BF2S Forums what are you listening to right now?

Kids from different schools got in fights all the time, I'm sure french existentialist philosophy was uppermost in the mind of the average 14 year old, not how they could distract the newsagent so they could nick a packet of Rizlas.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2021-11-22 22:10:40)

you have a very good picture of how culture works, i'm sure.

of course the 14-yos were imitating their elder siblings or the older kids at school, the 'cool kids' and late-adolescents of the neighbourhood.

maybe even they didn't read french philosophy, fat chance in fact, but the concept was imported to popular culture via that philosophy. it had a clear trajectory and shelf life. the concept of authenticity, and of self-fashioning yourself, including by conspicuously consuming certain things and dressing in a certain way, didn't just spring out of a rock. the concept was a product of a specific sociocultural moment. cultures pick up and put down these concepts in interesting ways. again, i'm sure you understand how culture disseminates itself.

the 1980s were an incredibly tribalist, clique-ey-, identity driven era. people formed gangs based precisely around music taste. if you don't think 'authenticity' is central to gang/group formation, then go read a fucking book. honestly. you are clueless beyond all belief. just because you sailed blithely through the decade being fed whatever noel edmunds pumped out on car radio, didn't mean these huge cultural trends simply didn't happen.

even within the ska listenership, there was literally a huge ruction between the original, first-generation 'rudeboy' fans who came to ska through multicultural jamaican roots, and who tended to be inner-city cosmopolitan, and the racist skinheads who came via oi, hardcore punk, etc., and tended to be white working-class.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3790031

this article mentions authenticity about a half-dozen times.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-22 22:19:22)

I got to the bit where the kid didn't know the difference between a skinhead and a ska boy.

Kids like to join cliques, the stupid ones latch on and make it their whole identity, most of them grow out of it and forget it.


I'm sure existentialism is top of her priorities.

You weren't actually in the 80s though were you?

Teenagers took on an identity related to music, amazing.



And hung around in parks with like-minded people until they were old enough to go to pubs and forget about it.

Lol OK, I worked with a crew of skinheads for a year or two, deep existentialists they weren't. One of them only became a skinhead so people wouldn't bother him and he could drink in peace.

There was a kid at school who was deeply invested in NME, he picked a persona and after summer holidays came back as some Howard Jones/Nik Kershaw sort of thing. Everyone thought he was a dick.

I'm not a Dawkins fanboy

Most people do things because their friends are doing it - its really no more complex than that.

Nobody 'invented teenagers'. Kids spent longer in school and had time and energy on their hands.
They weren't invented by some Rand-esque marketing nut in a backroom over a lot of coffees and cigars.

the category of the teenager was literally helped into being by marketeers. specifically, the entire category of pop music was invented, packaged and sold to a new socioeconomic formation, known as 'the teenager', of culturally curious kids with pocket-money to spend.

First coined by American market researchers during the 1940s, the term 'teenager' was imported into Britain during the early 1950s. Presented by the media and cultural commentators as the vanguard of contemporary social trends, 'teenagers' were configured as the sharp-end of a new consumer culture. As writer Peter Laurie contended in his survey of The Teenage Revolution, published in 1965, 'The distinctive fact about teenagers' behaviour is economic: they spend a lot of money on clothes, records, concerts, makeup, magazines: all things that give immediate pleasure and little lasting use'. In these terms, the phrase 'teenager' was not a simple description of a generational category. Instead, it also carried a wealth of connotations that configured young people as the precursors to a world of leisure-oriented consumption; an exciting foretaste of affluent good times soon to be within everyone's grasp.

https://museumofyouthculture.com/teen-intro-three/

it's fucking ASTOUNDING how far out of your depth you are in these conversations. you don't know anything about history or culture at all. and yet you make me seem like i'm the ridiculous one. read richard hoggart's 'the uses of literacy', which talks about this at great length (and is an incredible book).

'youth culture' was literally a novel phenomenon to the 1950s. saying 'people do things because their friends do it' is massively insufficient for the huge collective trends – if not manias – of things like teddy boys, mods and rockers, punk, goth, etc. these things were literally seeded, for e.g., on the british isles by the american record industry. huge amounts of money, advertisements, supply-chain distributions, etc, went into it. how do you think an entire generation of teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s who grew up in northern-industrial towns ended up slicking back their hair and listening to rockabilly? do you think they downloaded it from the interwebs? lmao ffs. it was an industry that was shaping these people.

as i'm sure you're aware, with all those stadium concerts you go to, the main audience for pop music is still 12–16 year old girls. they are the main consumers of those huge industries. if you don't think that the market, and advertisers, haven't adapted or helped to shape this category, then you are stupid beyond all belief and clearly don't understand much about consumerism/materialism and its effects on subjects and identity-formation.

people went to woodstock for both reasons. that's how culture and 'cultural trends' work. it's not a bunch of perfectly rational people making simple transactions 'because we like it'. they went because it was also a hugely hyped thing and there was a great collective energy. it's part of the draw, the energy, the buzz, and always has been. you don't have to go to a festival to get stoned and listen to music with your friends ...

why are you so fucking dense? it's like trying to explain human beings to an autistic teenager.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-23 01:17:39)

can you read? i literally said that marketeers quickly responded to a new socioeconomic formation and coined/shape the 'teenager' as a category. of course they weren't directly responsible for young people having more time and more money – but they seized upon it and helped to concoct a whole plethora of goods, commodities and images which shaped young people's views of themselves and kept them faithfully coming back to the woolworths CD racks every weekend. there was FAR more to these emergent phenomena than 'kids like what they like and copy each other, so nur'.  stop being so fucking DUMB.

no one is saying everyone in the UK was a part of the swinging sixties or the punks. but they were widespread social phenomena. i just showed you a video where entire streets of working-class youths in ireland, of all places, were dressed like skinheads, rudeboys and punks. but, oh, it was just 'one little street in london', to be sure ...

richard hoggart did a landmark study of youth culture in the UK, taking the industrial terraces of LEEDS as his subject, and showed how a new wave of american youth culture had landed on british shores and changed the social fabric of life there forever; no longer traditional identities rooted in place, family, and other working-class institutions, but an internationalized/globalized 'youth culture' based on consumer categories. it's LITERALLY one of the founding texts of cultural studies and one of THE MOST INFLUENTIAL books to be published on this subject.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ … rd-hoggart
listed at no. 25 on the top 100 nonfiction books of all time. though you haven't heard of it, of course, and are derisive and dismissive as usual.

or read a short little book by dennis potter, 120 pp, 'the changing forest', which gives the same account in microcosmic form based on the forest of dean in the UK. you could read it in 2 hours if you liked. but you won't, because you're ignorant and like to think Dilbert Always Knows Best.

and on and on you prate about 'silly historians extrapolating from nothing'. you DON'T fucking read anything, you idiot. you don't even know how ignorant you are. many fine and well-researched books have been written on this topic. couldn't one say that YOU are at fault here, assuming you have an encyclopaedic knowledge and deep analytical grasp of the subject because, erm, 'i was there in the 1980s'. wow, well done.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-23 01:33:07)

ok so you're from a family of disconnected dunces, well done. meanwhile this stuff has been the purview of cultural commentary and academic study since the 1950s.

just to clarify, saying 'no one cared about authenticity in the 1980s, we just listened to what we liked' is one of the funniest things you have ever written. the entire pop-cultural stereotype of the 1980s is of everyone dressed ridiculously according to their musical tribe. i've got pictures of my own parents and younger aunts dressed according to music taste from the 1970s onwards.

try and make out it was 3 streets and a niche concern if you want. it's more likely you were just a white-bread normie. if manchester, liverpool, leeds, sheffield, birmingham, etc, could all give birth to distinctive youth cultures and subcultures, somehow i doubt it was limited to one privileged enclave in london. we are not talking about the swinging 60s exclusively, here.

didn't you grow up in fucking qatar or an oil-spewing emirate for fuck's sake? i'm sure you have an intricate knowledge of early 80s–90s youth culture.

https://www.pinterest.se/nightprinzess/ … n-the-80s/

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-23 02:09:55)

i never said any of the above were 'mainstream'. ska is not duran duran or kylie minogue, after all. i said that the 1980s was the hey-day of subcultures and to claim that people listened to ska music without any deeper investment in things like 'authenticity' is funny. ska being notable as a music that spawned entire gang cultures and violent confrontations between rudeboys/skinheads. i'd say quite a lot of people were listening to this music as more than background tootling on car journeys, and that it was vital, in fact, to their sense of identity whilst growing up. (if people do grow out of subcultures eventually, that's neither here nor there; to make out it was merely 14 year olds being schoolchildren is utterly laughable and yet another one of your knowing misrepresentations, for which you seem to have such a knack.)



what is truly strange is your desperation to make evidently nation-wide, if not international, currents of youth culture seem like 'a few streets, maybe, in london' and 'a few schoolchildren copying each other, nothing more'. lol fucking what? these were all-consuming lifestyles for whole generations of youth. i just pointed out to you a book about leeds, a book about the forest of dean, of all places ... we are discussing bands from essex and coventry ... but you argue against the idea it was nationwide youth culture? LOL ok, idiot.

as usual it's you arguing against the 'mainstream' of historical discourse. the idea of there being a post-1950s rise in 'the teenager' and 'youth culture' is an entirely orthodox political reading. there have been about 15 major books written about it. you don't read, so you don't know that, of course. so you argue from your piteous little corner, Dilbert Knows Best – "i wuzz there!" – and think this stands in place of actual argument. get a life.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-23 18:12:41)

amazing argument. a 'sub'culture isn't the mainstream. you've made a major breakthrough today. have a biscuit.

mods/rockers, punks, new romantics, ravers, etc, were all significant enough subcultures to create national debate and controversy.



no historian is claiming that rave was 'universal' and that 'everyone spent every weekend taking drugs', but the subculture was literally discussed in parliament and thatcher's/major's governments tabled legislation to control it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_ … r_Act_1994

it is a part of history, literally codified legal history as well as social history, and historians talk about it.

why dilbert wants to construe that historians don't know how to do their most basic job, and can't represent parts of the past in their right proportion or measure, i don't know. he invents straw men arguments and argues from positions of absurdity. so WHAT if ska or punk or latterly rave weren't everyone's cup of tea, and didn't sweep everyone up in their respective movements? they were still majorly influential SUBCULTURES.

his best argument seems to boil down to 'you weren't there, though, were you?' which, well i'm stumped. why does he keep reading all those pop-history airport books about world war 2 written by people who ... weren't there?

dune is sci-fi.
cats is a terrible movie.
vaccines work.
a great deal of people in the 1980s were definitely familiar with or invested in the concept of 'authenticity'.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-24 20:13:52)

show me a tabloid frontpage about furries. show me a parliamentary debate about comic cons. go ahead.

it's like you argue for the sake of arguing. you are boring and inane.

rave was not 'fairly niche', nor was punk or any other of these major youth cultures. they were international, decades-straddling movements. of course, it wasn't 'the mainstream': subcultures often define themselves in contradistinction or opposition to mainstream culture, hence the concept of the 'underground'. it's what gives them their energy or animating spirit. youth culture itself is all about rebellion, kicking against the pricks, upsetting the older generation, etc.



hippies and swingers in the 60s and 70s might have been limited to bougie types, or insiders. woodstock and carnaby street were not the centre of the universe in those decades, true, and everyone wasn't there partaking in the buzz. in 60s britain it was probably rather exclusive, in fact, and only for the beau monde and monied Society types. but the enduring influence, the image and idea of hippies, for example, has been massive. proper mass participation isn't really that important or necessary in these things. so a relatively small number of people from a relatively narrow band of age/experience now dominate our cultural memory and imaginations when it comes to the 1970s. sometimes a small avant-garde or even an individual/coterie can shape history. the 'idea' of the hippie, the thing which has been culturally transmitted through the generations, has a life of its own quite apart from the material reality. our dominating idea of just about every decade or century is probably based on the actions of very few; the great majority of humanity through all time have lived, died, and sank without a trace.

as i said, this is all part of how culture disseminates itself (dawkins meme, if you like, that's one useful way of thinking about it).

and we are very far from the point: authenticity was a thing in the 1980s. people thought very hard about how they defined themselves, and often based their entire identity around music and specific subcultures. authenticity is the cell membrane of that inside/outsider group formation.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-24 23:33:20)