The Emergence and Impact of Teenage Culture in Post-War Britain, Appunti di Musica

Scarica The Emergence and Impact of Teenage Culture in Post-War Britain e più Appunti in PDF di Musica solo su Docsity! Swinging, swingeing, sleepy London: new entertainment for young people In a sequence of Richard Lester’s 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night, George Harrison gets lost before a Beatles gig and finds himself in the office of a television company where he is taken for a trendsetter. The interview that follows is quite surreal, in tune with the whole movie, but after being dismissed by a resentful manager, his sarcastic comments about a teenage female television icon are taken seriously and she is fired offhand. The sequence is quite revealing about the importance that teenagers had gained in British society since the end of the Fifties, when they started to be viewed as a new and influential group of consumers, despised and courted at the same time, with new needs and unprecedented desires. Today it is rather obvious that teenagers in Great Britain, to a certain extent, are an invention of Colin MacInnes. As Jon Savage has shown,1 the category of teenagers existed in the country (and outside of it) long before Colin MacInnes discovered the existence of this new strange figure in the articles he wrote for Encounter in December 1957 and The Twentieth Century in February 1958, but also in his novel Absolute Beginners, published in 1959. “We are in the presence, here, of an entirely new phenomenon in human history: that youth is rich. Once, the jeunesse dorée were a minute minority; now, all the young have gold”.2 Hardly true: MacInnes was obviously exaggerating, but his insight acknowledged something that got lost in the debate pro or against the presumed Americanization of British society that had spread across British newspapers and public debate at the time. MacInnes realized that teenagers were not only passive victims of the new consumer society, as they were often depicted, but also a force inside and behind it, that could influence the market creating new opportunities and producing a creative explosion. “They are a social group whose tastes are studied with respect - particularly by the entertainment industry,” MacInnes had written in the Encounter article, and he came back to the topic with more force in The Twentieth Century article: “This piece is about the pop disc industry - almost entirely their own creation; but what about the new clothing industry for making and selling teenage garments of both sex? Or the motor scooter industry they patronize so generously? Or the radiogram and television industries? Or the eating and soft-drinking places that cater so largely for them?”.3 Not to speak of the new jobs that became fashionable (and very well-paid) over the following years, first and foremost that of the photographer, the fictional hero of MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners and Antonioni’s Swinging London movie Blow Up (1966) but also real figures such as David Bailey, Brian Duffy or Terence Donovan, “superstars from a world that had previously been invisible”.4 How was this new phenomenon to be dealt with? Particularly if, when left on its own without social control, it spontaneously created subcultures like the Teddy Boys in the Fifties and the Mods in the early Sixties? According to Hebdige, there are two ways of incorporating subcultures that “represent symbolic challenges to a symbolic order”. The birth of a new subculture is usually welcomed by a hysterical reaction of the press, marked by deep ambiguity and oscillating between “dread and fascination, outrage and amusement”. Paradoxically, in the same newspaper the same 1 J. Savage, Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture, New York, Viking, 2007. The two terms "teenage" and "young" are often used as interchangeable. However, S. Frith in Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll, New York, Pantheon, 1981, p. 181, makes a distinction between the two: "In sociological literature there are (...) two descriptive categories: teenagers and youth (or Elvis Presley and the Beatles). These different terms partly reflect different historical moments, partly different concerns, and they often overlap. 'Teenager' is a 1950s concept, and 'youth culture' come from the 1960s; 'teenager' refers mostly to the working-class young, 'youth' suggests the insignificance of class distinctions at this age, but is usually, implicitly, applied to the middle-class young". 2 C. MacInnes, “Pop Songs and Teenagers”, in England Half English, London, Chatto & Windus, 1993, p. 47. 3 C. MacInnes, “Young England, Half English”, in England Half English, p. 11 and “Pop Songs and Teenagers”, p. 54. 4 S. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, London and New York, Fourth Estate, 2003, p. 16. subculture may be exalted in the cultural or fashion pages and demonised or ridiculed in the general news. Media, says Hebdige quoting Stuart Hall, solve the ambiguity when, parallel to the “diffusion and defusion of the subcultural style”, its attitude and its deviant behaviour, real or presumed, are located “within the dominant framework of meaning”, while the signs characterizing its style are turned into “mass-produced objects”.5 However, the Teenage Revolution created many problems for the easy incorporation of the resulting subcultures in society and of their own values inside the general framework of the period. Viewing subcultures and youth culture in general as a form of resistance to the traditional order is rather apt but should be rethought since, as we hope to show, a complex situation requires a complex explanation or many different explanations. Talking about the Teds, for example, Alan Sinfield says, reasonably enough, that they should not be romanticized as “a challenge to capitalism and the state”; however, they were the “first significant dent in the postwar settlement” and “the spectre of young working-class males not imbued with customary social values was disturbing”, both, we may add, to the establishment and to the left-wing intellectuals like Hoggart, who in his The Uses of Literacy (1957) offers a sordid image of a milk-bar and its apathetic and bored customers.6 The traditional ways of describing and analysing the younger generations in post-war Britain, and the simplistic categories used in dealing with them, were jeopardized by a number of concomitant events that characterised the end of the Fifties and the beginning of the Sixties, of which the most important was the Teenage Revolution; even though it didn’t exactly happen according to MacInnes’ outline, it was nevertheless an important turning point in the British cultural scene of the late Fifties and early Sixties. One of the myths about the Teenage Revolution has often been proved ungrounded, i.e., the alleged classless society created by it. MacInnes again is accidentally one of the sources of the myth of this classless society when he wrote that the teenagers were “more classless than any of the older age groups are, or were”.7 However, MacInnes was talking about teenagers, not the whole society,8 since all the data and their interpretation focus on the permanence of “the old British hierarchy” that “remained irritatingly intact”,9 despite the relative affluence that the lower classes now could enjoy. There were undoubtedly “cracks in the traditional façade”,10 but above all the Sixties saw the rise of a new and limited group that succeeded in becoming what has been called a New Aristocracy or Popocracy, “a stratified pantheon of pop bands and actors and models and new-style entrepreneurs and a few titled and moneyed and privileged sorts who were hip enough to fit into the mix”.11 If a classless society was not created from the Teenage Revolution and the advent of a consumer and “Americanized” society in Great Britain, there was, however, a limited renewal and blend in the upper part of society. The example of Andrew Loog Oldham can be considered paradigmatic: born from an American soldier, who died before his birth, and a mother with an “Australian and Jewish lineage, socially a double whammy at that time”,12 he became in the Sixties one of the most important music producers, managers and public image creators of the decade’s icons such as The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull. He used to dress and act like an American gangster, intimidate 5 D. Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1988, pp. 92-94. 6 A. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, London, Continuum, 2004, p. 177 and R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1958, p. 250. Hogarth’s passage on the milk-bar is reprinted in H. Kureishi and J. Savage, eds., The Faber Book of Pop, London, Faber and Faber, 1996, pp. 70-72. 7 C. MacInnes, “Pop Songs and Teenagers”, p. 55. 8 According to Sinfield, in Absolute Beginners MacInnes even anticipates “the fallacy of the classlessness of youth” (Literature, Politics and Culture, p. 193). 9 I. Chambers; Urban Rhythms, London, Macmillan, 1990, p. 57. 10 Ibidem, p. 56. 11 S. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, p. 9. 12 A. Loog Oldham, Stoned, London, Vintage, 2001, p. 2. These elements taken together – the competition with the Beatles, their image as bad guys, the ability to be classless, addressing an educated and an uneducated audience – can explain why their movies were so different from the Beatles’ films. The Stones attracted avant-garde French directors like Godard or American experimental authors like Kenneth Anger, produced documentaries that were innovative in many respects, such as Charlie Is My Darling (1966),19 Gimme Shelter (1970) by the Maysles Brothers with footage of the murder of a member of the audience during their Altamont concert, or Cocksucker Blues (1972), directed by Robert Frank but in fact filmed with several cameras available to anyone in the crew.20 And Mick Jagger was the main character of one of the most provocative films of the Sixties, Cammell's and Roeg's Performance (1970). Like the Beatles, they attracted many pop artists: however, if Peter Blake was involved in the creation of the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Richard Hamilton in the White Album, the Rolling Stones were the source of one of Hamilton’s most political works, the series of paintings and prints known as Swingeing London. The event that inspired Hamilton’s work started with the so-called "Redlands bust", in February 1967, when the police raided the country home of Keith Richards in Sussex, following a tip-off from the popular magazine News of the World. In the trial that followed in June, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were found guilty, but, after a night in jail, they were released due to protests against the sentence but also, and more significantly, thanks to the intervention of some important members of the Establishment, like the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, who wrote an editorial criticizing the sentence.21 According to some, like Marianne Faithfull in her autobiography, the episode was part of a greater conspiracy against the new generations: "By the beginning of 1967 there were highly placed people in Her Majesty's government who actually saw us as enemies of the state. (...) these little men in Whitehall felt that the Rolling Stones were a threat to the safety and security of the United Kingdom and (...) decided to actually do something about it".22 More realistically, part of the British Establishment was worried about the general situation soliciting a politics of repression and, as far as young people were concerned, a revision of the lines separating good guys from bad guys: "Putting myself in their place I imagine Britain must have seemed suddenly overrun by frivolity and lunacy. Flashy clothes, miniskirts, promiscuity and drugs. The gents in Whitehall saw this as a challenge to their authority".23 Drugs and music (and the bond between them) were the main target of this attack on the freedom of expression. Between 1966 and the first months of the 1967, popular press and police joined in a new wave of moral panic and in the persecution of public figures for their real or assumed use of drugs. At the same time, some art galleries were targeted for performances by avant-garde artists accused of obscenity.24 The trial involving Jagger, Richards and Robert Fraser, one of the more important art dealers in London, after the Redlands bust was one of the highest events in this reactionary surge. The judge 19 The more traditional Stones documentary is their first one, Charlie Is My darling, directed by Peter Whitehead and produced by Oldham in 1965, which seems a more realistic and less surreal version of A Hard Day’s Night, Lester’s 1964 film with the Beatles. However, Peter Whitehead was not exactly a traditional choice as director since he had just filmed the International Poetry Incarnation held at the Royal Albert Hall, a poetry event with Allen Ginsberg, Alexander Trocchi and other American and British poets. 20 The last documentary has never been released but has been screened on some special occasions. 21 In BBC footage of the trial as well, a voice-over comment states that "the rather grim scenes of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser appearing handcuffed together at the Chichester court this morning are surely an unnecessary humiliation". The best survey of the entire episode is S. Wells, Butterfly on a Wheel: the Great Rolling Stones Drug Bust, London, Omnibus Press, 2011. 22 M. Faithfull with D. Dalton, An Autobiography, London, Penguin, 1995, p. 130. 23 Ibidem, p. 131. 24 The "larger narrative" of the events of 1966 and 1967 is given in A. Wilson, Swingeing London 67 (f), London, Afterall, 2011, pp. 32-50. talked of a "swingeing sentence", properly using an archaic synonym of "flogging or "striking hard". Pop artist Richard Hamilton picked up on the probably unintended pun between "swinging" and "swingeing" and elaborated a photograph of Jagger and Fraser handcuffed together, in a gesture that could express showing the handcuffs as criticism of their unjust treatment or only a desire to cover their faces from the flashes of the photographs. Opening the image to its different and opposite meanings, Hamilton showed the other face of Swinging London, declaring it a fiction with different forces working inside it to shore up the fragments of a glorious and imperial past. Another part of the Establishment didn't agree with this project, and the protests against the sentence and the magazine accused of the plot against the Stones were so huge that the more traditional sectors of British society seemed defeated. On the same day of the appeal that overturned the previous sentence, Jagger was invited to a meeting organized and aired by Granada Television with Rees-Mogg, the editor of The Times who had criticized the previous sentence, a former Labour home secretary, and two members of the clergy in the garden of the Lord Lieutenant of Essex. This can be seen as one more example of the complex relationship between the younger generations and the British Establishment, mediated, negotiated and sometimes even orchestrated by the entertainment industry. The balance was unstable, open to further discussion, but led, for a certain period, towards a more tolerant and open society, less prone to the outbursts of political violence and the harsh conflicts that spread across Europe and the US in 1968. However, the same policy was one of the reasons why, towards the end of the decade, London had stopped swinging and entered a period of stasis and relative cultural stagnation. The Stones, acting one more time as rebels, expressed this feeling when at the beginning of 1968 they released Street Fighting Man, a song that explicitly states that in "sleepy London town / There's just no place for a street fighting man" and where "the game / To play is compromise solution". In sleepy London, in 1968, "a poor boy" can only "sing for a rock and roll band": it is not by chance that in the following decade what best survived the great invention of Swinging London as far as youth culture was concerned was music. Even though London lost its leading position as the cultural capital of the world, its importance in the music industry held its ground. London could be sleepy from a political perspective and remained relatively untouched by the turmoil of the decade’s last years, but the provocative heritage of the Sixties kept on swinging all through the following decades in artists like David Bowie or in punk music, in spite of all the attempts to swinge and neutralize it. 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