December 29, 2014 |
I’d like you to come with me on a journey into the past. Alas, I’m not taking you anywhere particularly exotic. We’re going to my secondary school, on charity no-uniform day in 1984. Actually, perhaps it is at least a little exotic by today’s standards, because, temporarily unshackled from the yoke of the blazer and the school tie, the whole place is a huge, broiling mass of youth cults. Almost everyone seems to belong to one music/fashion clan or other.
There are goths. There are heavy metal fans. There are soul boys, at least one of whom has attempted to keep with prevalent male fashion trends at the Caister Weekender and the Canvey Island Goldmine by growing a moustache, with precisely the results you might expect from a 15-year-old attempting to grow a moustache: what’s going on just above his top lip is almost indescribably pathetic. There are anarcho-punks, devotees of bands such as Crass and Conflict, many of whom seem to have squared said artists’ fearsome revolutionary anti-capitalist, class-war agenda with being picked up and dropped off at school by their mums. There are Morrissey clones with their quiffs and long overcoats and, incredibly, there are a couple of ersatz hippies, a ballsy move in 1984, when hippies are being mocked on a weekly basis by The Young Ones’ Neil. And there are a surprising number of psychobillies, an almost-forgotten 1980s youth cult that was fond of music that melded rockabilly and punk – The Meteors, Demented Are Go, Guana Batz, King Kurt, the latter of whom distinguished themselves by releasing an album called Big Cock, which featured a photo of a giant cockerel on the cover and was advertised with the striking slogan KING KURT’S BIG COCK IS OUT. They effected a cartoonish look that somehow contrived to be completely ridiculous and terrifyingly suggestive of a barely contained capacity for violence, in which heads shaved save for a vertiginous quiff – usually dyed green or red or yellow – figured heavily. One of the psychobillies turned up on no-uniform day wearing a giant banana costume – presumably in tribute to King Kurt’s recent hit Banana Banana – and Dr Martens. I’m not making this up.
This is, I should add, not a school in London or Manchester or Glasgow or any of the kind of hip metropolitan location where youth cults are held to begin and thrive. It’s in the Home Counties, in a small town of such preternatural boringness that the local paper one week ran with the banner headline NO END IN SIGHT FOR BIN-BAG MISERY – the introduction of a new, slightly thinner and less-robust bin bag by the council’s refuse department being held to be the most exciting thing that had happened in the previous week. I expect the scene would have been much the same at any secondary school in Britain, at pretty much any point in the 1980s, albeit with a slightly changing cast: a few years before, there would have been Two Tone fans and mod revivalists; a few years later, ravers and bowl-cut-sporting Madchester fans.
Fast forward to 2014. I’m 43, I live a couple of streets away from a sixth-form college in Brighton, and almost everyone who studies there seems to dress, more or less, like me, though a little heavier on the 1980s-revival gear (there’s no dignity in wearing clothes that you can remember the first time around). But nothing about them signifies the kind of music they like, or indeed anything much about their personality. The only visible members of a youth cult are the emos, with their dyed fringes and their lip piercings and their Nightmare Before Christmas rucksacks. Emo seems to have swallowed up goths, punks and heavy-metal fans into one, all-purpose, black-clad throng – incidentally, the only youth cult to have attracted the kind of what-will-become-of-our-children censure from the media in recent years that was commonplace from the moment teddy boys and girls appeared in bombsite-scarred London in the late 1940s. On the streets of Brighton, you still occasionally see people who adhere to the codes of a youth cult, who define themselves by the way they dress, but they’re not youths. Every August Bank Holiday, the city is invaded by mods in the time-honoured tradition, but the mods are pretty time-honoured themselves: chubby, balding, paunchy guys, their wives squeezed into unforgiving 1960s dresses.
So what happened? Where did they go? Some of the theories are deeply depressing. One suggests that teenagers are so satiated by the plethora of entertainment on offer to them in the 21st century that they no longer feel the need to rebel through the way they dress. Another is that they just don’t care about music in the way that previous generations did. From the teddy boys to ravers to the Britpop fan with their jumble of mod styling and sportswear, youth cults were defined by their relationship with music, but when was the last time you saw a kid making an active effort to dress up like a pop star the way their parents or uncles might have copied The Cure’s Robert Smith or Morrissey or Paul Weller. Another suggests that teenagers who have grown up in a world dominated by social media feel self-conscious, as if they’re under constant surveillance by their peers. That self-consciousness makes them non-committal, hence the rise of the much-reviled hipster, a term that’s now so ambiguously applied as to be virtually meaningless, but which at its root always seems to involve appropriating fashion and music from the past with a knowing smirk. You can’t really call the rise of the hipster a youth cult, because a youth cult, by definition, requires commitment: you couldn’t be a goth or a punk or indeed a psychobilly in a knowingly detached and ironic way, not least because the way you dressed and the music you like could quite easily get you thumped by people who thought differently. The most depressing theory of all might be the one that claims that, in a time of financial instability, your average teenager is too worried about their future to indulge in anything particularly rebellious or creative.
I’m not sure I agree wholeheartedly with any of these ideas. There’s probably a grain of truth in all of them, but there’s also a large dose of tsk-kids-today eye-rolling, the infinitely wearying sound of people who refuse to let go of youth culture in their thirties and forties telling the actual real-life young people that they’re doing it all wrong. A far more plausible explanation is that the decline of the youth cult has at least something to do with the rise of fast fashion and the cheapness and availability of music in the internet age. Clothes on the high street are far cheaper and hipper and more diverse than they were 30 years ago, when anything vaguely out of the ordinary had to be sought out (via a visit to Kensington Market or Affleck’s Palace, or whatever your relatively local equivalent was, or bought by mail order): that encourages a kind of sartorial promiscuity, flitting from one look to another as the mood takes you, rather than committing to one style. The same thing has happened to music. Where once, anything outside of the Top 40 required a visit to a specialist record shop, or trawling the second-hand racks, now everything is on YouTube – it’s a shock when you can’t find something on there, no matter how obscure. Why would you restrict your musical diet to one specific genre, when the table before you is groaning with the entire smorgasbord of rock and pop, inviting you to pick at it?
Moreover, there’s a sense that the internet has fundamentally altered the way teenagers relate to the world and especially their peers. Over the past decade, there has been an ever-increasing sense that the image you project online is infinitely more important than the image you project in real life. You can sigh at this as a terrible symptom of our isolated, atomised society, but in fairness, the former image is probably the one most people are going to come into contact with most often. And adopting a persona online is easier (and cheaper) than trying to demonstrate something about yourself by changing the way you look. Youth cults were never just about clothes and music, they were about banding together, a sense of belonging, membership. Now, you can align yourself with ostensibly like-minded people by joining a message board or commenting on a Facebook page. You don’t have to try to look like them.
On one level, it seems a shame that what a sociologist would call “spectacular” youth cults are now largely something to get nostalgic about, rather than excited about, or afraid of or – if you work on the Daily Mail – outraged about. It’s hard not to think that footage of teenagers in 2014 is going to look less colourful, more homogenous than film shot 30 years ago. Then again, there’s a sense that youth cults vanishing or shifting online represent an advance. After all, no one’s going to get battered – at least not physically – by someone from a different youth cult any more. And no one is going to feel compelled to dress up in a banana costume to prove their commitment.
By Alexis Petridis
