Teenage Fanclub? How youthfulness has turned from a promise into a threat
Mercedes Bunz
Always, and always too loud, it has accompanied youth—to the present day: music. It continues to be one of the most important media in which young people find a place and have a place. Fashion, games, sex and alcopops may play a not inconsiderable role for young people, but music is the cultural format that accompanies them longest and most intensively throughout youth. There are reasons for this special relationship. Music is a very special medium because it enables young people to conquer spaces with nothing more than pocket money in a world which does not belong to them. For music is loud; with it one’s own order can be set up in a world which is not one’s own. In one’s parents’ terraced house, on stage, in a club, by turning up the music, a second space of one’s own arises which becomes one’s authentic space. »Long live secondary living. There is no other,«[1] writes music critic, Diedrich Diedrichsen. Music is therefore always more than just sound. It is the erection of one’s own order. Precisely for this reason, the struggle between the generations that was put in a nutshell for the first time by The Who in 1965 with My Generation, has always been fought out in part through music.
Law of motion
Of course, many people have listened to music even after the end of their youth, and also in later years. In time, however, they have ceased to move to this music. In general you only go to a concert to prance and rave when you are young and want to experience the world. Later on, what has been experienced is transformed into knowledge and you begin to prefer to speak about music rather than move to it. The fact that in musical discourse, music for listening is preferred has been pointed out, among others, by the English cultural studies researcher, Sarah Thornton.[2] Music critics are therefore seldom fresh young people. When they make a night of it, they prefer to stand talking at the bar rather than gyrating on the dance floor.
In getting older, finally a point is reached where there is no more fun. At first, endurance fades; then the youth jumping around remind you brazenly of your age. As years go on, movement is exchanged bit by bit for better knowledge. A re-orientation of one’s favourite music takes place. In the 1980s, people had sophisticated conversations about jazz, and since the 1990s, people prefer to hear electronic music. At least until lately. In the past few years, a counter-tendency has been developing: people well beyond forty are still going to concerts and are listening to the new in-bands, perhaps with some scepticism.
In clubs today you do not have to be afraid that at the age of forty you will stick out like an illuminated buoy on the dark Eisel sea. Over the past five years, the combination of clubs and restaurants has contributed to people over thirty staying awake, enjoying loud music on good sound systems even two hours after midnight, moving among other nice people with a beer in their hands well into the wee hours. And at expensive large events like Robbie Williams tours, because of the high price of tickets, apart from a few screaming teenagers, adult concert-goers predominate anyway. This means that pop music today is no longer laid aside at a certain age. People remain well-disposed towards it. It accompanies them well beyond the age of forty, which indicates that something must have changed in what constitutes youth.
Rebellion was yesterday
Youth has been a promise for a long time. A promise of something new, of freedom, perhaps also of rage. Youth, that was a certain phase in which something special was possible. It was possible to do things differently and in a new way. You had to find your own path, your own expression, to create your own style. Against the existing rules. It is not simply a coincidence that the English cultural studies researcher, Dick Hebdige, has written that youth is only present when its presence is a problem or is felt to be a problem.[3] Youth was the start of one’s own. The beginning of one’s own life and it was celebrated with a fanfare. Then things fell silent. It was not so very conspicuous; there has been no generation conflict basically since the late 1980s. In the past years, one began to reflect upon and publish articles about this phenomenon,[4] and people discovered that youth is not a phase between childhood and adolescence. You no longer grow up. You stay young.
The first traces of this shift are described at the beginning of the 1990s by the American writer, Douglas Coupland in his novel, Generation X,[5] in which three young people in their late twenties more or less do not arrive in the world and become established. Faced with the abhorrent vision of post-modern arbitrariness, about which intellectuals in critical cultural circles liked to cultivate panic at the time, the novel attributes this circumstance still to the historical situation. In fact, in the meantime it has become apparent that Douglas Coupland has not so much described the experience of a generation which has fallen between the cracks of history by mistake, but rather a social change which has developed and persists. Reaching your thirtieth birthday no longer leads to an invisible dissection of the umbilical cord to our youth. People no longer grow up, a fact whose most conspicuous sign is that there is no longer any generation conflict. Youth no longer rebels against the achievements of the older generation. To become like your parents is today no longer a threatening nightmare. On the contrary, it is rather an impossibility. Consequently, a conflict no longer takes place.
Youth today
In the past few decades, being young has slowly and gradually made its way from the world of youths into the world of grown-ups and refuses to give way at the proper time. At first, youthfulness was something desirable for adults. In the 1980s, when men were still estimated largely by the woman at their side, youthfulness was a sign of their dynamism and suggested potency and success. And for the women who at the same time made their way into the executive suites with big shoulder pads, attractiveness depended on their youthful appearance anyway. Everybody wanted to be young and wrinkles were enemies. Then, however, conditions began to change. Since the mid-1990s, you no longer always had to try to appear young. You simply stayed young. The film critic, Claudius Seidl, describes this shift in his book, Brave Young World, using the example of Hollywood. There, since the end of the 1990s, it has become completely normal that in film remakes, a woman of forty-five plays roles for a twenty-year-old woman. He concludes from these observations, »being young today is a possibility that apparently is open to everybody, no matter how old he or she is.«[6] That’s right; that’s the way it is. But have the problems really been solved? Surely we have rid ourselves of the generation conflict, but not the problems. There are new problems because youth today is no longer just a promise; it is also a threat.
The fact that post-adolescent thirty-year-olds use the same codes as twens, that the differences are no longer so big as they once were (even though some remain), that is certainly something for the good. When, however, experiences of youth culture have their effects even in family and working life, then that means not only that you stay young. It means also that you can no longer arrive and become established in the world. In fact, the insecurity about life circumstances has affected not only the »internship generation«, but all age groups. With an apprenticeship, you no longer enter a company in which you will climb the ladder over the course of years until you retire. Our lives have changed.
»Curriculum vitae«, »professional career«, »retirement«—metaphors with which we used to describe our biographies, suggested that the only way is up. This linearity has also always had the effect of social discipline on the course of our lives. For a long time, an alternative, broken course through life was therefore regarded as hazardous, as »dropping out«. Those times are gone. Today, the alternative, broken casting of one’s life has become the norm.[7] You retrain. You go bankrupt. You start over again. Only one thing is certain: you will never finally arrive and become established.
Even though today in the salary scales for public officials there are still traces of the old model according to which you are promoted on the basis of age alone, flexible careers have started to become normal in all sectors. And it is this threatening situation which one shares with young people. Of course, this also has a good side. In working life you come across less ossified hierarchies when it is a matter of pragmatic contents and abilities. Moreover, the mid-life crisis is dying out; apart from the anxiety, you are allowed also to have more fun and for a longer time, even if you own a company. Or children. Nevertheless—and we should not have any illusions about this—we do not simply remain young. Only at first glance does it seem as if our youth has pervaded also our later years.
Life, knowledge and one’s own history
In fact, post-adolescents thirty-year-olds share the pop-cultural codes with twens, but these codes, even though they at first seem to be the same, have different meanings. That has something to do with history, for the meaning of a sign always depends upon its specific context, and this context shifts in the course of time. The play of signs is a different one when you enter the game at another point in time and are thus confronted with another historical phase. This is also the reason why the new musical talents are viewed sceptically by most music journalists who were socialized in the 1990s or earlier. When word spreads that grime is a new hype, or in rock excursions by in-bands it is merely a matter of a poor imitation of elements that had been presented better already by Gun Club or Talking Heads, one is claiming the hegemony of one’s own perspective. Indeed, the repetition of existing elements is not so much a defect, but rather the point at issue: Every beginning is always already a repetition; and understanding is only possible if you allow yourself to be co-opted,«[8] writes the Berlin historian of science, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. And precisely for this reason, youth also has a right to repetition, a right to cast its own history.
Because it comes across pop culture at another point in time than an older generation is, things are new which for older people seem to be already somewhat stale. And their superior knowledge can only be set off against their own lives, which later on will become transformed into knowledge as well. Although we all remain young longer, we cultivate internal hierarchies via knowledge. And superior knowledge is even less innocent in a world in which securing intellectual property has in part become more important than owning the means of production. In the context of a more intensive practice of patenting, knowledge has been declared to be a new currency, not only economically, but also culturally. In popular cultural knowledge, only a certain ignorance can help against superior knowledge but also against the ballast of the thirty-year-olds: you don’t know, but you just do it. Whether you escape repetition only becomes apparent later on.
In the discussion of cultural production over the past few years it has become apparent that the element of originality is not there to start with, but only becomes visible with the repetition.[9] Repetition therefore has an essential part to play in creating what is new. Nevertheless, the emergence of something new cannot be planned. It remains, according to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, »in the realm of an untidy confusion.«[10] What will really turn out to be new cannot in principle be determined at the moment of its emergence, but only after the event. And even if the signs are shared, there will continue to be a struggle over what will turn out to be new. The generation conflict has become quieter, but it continues to exist. Thank goodness. For only for this reason will youth in the end remain perhaps what it always was: a Utopian potential, the promise of another, new, independent future.
Translated from the German by Michael Eldred, artefact text & translation, Cologne
Footnotes:
[1] Diedrich Diederichsen, Musikzimmer, Cologne, 205, p. 15.
[2] See Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures. Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Oxford, 1997, p. 1-2.
[3] See Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, London, 1988, p. 17.
[4] See Claudius Seidl, Schöne junge Welt. Warum wir nicht mehr älter werden, Munich, 2005; also: Sascha Lehnhartz, Global Players. Warum wir nicht mehr erwachsen werden, Frankfurt am Main, 2005.
[5] Douglas Coupland, Generation X. Geschichten für eine immer schneller werde Kultur, Berlin, 1994.
[6] Claudius Seidl, Schöne junge Welt, p. 19-20.
[7] See Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons, Globale Immunität oder eine kleine Kartographie des europäischen Bildungsraums, Zürich-Berlin, 2005.
[8] Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen, Berlin, 2005, p. 105.
[9] See Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz, Eckhard Schumacher, Brigitte Weingart (Eds.), Originalkopie. Praktiken des Sekundären, Cologne, 2004.
[10] Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen, p. 118.
