Alice franklin cop2 essay final

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Alice Franklin

Have we seen the last of Youth Sub Cultures in Britain?

Youth subcultures have been a major part of Britain’s culture since the 1950’s, beginning with Teddy Boys then, Rockers, Mods, Hippies, Skinheads, Soul Boys, Punk, Two Tone, Football Hooligans and initially ending with Ravers in the 1990’s, ‘These classical subcultures obtained their potency, partly through an ability to shock and dismay, to obey prescribed confines of class, gender, and ethnicity’, D. Clark in D. Muggleton & R. Weinzierl (2003:223). Although people claim there have been and still are subcultures since the ravers, none have been as significant as the classical ones. I am going to explore the reasons to why subcultures have faded into a memory of the past and how, overtime, the social environment has made it somewhat difficult for another subculture to now be as influential as they were in the 20th Century. Subcultures have all derived from the working class society, ‘I do not think the middle class produces subcultures, for subcultures are produced by a dominated culture, not a dominant culture’, P. Cohen in K. Gelder (1972:92). There are many reasons to why they have formed, all are which from the surroundings and circumstances they have been accustomed to. The working class adolescents of 19th Century Britain had a lot of reasons to why they wanted to go against the social norm. After World War II, the conditions of society were poor, the working class lived in slums or were moved into other areas, ready for redevelopment (1950’s East End London); families were split up and due to the finances in the country, public services, like youth clubs, pubs, and community services were unaffordable. This created a lot of animosity within the community, leading to even bigger class divides and revolts. The younger generation wanted to pull away from their ‘parent culture’, hoping to live a life in which they could live happily, away from the constrains of the suffocating social norm previous generations had become accustomed too. ‘Mods, Parkas, Skinheads, Crombies all represent, in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in their parent culture, and to combine these elements selected from other class fractions, symbolizing one or another of the options confronting it’, P. Cohen in K. Gelder (1972:89). These factors are what are missing from today’s so-­‐called subcultures, times have changed over the past years and the social classes aren’t as divided as they once were. Facilities are a lot more available to people who are struggling and the classes don’t seem to affect it as much as it did. Throughout my research into modern day subcultures, I have not yet found an argument in which they are fighting against, a social class divide which they are trying to rectify, but only style over substance. P. Cohen in K. Gelder (1972:89-­‐90) then writes on to explain that there are three types of analysis of subcultures; historical analysis, the problems in the social class; structural or semiotic analysis, the way the subcultures articulate and transform into different movements; and the third being the phenomenological analysis, how the subculture is lived out. The lifestyle for youths at that time was quite bad, being a working class teen; there was often violence in school, at home and even from the police. At the crucial period of being a teenager and leaving school to progress into the adult world, job opportunities where very hard to


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Alice franklin cop2 essay final by Alice Franklin - Issuu