at home you are a child if it is convenient for them at that moment but the moment that they want to put something on you they say you’re a grown up’. When Shapiro asserts ‘my point of view has got to be known’, you feel that she means it.

16: Cliff Richard, The Young Ones (1962)

The theme tune to the ‘let’s do the show right here’ clean teen film and the start of Cliff Richard’s imperial period, “The Young Ones” went in at number one and stayed there for six weeks in early 1962. A great pop production – with the swing of the Shadows balancing producer Norrie Paramor’s sweetening tendencies – the song celebrates living in the present, the transience of youth, all those fundamental teenage tenets.

17: The Beatles, I Saw Her Standing There (1963)

Titled ‘Seventeen’ until the last moment, the lead track from the Beatles first album acted as a manifesto for a new pop age. No pizzicato strings or shrill female back-ups here, just tough, guitar-driven rock’n roll and sharp, colloquial lyrics (‘she was just seventeen, you know what I mean) that described teenage life as it was or could be. As the b side of “I Want To Hold your Hand”, it hit the American top 20 in February 1964.

18: The Beatlettes, Only 17 (1964)

One of the earliest Beatle novelties in the US market, this exultant mash-up of “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, “She Loves You”, “I Saw Her Standing There” crackles with energy. Right from the opening count-off, these tough girls know what they want and they know how to get it. The song was put together by Shadow Morton, who quickly refined his explorations of the young female psyche in the melodramatic, wide-screen productions for the Shangri-Las.

19: The Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (To Be A Man) (1964)

A fascinating concept – a look at adolescence from the point of view of adulthood written by an adolescent – is matched by an inventive production: harpsichord, tricksy drumbeat, and soaring harmonies. ‘Will my kids be proud or think that their old man’s really a square’,’ ponders Brian Wilson, while the group harmonises behind him: ‘eighteen, nineteen’. The follow up to “I Get Around”, “When I Grow Up” went top ten in autumn 1964.

20: The Who, My Generation (1965)

By the mid 60′s, the word teenage had fallen into comparative disuse. As a term that had often denoted adult exploitation, it had become obsolete. Pop groups did not discuss what it was to be young, they just hit you with the raw emotional state. However, the word generation still held its ideological power, no more so than in this blast of fury, where the manic air raid finale takes you right into the state that the lyrics are attempting to describe.

The extraordinary thing in retrospect is that this record was a huge hit. Many observers have stuck on the famous ‘hope I die before I get old’ lyric, but what “My Generation” does, apart from basic peer assertion (‘for the twenty year old man, every old man is the enemy’, a futurist writer had written in 1912) is go deeper. Pete Townshend was one of pop’s most psychological writers, and “My Generation” sounds more like war damage than anything else.

21: The Eyes, My Degeneration (1966)

Tragedy replayed as farce. “My Generation” was a huge hit in late 1965, and many London groups – like David Bowie’s Mannish Boys – were already in thrall to their violent, pop art sound. From Ealing, the Eyes had a good line in op art visuals, and offered this Who parody/ homage in early 1966 – constructing this account of trying to get a young woman into bed. Their failure to do so was their ‘degeneration’, which was not how moralists would have seen it.

22: Chad and Jeremy, Teenage Failure (1966)

Stars in the US but ignored in their home country, Chad and Jeremy had by 1966 moved from Peter and Gordon towards that more contemporary duo, Simon and Garfunkel. The Dylan-esque “Teenage Failure” recast the frustration of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” within contemporary folk-rock modes but, despite a TV plug on “Batman”, it succumbed to the fate predicted by the lyric: ‘sometimes it seems that the world has passed me over’.

23: Eric Burdon and the Animals, When I Was Young (1967)

Eric Burdon was only twenty-five when he wrote this confessional, but he’d obviously gone through some kind of rebirth. In place of the hard-drinking R&B singer who’d made some of the UK’s toughest beat records, there was a reflective, angst-ridden man looking back at his brief life: ‘I was so much older then, when I was young’. How did this happen? If the psychedelic production didn’t alert you, then there was the flip, “A Girl Named Sandoz”.

24: Keith West, Excerpt From A Teenage Opera (1967)

A huge UK hit in the autumn of 1967, this four and a half minute song summarized many of that year’s fads: ornate instrumentation, several themes, the return to childhood (most notably in the kids’ chorus that provides the hook). However it does not refer to adolescents at all – being a taster for producer Mark Wirtz’s ambitious (and stillborn) Teenage Opera – which is very of the period.

25: Victor Lundberg, An Open Letter To My Teenage Son (1967)

One of the forgotten phenomena of the mid sixties is the American backlash against pop. If you read US magazines from the period, there is an undercurrent of reader and adult resentment against the long-hair and anti-establishment attitudes of figures like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. This hostility recognised the increased power and politicisation of youth culture.

1966 saw the banning of several records – like the Byrds’ masterpiece, “Eight Miles High” – for drug references, while the Beatles were pilloried and threatened after John Lennon’s comments on organized religion were reported in the US press. One of the biggest hits of the year was Sgt. Barry Sadler’s militaristic anthem, “The Ballad of the Green Berets”: number one for five weeks in March and April.

In America, Vietnam was the flashpoint for the generational war and as the conflict escalated, so did the sides become more entrenched. This long recitatif begins with Lundberg talking about long hair and beards on men – he can deal with them – and his willingness to judge his son ‘not merely as a teenager’. Not all teenagers are ‘drunken dope addicts or glue-sniffers’. So far so good, but then the patriotic music swells.

‘You ask my opinion of draft-card burners,’ Lundberg states, and then goes off on a rant: ‘if you decide to burn your draft card then burn your birth certificate at the same time: From that moment on, I have no son’. Closing with a couple of ‘amen’s, this effective slice of propaganda went to number 14 in the US charts and prompted a slew of patriotic records as well as an answer record by one Brandon Wade, “Letter From A Teenage Son”.

25: Mike Curb, Pot Party (1968)

Another adult recitatif, this time from the B movie “Teenage Rebellion”. To a groovy soundtrack of ominous bass and guitar fret-scrapings, our gravel-voiced guide extends an invitation: ‘come over to a similar apartment in the Village, smoke a joint, burn a little grass, pot party, roach party, mainliner, skin-pop, shoot some crystal, the language of the narcotic and marijuana user, the language of a large and ever increasing number of teens’.

Sounds great, but there’s more on offer: ‘if marijuana is the appetizer, the advent of space age technology has provided the main course, Lysergic Acid Diathelemyde, LSD the crazy acid’. It ‘may be the forerunner of a new drug society out of some science-fiction writer’s imagination: will drugs pave the road to destruction for the NOW! Generation?’ Other songs from the soundtrack include ‘The Gay Teenager”, “The Call Girl”, and “Teenage Rebellion” itself.

26: Nina Simone, To Be Young Gifted and Black 1969)

Inspired by pioneering activist Lorraine Hansberry’s play of the same name – which was first performed off-Broadway in 1969 -Nina Simone wrote “To Be Young Gifted and Black” as an inspiring anthem to a youth that needed it: ‘young, gifted and black/ We must begin to tell our young/ There’s a world waiting for you/ This is a quest that’s just begun.’

Simone had long been associated with civil rights, “Mississippi Goddam” was written in response to the Birmingham Church bombings and her 1968 album, “Nuff Said”, was recorded live three days after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Simultaneously light and rousing, “To Be Young Gifted and Black” quickly became a standard, being covered by Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, and – in reggae style – Bob and Marcia (UK top 5 in 1970).

27: Neil Young, Sugar Mountain (1969)

Solo acoustic Neil, in a definitive emotional summary of adolescence. ‘You can’t be twenty on sugar mountain’, runs the chorus, ‘though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon’. Verse by verse, Young runs down the developmental stages: going to the fair with your parents, getting hidden notes from a girl, running into peer trouble, smoking your first cigarette, and then leaving home: ‘ain’t it funny how you feel when you’re finding out its real’.

28: MC5, Teenage Lust (1970)

With the turn of the seventies, teenage became a vogue word again, as a new micro generation sought to place some ground between itself and the hippies. From the MC5′s attempt to tap into this younger market, “Back In The USA”, comes this witty tale of teen frustration. Unsuccessful in his quest to find ‘release’, singer Rob Tyner finds the ‘perfect plan: I shake my ass and swing in a rock’n roll band’. The music backed him up all the way.

29: Alice Cooper, Eighteen (1971)

‘Lines form on my face and hands,’ ponders Alice in this archetypal slice of teenage confusion: ‘I’m in the middle without any plans, I’m a boy and a man’. In the early seventies, Alice Cooper really scored with a string of hits of which this was the first: his doubts – ‘I’m eighteen: I don’t know what I want’ – were echoed five years later by the young man who auditioned to this record. ‘Don’t know what I want,’ Johnny Rotten sang, ‘but I know how to get it’.

30: The Lost Generation, Talking The Teenage Language (1971)

Produced by Eugene Record, then having huge success with the Chilities, this slow, wracked, bass heavy meditation deals with the harsh reality that followed on from the hope of the sixties. ‘The kids today live in much anguish’, so they talk in the teenage language, which in the hands of the Lost Generation sounds like a darker version of Shirley Ellis’ “The Name Game”. It ends with a plea: ‘listen to our cries before it’s too late’.

31: Flamin’ Groovies, Teenage Head (1971 )

Too young and too punky for the San Franciscan boom of the late 60′s, the Flamin’ Groovies perfected their bluesy, psych-punk on their classic third album, “Teenage Head”. This prime slab of male teen angst – ‘I’m a monster, got a revved up teenage head’, ‘I’m angry, and I’ll you mess you up for fun’ – was dignified with a sociological explanation: ‘I’m a child of atom bombs and rotten air and Vietnam’. Right on!

32: Mott The Hoople, All The Young Dudes (1972)

Touching several teenage bases – stylish self-destruction, juvenile delinquency, media scapegoating et al – David Bowie’s hymn to the kids who got spots from sticking stars on their face became a rock anthem in summer 1972. Blame it on Mott, who slowed the track down, put the riff up front, and let Ian Hunter cajole the teens with a perfect mix of sarcasm and menace. Generational note: ‘is there concrete all round, or is it in my head?’

33: The Sweet, Teenage Rampage (1974)

Announced by squalling guitar and crowd noises, this was the fourth and last in the Sweet’s series of glam blockbusters. Programatically confused in its calls for a teen takeover – ‘go join the revolution get yourself a constitution’ – ‘Teenage Rampage” is nevertheless epic, fast hard pop, and does contain a germ of perceptiveness in all the verbiage: ‘but they don’t care!’

34: Hello, Teenage Revolution (1976)

From high to low, from the sublime to the ridiculous, the idea of street rock was in the air long before Punk Rock became a national obsession. Tucking into the tough glam end of things were Hello with this rather vague manifesto: ‘natural evolution – sure to blow your mind’. The public was not convinced by such sentiments, especially when uttered by young man in appliquéd denims.

35: Trevor White, Crazy Kids (Teenage) 1976)

Another pre-Punk hybrid. White had been in hard glam band Jook and had played guitar on Sparks’ “Propaganda” before staking his claim to the new age. Despite its chant of ‘teenage’ in the chorus and the references to speed, “Crazy Kids” was too Americanised and slick to hit its intended market. The picture sleeve of White in a turquoise jump suit did not help.

36: Sex Pistols, Seventeen (1976)

The Sex Pistols’ first manifesto, and a fine piece of cheek by twenty year old Johnny Rotten: ‘you’re only twenty nine, got a lot to learn, about when your business dies, you will not return’. Here was the program: ‘we like noise, it’s our choice, it’s what we wanna do, we don’t care about long hair, we don’t wear flares’. The version chosen is the demo on “Spunk”: for the opening lyric above, changed by the time it was rerecorded on “Never Mind The Bollocks”.

37: The Ramones, Teenage Lobotomy (1977)

The mid 70′s were the period when adolescent mental health problems skyrocketed in the US, a serious problem underpinning the Ramones’ typically mordant view on the topic. From the groups’ last really great album, “Rocket To Russia”, “Teenage Lobotomy” thrives on its sick humour: ‘guess I’ve got to tell em, now I got no cerebellum’.

38: The Adverts, Bored Teenagers (1978)

As a self-consciously youthful style, Punk continued Glam’s obsession with the word ‘teenage’. It also highlighted (adolescent) boredom as a cosmic principle. Combining both themes, “Bored Teenagers” is fast, short, articulate and excitingly skittish (part of the Adverts’ appeal was the possibility that they might musically fall apart). Key line: ‘bored teenagers, see ourselves as strangers’.

39: The Undertones, Teenage Kicks 1978)

Before it became a cliché, this was a blast of youthful energy from a blasted environment that encouraged neither. Written and driven by one of Britain’s great forgotten talents, John O’Neill, “Teenage Kicks” goes beyond a willful refusal to acknowledge the sectarian violence that ravaged the group’s hometown Londonderry: with its lusty evocation of teen courting rituals, it becomes an affirmation of the life force.

40: The Buzzcocks, Sixteen (1978)

An unusually staccato manifesto from this most melodic of Punk groups. From the grand old age of twenty-one, Pete Shelley looks back at the innocence that he feels he has so recently lost. His wish to be sixteen again changes, by the song’s end, into a furious, screaming denunciation of teen culture: ‘and I hate modern music, Disco Boogie and Pop, they go on and on and on and on and on: how I wish they would stop!’

41: X Ray Spex, Germ Free Adolescents (1978)

The group’s fourth and most successful single (number 11 in the UK) replaces thrash with guitar reverb and a great vocal from Poly Styrene: defiantly English, and affecting in its halting cracks. The theme is how, by experimenting on youth in the name of consumerism, society takes the young away from nature and helps to create neurotic patterns. Not much has changed then.

42: The Cramps, I Was A Teenage Werewolf 1979)

‘Somebody please make me stop’: harking back to the archetypal ‘fear of youth’ B movie from 1957, the Cramps take you right inside teen compulsiveness with a brutal fuzz guitar and a good line in sly wit. ‘I have puberty rites’, yells Lux Interior, ‘And I have puberty wrongs’. Scary and funny is a good combo, especially when backed by a killer riff lifted straight from a 1950′s hoodlum instrumental, “Strollin After Dark” by the Shades.

43: David Bowie, Teenage Wildlife (1980)

A long, wordy comment on youth marketing and how it uses up its raw material. Already in his thirties, Bowie had gone through most sixties youthcult variants before helping to invent Glam, and was unimpressed by the latest teenage revolution: ‘are you one of the new wave boys? Same old thing in brand new drag’. At the same time, however the video for “Ashes To Ashes” popularized the latest style on the merry-go-round, the New Romantics.

44: Beat Happening: Bad Seeds (1986)

The spearhead of a tiny indie scene based around Olympia, Washington’s K Records, Beat Happening’s faux naïf approach verged on the creepy. But they really hit it on their update of William March’s famous novel of adolescent evil, 1954′s “Bad Seed”. Propelled by a chunky 60′s spy theme guitar, singer Calvin Johnson turns basic adolescent obnoxiousness into a new manifesto: ‘a new generation for the teenage nation: this time let’s do it right’.

45: The Gruesome Twosome: Hallucination Generation (1989)

A fine example of what was called Belgian New Beat but what now sounds like early Trance. With a growling vocal and shrieking samples offsetting spacy synths, the Gruesome Twosome offer a humorous commentary on contemporary Acieed shock horror stories, as per the sixties documentary sample: ‘have you ever seen a psychedelic circus, and the acid heads? Pill party to pill party’.

46: Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991)

A revolutionary record based on a misapprehension: the title referred to a deodorant rather than any innate adolescent genius (or maybe the two had become intertwined by this point). Armed with a killer riff and a transcendent performance, this troubled song fulfilled a prophecy: Kurt Cobain was a big K Records fan, and “Teen Spirit” initiated ‘a new generation of the teenage nation’.

47: Manic Street Preachers, Sorrow 16 (1992)

Proclaiming themselves ‘generation terrorists’, the Manic Street Preachers worked very hard to distinguish themselves from their beatific, baggy contemporaries. Illuminated by a great sliding guitar figure, the hard rocking “Sorrow 16″ (the b side to the Top 20 “Slash’n Burn”) is their kiss-off to their own ‘useless generation’: ‘you live stoned on obedience’.

48: Pet Shop Boys, Young Offender (1993)

An uptempo stormer that examines the vexed relationship between the generations. Not a criminal but a sulky love, the young offender plays computer games (cued by synth swarms), while his older partner tries to deal with the boredom and resentment that clouds the air: ‘how graceful your movements, how bitter your scorn; I’ve been a teenager since before you were born’.

49: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Generation 2005)

If you’re going to use the word ‘generation’ in a song title, you need to rise (or descend) to the occasion. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club did so on this relentless yet melodic rocker: ‘I don’t feel at home in this generation’, they spit; ‘I’m keeping up with you and your invasion eyes’. In the true spirit of aimless protest, they repeatedly mutter at the song’s finale: ‘don’t fuck with me’.

50: Robbie Williams, Teenage Millionaire (2005)

Full of gratuitous obscenity, this rocking B-side represents Williams’ bilious riposte to his Take That years: ‘being stupid makes you lots of money’. Set to a riff and a drum pattern not a million miles away from “Smells Like A Teen Spirit”, “Teenage Millionaire” is the gleeful sound of Robbie having his cake and eating it: ‘I ain’t supposed to BOAST/ But I don’t care/ I was a teenage millionaire’.

51: Girls Aloud, Teenage Dirtbag (2006)

Recorded live at the Brixton Academy, this version of Wheatus’ huge pop/punk hit switches the genders but keeps the high school scenario. Quite apart from the fun of hearing the UK’s premier girl group inviting you to see Iron Maiden, their feisty performance updates those old girl group records (think of the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back”): ‘His girlfriend’s a bitch!!!!!!!/ She has an attitude/ And she’d simply kick my ass if she knew the truth’

52: LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver (2006)

Jamie Murphy’s relentlessly blank approach really suits this song’s high concept. Sounding like a tranquillised Phil Oakey, he croons over artfully re-presented 80′s synth tropes: ‘sound of silver talk to me/ makes you want to feel like a teenager/ until you remember the feelings of/ a real life emotional teenager/ then you think again.’ Murphy is 36, and truer words have rarely been intoned.

53: Arctic Monkeys, Flourescent Adolescent (2007)

Full of Alex Turner’s earthy observations – ‘was it a mecca dobber or a betting pencil?’ – “Flourescent Adolescent” mixes reggae with a bit of disco to tell the story of a rave-era? adolescent facing the onset of middle-age. But this isn’t a slag-off, more a meditation on the strength of teenage ideals: ‘those dreams, weren’t as daft as they seemed, not as daft as they seemed my love, when you dreamed them up’.

Posted on September 24, 2008 at 4:43 pm