Customer Reviews

Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The concept of teenagers as a group separate from children and adults is relatively new. It wasn't until World War II that the word existed and that was in response to advertisers who realized that young people had money to spend. But teenagers weren't invented during the 1940s. In writing the history of teenagers from Victorian times until World War II, author Jon Savage has shown that their history is our history. They don't govern nations or run companies, but they fight wars, earn money, commit crimes and when it comes to movies and music, it's teenagers who decide the trends.

Savage defines teenage loosely, as being from about age twelve to mid-twenties. Teenagers aren't children anymore, but they don't have the responsibilities or the experience of adults. They are like adults who haven't mastered their emotional volume control yet. Their highs are higher and their lows are lower than adults who've learned to expect disappointments and are too self conscious to enjoy with abandon. Teenagers have their lives ahead of them and anything is possible. They have little to lose and can take risks that most adults wouldn't dare.

Teenage is full of interesting stories of trend-setting teenagers such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud, but it's not until World War I that teenagers became really influential. With the invention of movies and radio, teenagers became the early-adopters of their times. Rudolph Valentino's fame and the reaction to his death and funeral remind me of the arrival of the Beatles in New York. Leopold and Loeb killed a child and thought they were too smart to get caught. When they were caught, they acted like celebrities during the trial, wearing stylish clothes and attracting an ardent following of young admirers. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were overwhelmed at first by their hysterical fans, but quickly adapted.

Savage's study examines teenagers in the U.S., England, France, and Germany. We see the youth who followed the rules: the Boy Scouts and the Hitler Youth. We see the ones who rebeled: the Zoot Suiters and the White Rose, an anti-Hitler German group who came to a tragic end. The dilemmas of when to treat teenagers as adults and when to treat them as children have been around as long as teenagers have. When do you try a teenage criminal as an adult? At what age should young adults be allowed to drink alcohol? Get married? Join the military? Leave school? Earn a living? Leave home? There are no answers here, but it might help to realize that we aren't the first to ask the questions. And even if it doesn't help, Teenage is an excellent social history.

This book is much more than a mere enquiry into the origins of youth culture - it is actually an absorbing historical account of what young people (in Western Europe and the USA) have experienced as the world underwent two big wars, a great economic crash, and several ideological experiments (from communism to fascism to "consumerism").

There seems to be an underlying question throughout Savage's quite detailed (and carefully researched) chronicle of youth from the mid-19th century to 1945: what happens when you have a) an economic system that needs to continually develop and expand in order to keep functioning (what we can summarize as "industrial society" or "capitalism"); and b) an oversupply of individuals who have to be organized in accordance with that system's necessities/aims (what we call "the mass")? The answer: you make youth, the most volatile and vigorous social cohort, instrumental - the pivotal point around which society defines (and renews) itself.
Savage shows how from their organization around schools, factories and all kinds of diversions in times of peace, to their incorporation into armies in times of war, young people in industrial societies have been exposed to several more or less successful experiments in the complicated art of social management. Thus their energies were either channelled into productive and leisurely activities when the system of industrial production was focused on commercial expansion (developing a stunning variety of mass entertainments, fashion industries, etc) - or they were used as a violently destructive force when the system was concerned with geopolitical expansion (most clearly visible in WWI and WWII and colonialism). The main problem being that, malleable as a mass or group might seem, it often engages in pursuits that may not coincide with the industrial system's "best interests". Hence the history of the management of youth has been fraught with conflicts and clashes, as youth groups (sometimes of considerable sizes) challenged or outright rejected the roles society tried to impose on them: whether as workers/consumers or as soldiers.
It is this problem which Savage addresses in his book, following youth's attempts to define itself as "independent" from adult society and its expectations, while simultaneously being exposed to ever more sophisticated laws and social measures determining its rights and obligations. Many of the most impressive cultural innovations came out of this friction.
An interesting aspect in this conflict between young people and adult society is the generational rhetoric that became common after the French Revolution. Again and again, the "new generation" (or actually a loud minority in it) defines itself as radically different, even opposed to its predecessors, and announces a glorious future, when the young will finally take over and correct the mistakes of the past. Using countless examples (from the decadents and nihilists, through the "lost generation" and "bright young people" and Hitler Youth, to less well-known subcultures such as the Wandervogel, the zazous and the zoot-suiters), Savage makes visible how much also the generational dynamics are determined by the stunningly fast pace of industrial developments and cultural evolution, making uncertainty and anxiety the main driving force in society - which youth incorporates best, in all its (biologically determined) eagerness and energy. No wonder the young have been adopted as symbols of (a nation's or an ideology's) future.

With an astounding array of theoretical models, cultural references (literature, music, film) and biographical accounts, Savage thus presents a gripping portrait of Western culture from the perspective of its most challenging and inspiring cohort, which persistently holds the threat of annihilation as well as the promise of regeneration. All the more interesting that the term resulting from this 100 years adventure - "teenage" - put so much emphasis on pleasure and leisure, and so little on the less cheering side of being an adolescent in times of accelerated change. As the second half of the 20th century would prove, though, "teen spirit" has the potential of causing (at least a bit of) chaos. And with the uncertainties and crises of the 21st century already looming on the horizon, one can surmise that new and just as surprising "revolutionary" or "destructive" youth formations will arise as a reaction to further shifts in the (now global) industrial system.

Author Jon Savage is best noted for writing what many consider to be the definitive history of punk rock- "England's Dreaming" (personally, I prefer Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces".) In "Teenage"- his new book- he gets all ambitious. Teenage is a straight forward social history of what Savage calls "the creation of youth culture." One of the facts i learned this book, was that socialologist/philosopher Talcott Parsons coined the term "youth culture" in 1943.

I think this book is a must read for professionals in the culture industries- journalists, music industry folks, etc. The 450 page length is a tad offputting, but the length is set off by the structure of the book: episodic, proceeding from the 1890s- to 1945 in chronological orders, most focusing on one specific youth cultures from the U.S., the U.K. or Germany (France is mostly absent, along with Italy, Austria and Spain).

Generally speaking, Savage explicates his (fairly non-controversial) thesis that the industrial revolution stimulated the consciousness of youth as a class (by getting them into the work force early, creating more leisure time on a society wide basis, and weakening the relationship between children and their parents) and that "Youth" emerged in the mid 1920s as the most powerful "demographic" of western market capitalism.

Not a very novel set of ideas- I think most would already "know" the above paragraph to be true at some innate level. The devil, of course, is in the details, and it is Savage's work with the primary sources of each particular era which elevates this work from tedious pop history to a must read classic.

Working with the same careful eye for detail that marked his other work, Savage mines the detrius of low and middle brow culture (with the occasional shout out to contemporary academics and artists) with the skilled eye of a grizzled prospector.

Savage starts off in the 1890s- the earliest chapters are the weakest. The apogee, as far as Savage is concerned is in the 20's:

"The youth movement of the 1920s had been all too scucesful in creating their own discrete worlds. In doing so, they had reminded manufactuers, governments, and ideologues that youth comprised a social force that was far too important to be left to be left on its own."

The next 10 chapters mainly deal with Hitler and his fondness for youth culture(!). Indeed, in Savage's analysis, Hitler's succesful appeal to youth was key in his rise to power within Germany. Hitler, it turns out was a fan of American advertising guru Bernays. Whether the goal is social control or consumer capitalism, the techniques, all too often, are the same. It's hard to read the Hitler Youth chapters without thinking a little bit about some of the common characteristics of youth culture. Specifically, the thought that youth, unburdened by experience- are quick to embrace extreme ideas and have little patience for ideas that invovle gradualness or delayed gratificiation.

One of the intriguing inferences one can draw from this book is that- because of the tight relationship of industrialism and consumer captialism to "youth culture"- it's almost fair to say "youth market" instead of "youth culture." In other words- "youth culture" effectively doesn't exist in the absence of consumer driven market capitalism. Think about it.

Savage leaves many of the bolder inferences the reader can draw from this book unstated. The lack of any kind of theoretical explication makes "Teenage" an enjoyable read.

The title is misleading. A better one would be: Rebel Youth: The Disaffection of Adolescence and the Adult Response, 1875 to 1945. A secondary theme is the Rise of Popular Culture as Youth Culture. The book does not describe how adolescents lived during the seventy year period, but how adolescents rebelled against the world of adults and how adults responded. The rise of the entertainment industry, popular music and film, is also very lightly sketched. The book is divided into seven periods: 1875-1904, 1904-1913, 1912-1919, 1919-1929, 1930-1939, 1939-1943, 1942-1945. Endnotes acknowledge sources and thereby offer references for further reading, but the referenced books are not then conveniently listed together in a bibliography.

A major topic covered is youth and war. War obviously affects the views and emotional attitudes of everyone and especially those who are within the age or approaching the age of military involvement, and so the two world wars of the 20th century, and those which followed, were certainly influential periods in the evolution of youth culture. The war of 1914-1918 is treated as a catastrophic mistake, as if Germany would have peacefully backed down if only Britain and France hadn't been so intransigent in their own belligerent self-defense. The war dead of Britain are discussed as if Britain itself murdered them. This moral insult is not repeated in the discussion of WWII.

Other topics, in most cases simplified for the author's own purposes, but highly interesting nevertheless, include the British and American Boy Scouts and their precursors, the German Wandervogel and others of the like, war poets of WWI, anti-war sentiment, juvenile gangs, jazz and dance crazes, alcohol during Prohibition, flappers, sexual promiscuity, hedonism, Depression era vagabonds, communism and fascism, Hitler youth, jazz culture and hep talk, racism, Nazi hostility against swing-jazz, and non-military youth during war years. As mentioned, full references are given for more thorough reading on these topics, if desired. The countries studied are Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. The author is British.

The author has an agenda but he keeps it hidden through most of the book. Hints arise, however, along the way. The word 'consumerism' and its variants are used as subtle, negative moral rhetoric throughout the book without stopping to clarify their meaning or justify their use. Likewise, 'capitalism' is given a negative coloration, whereas 'socialism' is not. The book, it turns out, goes nowhere. After 465 pages of reporting on the unsettled rebellion of youth, in the penultimate paragraph of the book, the author goes simple, jumps a chasm and blatantly declares:

"The name given to this new synthesis was the Teenager. The many possible interpretations of youth had been boiled down to just one: the adolescent consumer. Coming to prominence through an intricate ecology of peer pressure, individual desires, and savvy marketing, the Teenage resolved the question posed by the war: what kind of mass society will we live in? In contrast to fascism, the American future would be ordered around pleasure and acquisition: the harnessing of mass production to disposable leisure items like magazines, cosmetics, and clothes as well as military hardware." (p. 465)

The history of adolescence and youth told over the previous 464 pages does not warrant this superficial, glib summary, and the mention of military hardware has absolutely no discernible justification within the preceding history. In the end, it seems, politics will out.

The youth subculture exists independently of any advertising market. The market is after-the-fact. Youth often react against the market, to maintain their sense of difference. Furthermore, to equate the advertisement industry with a particular culture in which it exists (or in which it first arose) is to conflate a part with a greater, complex whole. This should be obvious, but apparently for the author it isn't. He appears to not have yet grown out of his own simplistic youthful attitudes to the adult world.

Still, I recommend the book. It's a good overview and may excite further, deeper reading.

I'm using this book as one of the main sources for my thesis work on Youth Culture in America. This book perfectly describes the origins of youth culture and explains how this new group of people will go one to decide the fate of the world. Love every page!

Back when I was a teen, we called our elders "sir" and "ma'am", practiced our penmanship, and sang patriotic songs whenever we got together with friends. Nowadays teens run roughshod without adult supervision, blast loud music from their "cars", and would just as soon glare at you as spit on the street, which they do often--that is, when they are not otherwise shopping, consuming mass media, or conforming to their market-researched ideas of themselves.

Just where did this "teenage" culture come from? In earlier times, children passed either straight into adulthood or into some kind of supervised apprenticeship, learning a useful trade or craft, the vestiges of which can still be seen in family names like "Smith", "Farmer", "Clerk" and "Sweeper".

Jon Savage attempts to trace the origins of adolescent culture, "adolescence" defined by G. Stanley Hall as a time of moodiness, risky behavior, and conflict with the previous generation--all things that a cold shower and self-flagellation could easily take care of--in his lively tome "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture".

Savage begins his tale at the end of the Victorian age, when youths in England and Germany were being molded for imperial service and youths in America were swelling in number from recent immigration. The destruction of so many young people in World War I led to disillusionment and the beginnings of U.S. cultural dominance, feeding the fun-loving, convention-defying Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age. Here, Savage demonstrates his strength in describing the music, idols and popular culture of the era, a culture that was increasingly catering to youth and the ideal of youth. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Mussolini and Hitler both catered to and exploited the idealism and innocence of the young. In counterpoint, Savage retells the story of Anne Frank to chilling effect.

The narrative unfortunately ends in the mid 1940's, anticipating the next post-war rise of youth in the counterculture of the 1960's. What Savage does present, however, is a rich and vibrant recounting of the many cultural facets that fed and amplified the energy, discontent, optimism and joy of youth, something I wish I could get back by sucking it out of the youth of today.

A very thick book. It is more interesting when you have some historical knowledge of the history. Full of lots of insights into the history of teenage culture.