Youth Sub Culture Essay

It could be argued that the introduction of “youth sub cultures” was a twentieth century paradigm specifically aligned to several factors. 1950s Britain had emerged from the dark days of the Second World War as a country where living standards had risen dramatically, job security had never been better and consumption and leisure patterns had changed considerably. No longer did young men have a war to fight, conscription into the army or a uniform to wear. So instead teenagers began to create their own uniform. What followed was an intense period of creativity based around music, fashion and style. Beliefs were developed, attitudes changed, and mainstream societal and political ideologies were challenged. All of these factors coupled with widespread

Moreover they contend these sub cultures gather around specific milieus favoured for social interaction. With no solution to working-class youth unemployment, educational disadvantage, compulsory mis-education, dead-end jobs, the routinisation and specialisation of labour, low pay and the loss of skills. Sub-cultural strategies cannot match, meet or answer the structuring dimensions emerging in this period for the class as a whole. So, when the post-war subcultures address the problematics of their class experience, they often do so in ways, which reproduce the gaps Thus the ‘Teddy Boy’ replication of an upper class style of dress ‘covers’ the gap between largely manual, unskilled, near-lumpen real careers and life-chances, and the ‘all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go’ experience of Saturday evening. Thus, in the expropriation and fetishisation of consumption and style itself, the ‘Mods’ cover for the gap between the never-ending-weekend and Monday’s resumption of boring, dead-end work.

Working-class subcultures could not have existed without a real economic base: the growth in money wages in the ‘affluent’ period, but, more importantly, the fact that incomes grew more rapidly for teenagers than for adults in the working-class, much of which was ‘disposable income’ (income available for leisure and non-compulsory spending). But it wasn’t simply economics that differentiated working-class children from their parents there was a much wider disparity in their expectations of life, particularly in respect to leisure, from that of their