Paradigm Lost? Youth and Pop in the 90S Rupa Huq
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soundings issue 6 Summer 1997 Paradigm lost? Youth and pop in the 90s Rupa Huq Youth culture in the 1990s has been redefining itself around two vibrant musical forms - dance and Britpop. Rock, initially at any rate, was a contemporary incitement to mindless fucking and arbitrary vandalism: screw and smash music. George Melly, Revolt into Style Throughout its existence pop has been an essential part of British post-war youth culture: a cathartic outlet for youthful self-expression, empowerment and liberation from adult culture. Encapsulated in the Who lyric 'hope 1 die before I get old', pop mythology has dictated the value of dying young and beautiful. (Although the Who never lived up to their stated aim.) When slacker king Kurt Cobain did die young he was elevated to youth icon status, helped by his suicide declaration - 'it's better to burn than fade away'. Pop has always been young because sound and fury equate with youth; quiet signifies maturity; and ultimately silence denotes death. But today pop's assured place at the core of youth culture seems precarious. Youth culture is undergoing profound changes. In an ironic reversal, four decades of pop history means that it is steeped in the past: the subject of numerous books, publications and even university degrees. The pop-youth cohort is increasingly difficult to sustain; pop's audience has become more than teenage malcontents. In 1995 Simon Frith, founder of the 'sociology of rock' commented: 'age is a funny thing in music. For young people now, rock and roll is old people's music.'1 Indeed, 1. 'Rock of Ages', interview with Simon Frith by David Walker, Times Higher Education Supplement, 1.12.95. 180 so much so that 'pop is dead' has now become a fashionable line to take. The case for pop's demise was advanced in the early 1990s in both popular culture and academic discourse. For example, former punk journalist turned television cultural commentator Tony Parsons announced the 'death of pop' in The Times (21.11.92). In evidence Parsons cited radio stations based on the contradiction of 'nostalgia pop, tribute bands, computer games, music sales through jeans commercials, the ascendance of Australian soaps and the creative bankruptcy of current music in its revivalism and dehumanising technologies. Critics in the 1990s argue that rock/pop no longer offers escapism or reacts against the system, because it's been subsumed by the dominant culture. US academic Camille Paglia invoked the generation X stereotype when she claimed in 1992: 'rock is a victim of its own success... White suburban youth, rock's main audience, is trapped in creature comforts. They no longer have direct contact with folk music, blues, the oral repositories of love, hate, suffering and redemption.' xamples of pop's new found respectability were rife. The annual Mercury' Music Prize and the Brit Awards illustrate the passage from anti-establishment Eto arch-establishment. Big prize money and commercial sponsors have reduced pop to a competitive sport. Pop magazines aimed at the older post-music- press pop fan seemed also to deepen an erosion of pop's natural correspondence with youth. In 1993, following the success of Q magazine's formula of rock retrospective and stereo equipment review for the discerning (i.e. older) reader, came Mojo for post Q readers. A rash of 'classic' artists was relaunched for a younger, although not an altogether unsuspecting audience. From the grave emerged Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, their respective careers transformed from discarded back-catalogue acts to chart successes. Such acts were the antithesis of the rock and roll animal: never late, never answering back and never hung over. The technology of digital remastering has accelerated the process. Pop becomes a complete body of work, sold in box sets, subject of its own encyclopaedias like opera or classical music. The Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols punctured their one-time mystique by reforming. The fruits of the Pistols tour was released on CD to mop up the consumers unlucky(?) enough not to attend, faster than you could say the words Great Rock and Roll Swindle. The study of pop has found its disciplinal home under the rubric of cultural studies. However pop's defining characteristics of spontaneity and youthful allure are to an extent undermined when it becomes the stuff of tutorials and lecture 181 Soundings halls, promoted by the Friths and Paglias. This academicisation is a two-way process. For some years the distinction between rock journalism and academic criticism has been blurring, with the rise of anthropologically influenced 'style journalism' as exemplified by The Face. Jon Savage's writing has appeared in the blew Left Review, Sunday supplements and the music magazines. Tony Parsons has spent the 1990s arguing that there were no more heroes alongside Oxbridge dons on BBC2 and Channel 4 arts programmes. A 1994 advert for his newspaper, The Telegraph, showed him in a megastore being mobbed by a crowd of adoring girls. op culture's demise can also be observed when its products rise to political prominence. Tony Blair, having once played in a student band, attached Phimself to rock symbolism by appearing with U2 at the Q music awards in 1995. The arguments of such nostradamuses of pop are in a large degree imprisoned in their authors' own age-centred prejudices, which create a 'things ain't what they used to be' generation gap. Media cliches about 1990s youth - the slackers and generation X - provide a negative to the nostalgic coverage of the anniversaries of Woodstock and the Isle of Wight festival. Yet the notion of pop music's centrality to previous generations is itself a falsity. The Summer of Love did not impact on everyone equally. Many young people were completely untouched by it. And even accepting the 1960s orthodoxy of the pop-youth paradigm, there is no reason to assume that new generations will follow suit. Young people in the 1990s have increasing means at their disposal to attain youth culture's eternal goals. There is not one unitary youth culture but many: ravers, techno, cyberpunk, indie kids, goth, junglaists, grunge, bhangra, ragga, internet junkies and even ... squares. If we take rock to be music which is guitar based, with melodies of regular pace, perhaps it is dead - or perhaps is being replaced by other entities: variations on a theme. After all transience and ephemerality are an important feature of contemporary musical forms and youth culture. Rave on: 90s dance Rave has been ominously labelled the last subculture. In media circles much of the early 1990s was spent scrabbling around in a quest for the 'new rock and roll' (alternative cabaret, cyberspace, etc). The candidate that seemed most likely was 90s dance music, even though it was regarded as a sign of the end of pop itself. Other 'death of pop' allegations have been aimed at cultural forms which have displaced pop's force, but dance music is different, because all of its offspring - 182 techno, hard house, handbag house, ambient, hardcore, jungle, drum and bass, intelligent house, Goa trance and what London's Time Out calls 'other moves and grooves' - are original musical forms. Rave is the event to which the techno-based soundtrack is added. Yet the received wisdom of 'music' and 'the song' has led to claims that techno isn't music at all. This is rooted in the received wisdom of 'music' and 'the song'. Indeed techno does break all the conventions. The beats per minute rating of a track is crucial. The composer passes other people's music through a sampler to be reconstituted anew; Techno does not even rely on regular musical notation, it is recorded straight onto tape, bypassing the need for additional musicians to play other parts. Punk DIY is updated for the 1990s, substituting the guitar and three chords for a pile of records and a mixing desk. Techno is the ultimate 'be-there' joke: mood music which is meaningless when divorced from its context. Few would listen to nine hours of uninterrupted techno at home, yet it makes perfect sense at a rave. Techno is anonymous, contrasting sharply with the usually accepted 'social' function of music making and performance from its folk roots. Rave contradicts the spectacle of the pop concert. DJs are known by reputation alone: the name Carl Fox or Fabio on a flyer will attract audiences who wouldn't recognise their hero even if they fell over him in the bottled water queue. Britpop (vs dance): problematics/politics If dance is devoid of personalities, Britpop has thrived on them. Oasis and Blur's 'Who's the greatest.7' phoney war made Newsnight in the Summer of 1995. In April 1996 Jarvis Cocker of Pulp raised eyebrows with his stage invasion of Michael Jackson's perfonnance at the Brit Awards. The same summer Oasis's laddish antics nudged aside world affairs in UK news coverage. In Britpop 'working-class and hard' has been a desirable attribute. Middle class bands such as Suede (Haywards Heath, Sussex) and Blur (Colchester, Essex) have thus seen fit to appropriate cockney accents (mockney) and intonation in their singing voices. The lineage of ostentatious laddishness with the eye on 'looking good' can be traced back to the 1980s 'casual'. But despite the macho image Britpop has also encouragingly produced a number of strong female role models: Elastica's Justine Frischman, Sleeper's Louise Weiner and Echobelly's Sonia Madan, who is also Asian. These performers are outspoken in interview. Their assertive, upfront posturing is reflected in the slogan 'girl power' which symbolises sexual confidence. This attitude has 183 Soundings also informed the hugely successful Spice Girls.