'Speaking of Youth Culture': a Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice
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4 ‘Speaking of Youth Culture’: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice Andy Bennett Introduction For a number of years, theorists have suggested that the term ‘youth culture’ corresponds with particularized forms of youth cultural practice clustered around the more spectacular manifestation of the consump- tion of music, style, and associated objects, images, and texts. However, such a focus serves to close off any discussion of ‘ordinary’ youth, that is, those young people who are not obvious, card-carrying members of style-based youth cultures. With the increasing turn in academic research to issues of youth leisure and lifestyle in more mundane con- texts, combined with a growing body of work focusing on youth’s online practices, questions now need to be asked about the value, and validity, of focusing on ‘youth culture’ as this term has hitherto been defined and applied in sociology, cultural/media studies, and other academic disci- plines interested in the cultural practices of youth. Aligned with this is the blurring now evident between youth culture as an age-specific practice and as a series of discourses through which individuals who are far beyond any categorization as ‘youth’ based on age continue to invest in ‘youth cultural’ identities. For example, many adults identify as punks, hard-core, or dance music fans, while simultaneously engag- ing with adult responsibilities and leading adult lives. This chapter will examine these and other challenges to our understanding of the term ‘youth culture’ and consider whether the latter continues to be a valid conceptual and analytical category. Key to the argument presented in 42 D. Woodman et al. (eds.), Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations © The Editor(s) 2015 Andy Bennett 43 the chapter will be that youth cultural studies needs to become more aware that elements of both the spectacular ‘and’ mundane combine in the cultural practices of youth. A further dimension of the argument presented here is that such cultural practices increasingly form part of the biography and identity of individuals across the life course rather than merely being limited to youth and early adulthood. Youth cultural studies in context Although the phenomenon of youth culture has attracted the most widespread attention, academically and otherwise, during the period of contemporary history beginning with the end of the Second World War and the emergence of the leisure and consumer industries, the historical legacy of youth culture spans a much longer period of time. For exam- ple, Pearson (1994) documents a style-based gang comprising young apprentices in London during the 17th and 18th centuries who became notorious for their drinking habits and various forms of riotous behavior in city streets. Similarly, both Roberts (1971) and Fowler (1992) refer to stylistically distinct youth groups, such as the Salford Scuttlers, in north- ern England during the late 19th century and also during the interwar years. In Germany, Peukert (1983) identifies similar historical trends in stylistically spectacular youth cultures during the early 20th century. Youth culture is then not merely, as is often mooted, a product of the post-Second World War consumer boom, although there is little doubt that socioeconomic changes and technological developments occurring in the West during that period had a significant impact on the nature of youth culture from that period onward. The years following the Second World War saw a period of affluence buoyed up by near-full employment as postwar reconstruction and the rollout of new mass production industries got under way. Given the sheer number of adult males killed during wartime hostilities, there were significant gaps in the postwar labor market and these were often filled by young people between the ages of 15 and 25. The resulting affluence among this section of society created an increased demand for youth-targeted leisure and the emergence of consumer products – music, fashion, literature, and film, for example – targeted primarily at a youth audience (see Chambers 1985, Bennett 2000). Music in particular became a primary driver for new youth sensibilities as a new genre of pop icons, beginning with Elvis Presley in the 1950s and expanding in the 1960s with groups such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys, culturally connected with youth audiences who were typically of a similar age and 44 Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice shared a similar outlook on life (Shumway 1992). This ‘youthquake’, as Leech (1973) has referred to it, also gave rise to a steadily increasing number of stylistically distinctive youth gangs or, as they came to be termed, ‘subcultures’ (Clarke et al. 1976). Early postwar examples of this included the Teddy Boys, the mods and the rockers. Newspaper reports of clashes between the mods and rockers at seaside towns on England’s southeast coast during the mid-1960s placed these youth cul- tures at the center of a nationwide moral panic (Cohen 1987), a trend that continued into the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as subsequent youth cultures/musical genres such as punk, heavy metal, and dance were sim- ilarly targeted by the media (see Laing 1985, Thornton 1994, Bennett 2001). In terms of its representation as an academic object of interest, youth culture has also been considered primarily in terms of its significance in a postwar context. Hall and Jefferson’s (1976) Resistance through Rituals is something of a landmark study in this respect due to its highly sophis- ticated, and much emulated, theorization of postwar British youth cultures as articulating forms of collective resistance based on their expe- riences of class and class relations in late capitalist society. This position is developed and refined by Hebdige (1979) in his reading of punk as a stylistic response to the chaos and malaise present in Britain at the end of 1970s as the country plunged into a period of economic depres- sion. The subcultural studies tradition initiated by Hall and Jefferson and other researchers based at Birmingham University’s Centre for Con- temporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) also acquired transnational currency, for example, in Brake’s (1985) comparative study of youth cultures in Britain, the United States, and Canada, and in Weinstein’s (1991) study of heavy metal’s appeal for blue-collar youth in North America. As noted elsewhere (see, for example, Bennett 2002), the CCCS subcultural theory has been criticized on a number of accounts. These include the CCCS’s lack of attention to gender and the role of girls in youth (sub)cultures (McRobbie 1989), the metropolitan centeredness of its approach (Clarke 1990), and its overreliance on textual analysis at the expense of conducting ethnographic studies of youth (Cohen 1987). In the early 2000s, a new critique of subcultural studies emerged in the shape of what came to be known as ‘post-subcultural’ theory. Taking its inspiration from both postmodern theory and the ‘cultural turn’, a movement in sociological and cultural theory that argued for the reconceptualization of individuals as reflexive agents engaged in the coproduction of culture, post-subcultural theorists such as Bennett (1999), Miles (2000), and Muggleton (2000) argued that subcultural Andy Bennett 45 theory was too rigid in its interpretation of youth cultures as merely a product of class circumstances. Rather, it was suggested, youth cul- tures were better positioned as key examples of the way that media and consumerism gave rise to new, reflexive forms of cultural identity based around affective associations grounded in taste, aesthetics, and lifestyle. Where are the ‘ordinary’ youth? Conceptually speaking, post-subcultural theory represented something of a radical departure from subcultural studies (Bennett 2011), as evidenced by the rapid publication of two edited collections dedi- cated to evaluating the importance of post-subcultural perspectives (see Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003, Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004). While debates as to the advantages and disadvantages of applying subcultural and post-subcultural perspectives continue (see Bennett 2005, Blackman 2005, Hesmondhalgh 2005, Shildrick and MacDonald 2006), what is clear is that in both subcultural and post-subcultural approaches the emphasis is still largely upon what has been referred to in this chapter and elsewhere as spectacular youth. However, while the terms ‘subcul- ture’ and ‘post-subculture’ have essentially become conceptual code for addressing more visually marked renderings of youth cultural identity, for example, punk, hardcore, metal, rap, and so forth, the term ‘youth culture’ is now also being increasingly applied to more ‘mundane’ prac- tices such as texting, drinking, online social networking, and so forth (see, for example, Green 2003, Griffin et al. 2009, Robards 2014). In previous work on youth culture, such examples of more ‘mainstream’ youth activity, particularly when engaged in by youth who appeared to have no obvious stylistic affiliation, tended to be left in the amorphous and quite problematic category of ‘ordinary’ youth. However, even during a time when it was largely taken for granted that the study of youth culture amounted to something more than the study of ‘ordinary’ youth, a number of theorists pointed out that the distinctions between ordinary and spectacular youth were not as clear-cut as some might want to believe. Thus, as Frith observed: The problem is to reconcile adolescence and subculture. Most working-class teenagers pass through