Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'
Author: The Subcultures Network
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317628217

This book examines youth cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that affected Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, it considers the extent to which elements of youth culture and popular music served to contest the notion of ‘consensus’ that historians and social commentators have suggested served to frame British polity from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The collection argues that aspects of youth culture appear to have revealed notable fault-lines in and across British society and provided alternative perspectives and reactions to the presumptions of mainstream political and cultural opinion in the period. This, perhaps, was most acute in the period leading up to and after the seemingly pivotal moment of Margaret Thatcher’s election to prime minister in 1979. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'
Author: The Subcultures Network
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317628209

This book examines youth cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that affected Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, it considers the extent to which elements of youth culture and popular music served to contest the notion of ‘consensus’ that historians and social commentators have suggested served to frame British polity from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The collection argues that aspects of youth culture appear to have revealed notable fault-lines in and across British society and provided alternative perspectives and reactions to the presumptions of mainstream political and cultural opinion in the period. This, perhaps, was most acute in the period leading up to and after the seemingly pivotal moment of Margaret Thatcher’s election to prime minister in 1979. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain
Author: David Wilkinson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2016-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137497807

As the Sex Pistols were breaking up, Britain was entering a new era. Punk’s filth and fury had burned brightly and briefly; soon a new underground offered a more sustained and constructive challenge. As future-focused, independently released singles appeared in the wake of the Sex Pistols, there were high hopes in magazines like NME and the DIY fanzine media spawned by punk. Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain explores how post-punk’s politics developed into the 1980s. Illustrating that the movement’s monochrome gloom was illuminated by residual flickers of countercultural utopianism, it situates post-punk in the ideological crossfire of a key political struggle of the era: a battle over pleasure and freedom between emerging Thatcherism and libertarian, feminist and countercultural movements dating back to the post-war New Left. Case studies on bands including Gang of Four, The Fall and the Slits and labels like Rough Trade move sensitively between close reading, historical context and analysis of who made post-punk and how it was produced and mediated. The book examines, too, how the struggles of post-punk resonate down to the present.

Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983

Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983
Author: Patrick Glen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-12-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319916742

This book is a work of press history that considers how the music press represented permissive social change for their youthful readership. Read by millions every week, the music press provided young people across the country with a guide to the sounds, personalities and controversies that shaped British popular music and, more broadly, British culture and society. By analysing music papers and oral history interviews with journalists and editors, Patrick Glen examines how papers represented a lucrative entertainment industry and mass press that had to negotiate tensions between alternative sentiments and commercial prerogatives. This book demonstrates, as a consequence, how music papers constructed political positions, public identities and social mores within the context of the market. As a result, descriptions and experiences of social change and youth were contingent on the understandings of class, gender, sexuality, race and locality.

Cultures of Post-War British Fascism

Cultures of Post-War British Fascism
Author: Nigel Copsey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317539362

In Post-War Britain cultural interventions were a feature of fascist parties and movements, just as they were in Europe. This book makes a new major contribution to existing scholarship which begins to discuss British fascism as a cultural phenomenon. A collection of essays from leading academics, this book uncovers how a cultural struggle lay at the heart of the hegemonic projects of all varieties of British fascism. Such a cultural struggle is enacted and reflected in the text and talk, music and literature of British fascism. Where other published works have examined the cultural visions of British fascism during the inter-war period, this book is the first to dedicate itself to detailed critical analysis of the post-war cultural landscapes of British fascism. Through discussions of cultural phenomena such as folk music, fashion and neo-nazi fiction, among others, Cultures of Post-War British Fascism builds a picture of Post-War Britain which emphasises the importance of understanding these politics with reference to their corresponding cultural output. This book is essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying far right politics and British history.

Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism

Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism
Author: Ryan Shaffer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319596683

This book examines the domestic evolution and international connections of post-war fascists in the UK. It argues that post-war British fascism became transnational as the radicals increasingly exchanged ideas, money and culture with like-minded foreigners. Using interviews with key figures in several countries, this book traces the history of the National Front (NF) and British National Party (BNP), focusing on the political parties’ youth, music and international outreach. It explores how British fascism grew into an international movement, how fascist youth developed skinhead music as a conduit for their ideas, and how some of those key figures made international connections with people in Iraq, Libya, Syria and the United States. Moreover, it also draws from rare internal party documents, law enforcement records and membership lists to track foreign funding and the parties’ domestic electoral growth. For the first time, this book gained access to both the leadership and rank-and-file of the BNP and NF to explore its culture and international connections. In doing so, it shows the successes, failures and changes that have made British fascism a force in the international extremist subculture.

Music and Youth Culture

Music and Youth Culture
Author: Daniel Laughey
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2006-01-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0748626387

Music and Youth Culture offers a groundbreaking account of how music interacts with young people's everyday lives. Drawing on interviews with and observations of youth groups together with archival research, it explores young people's enactment of music tastes and performances, and how these are articulated through narratives and literacies. An extensive review of the field reveals an unhealthy emphasis on committed, fanatical, spectacular youth music cultures such as rock or punk. On the contrary, this book argues that ideas about youth subcultures and club cultures no longer apply to today's young generation. Rather, archival findings show that the music and dance cultures of youth in 1930s and 1940s Britain share more in common with youth today than the countercultures and subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. By focusing on the relationship between music and social interactions, the book addresses questions that are scarcely considered by studies stuck in the youth cultural worlds of subcultures, club cultures and post-subcultures: What are the main influences on young people's music tastes? How do young people use music to express identities and emotions? To what extent can today's youth and their music seem radical and progressive? And how is the 'special relationship' between music and youth culture played out in everyday leisure, education and work places?

"Changes". Using music to explore post-war British youth culture

Author: Lindsey McIntosh
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 19
Release: 2017-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3668432988

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Cultural Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 75 (A), University of Strathclyde, language: English, abstract: When the American director John Hughes chose to open the credits of his 1985 film "The Breakfast Club" with following lyrics taken from David Bowie’s 1971 single "Changes", his intention in doing so was to challenge the commonplace notions of youth plaguing 1980s teen-culture in America. "And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds, Are immune to your consultations – they’re quite aware of what they’re going through..." The film’s troubled ‘teenage’ protagonists, exaggerated caricatures of rebellious youth who spend an entire Saturday detention within a school library in atonement for their individual delinquencies, begin their journey defined ‘in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions’ lavished upon them by their adult authorities. Bowie’s lyrics were applied to "The Breakfast Club" by Hughes in order to glamorize the notion of ‘us versus them’ and youth isolation within the cultural landscape of 1980s America. However, these lyrics can also be aptly applied to the much-discussed issue of ‘youth culture’ within the British post-war landscape. Although ‘Changes’ was not released until the early 1970s, its lyrics effectively capture the tone of the previous two decades in Britain; decades in the throes of social and political change, with a newly formed ‘youth’ group who were becoming increasingly aware of that fact. Following the arrival of rock n’ roll in the late 1950s, British youths underwent a period of self-realisation in the 1960s as music, particularly rock n’ roll, drove a wedge between teenagers and the ‘parent culture’, effectively isolating them into their own unique cultural island. The primary ambition of this essay, therefore, will be to assess the change implemented by music during these post-war decades and whether it is possible to utilize music as a tool for effectively understanding youth culture and sub-cultures. Although each decade could be argued to embody its own distinct ‘mood’, effectively captured and echoed in its musical output, this essay will hone its energies primarily towards studying the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which a ‘fizzy electrical storm’ of a radiant post-war atmosphere was reflected and charged by its music. [...]

Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel

Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel
Author: Stephen Ross
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350067873

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many subcultures of Britain's teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of some of the most influential contemporary British writers. In this vivid work of cultural history, Stephen Ross explores: · The manic teenage vision of Absolute Beginners · The Angry Young Men of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning · Skinheads and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange · Irony and authenticity in the 1980s – from Amis to Kureishi · Heroin chic, disaffection and Trainspotting Examining the cultural contexts of some of the most important and popular post-1945 British novels, the book covers such themes as crises of masculinity, multiculturalism and inter-generational conflict, and in doing so casts new light on British writing today.

No Future

No Future
Author: Matthew Worley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107176891

An innovative history of British youth culture during the 1970s and 1980s, charting the full spectrum of punk's cultural development.