Modernity’s ‘panacea’: positive archetypes of youth
Representations of youth, however, have never been exclusively negative. Alongside the moral panics and malevolent stereotypes, there have always coexisted more positive media constructions in which young people are presented as the vibrant vanguard of a prosperous future. Indeed, at certain historical moments, media images of youth as a social ‘panacea’ have eclipsed the darker, more apprehensive iconography of youth as a ‘pathology’. In the US during the early 1960s, for example, positive images of youth came to the fore as young people were celebrated as an invigorating social force. Ideals of‘youth’, for instance, were powerfully mobilised by President Kennedy in both his public persona and in his vision of America’s ‘New Frontier’ of progress and optimism.15 And, as earlier concerns about juvenile crime diminished, young people were feted by the media and consumer industries and ‘youth’ became enshrined as the signifier of a newly prosperous age of freedom and fun.
Above all, it was the concept of the ‘teenager’ that embodied this positive, uplifting iconography. In some quarters ‘teenage’ culture was derided as the worst example of commercial massification (see Chapter 6). But, more widely, the teenager was cast in radiant terms. The trend began in the 1950s, but picked up pace in the early 1960s as teenagers were configured as harbingers of a new consumer culture — a social group distinguished not simply by their youth, but by a particular style of conspicuous, leisure-oriented consumption. This, of course, was a ‘mythic’ construction - and ‘real’ teenagers’ lives remained characterised by marked inequalities of wealth and power (see Chapter 2). But in media and advertising rhetoric, the ‘teenager’ was promoted as an essentially classless avatar of pleasure and abundance. Here, historian Kirse May (2002) shows, images of Californian youth culture took the lead. During the early 1960s, the Golden State — home to surfing, hot rods, and bouncy pop groups like the Beach Boys — set the pace for America’s ‘New Frontier’ in teenage leisure and pleasure. These, then, were archetypes of ‘well-behaved, well-meaning, middle-class teenagers’, with films, TV series, and pop records all packaging California’s kids as ‘a beautiful and wholesome generation living it up on the coast’ (May, 2002: 119).
In Britain, too, the early 1960s saw the media project a positive imagery of youth. Newspapers, magazines, and films all popularised notions of young people as a vibrant contrast to the tired conventions of the past. And, as in America, the term ‘teenager’ did not simply denote a generational age group, but signified a new brand of liberated, hedonistic consumption. As writer Peter Laurie contended in his taxonomy of The Teenage Revolution, published in 1965:
The distinctive fact about teenagers’ behaviour is economic: they spend a lot of money on clothes, records, concerts, make-up, magazines: all things that give immediate pleasure and little lasting use.
(Laurie, 1965: 9)
Consumer pleasure in an age of swinging modernity, then, was the central theme in configurations of the 1960s ‘teenager’. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that politicians sought to capitalise on youth’s dynamic aura. In 1964, for example, The Beatles were acclaimed by Sir Alec Douglas Home, Britain’s prime minister, as ‘our best exports’ and ‘a useful contribution to the balance of payments’ (Davies, 1978: 222). Harold Wilson, his successor, was not to be outdone and in 1965 invested The Beatles as Members of the Order of the British Empire (a prestigious honour).
Even the mod ‘folk devils’ could be embraced in the 1960s celebration of youth. Indeed, at the same time as they were reviled as the bete noire of the affluent society (see above), Britain’s mods were also hailed as stylish consumers par excellence. Superficially clean-cut and well-dressed, mods were often treated as the pace-setters of 1960s elan, the press eagerly charting changes in the minutiae of their fashion and music. Even in 1964, at the height of the moral panic about the mods and rockers ‘battles’, the Sunday Tinies Magazine (then an arbiter of fashionable chic) featured a sumptuous photospread spotlighting the mods’ sartorial flair.16 The association between youth and liberated modernity reached its apex in the mid-1960s when the image of ‘Swinging London’ — with its throbbing nightclubs and fashionable boutiques — encapsulated ideas of thrilling consumer freedom. The images resonated in both Europe and
America, where British cultural exports such as Beatlemania, mod style, and Mary Quant’s fashion designs won an enthusiastic reception, and Time magazine’s 1966 cover story on ‘London: The Swinging City’ captured the sense of excitement. ‘Youth is the word and the deed in London’, Time enthused, ‘seized by change, liberated by affluence ... everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life’ (Time, 15 April 1966).
By the end of the decade, however, the positive vibe was faltering. In the US, the mid-1960s saw the economy start to stumble, and liberal optimism gradually crumbled in the face of urban disorder and the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Against this backdrop, the iconography of youthful high-spirits began giving way to more negative representations of youth — with students and countercultural radicals attracting particular media venom. At the same time, however, the counterculture was also a source of fascination. Indeed, its libertine ethos of self-expression proved widely attractive at a time when cultural values were rapidly changing. Hence the fashions and attitudes of the counterculture all percolated into the social mainstream. In fact, rather than representing the antithesis of modern consumerism, the 1960s counterculture is better seen as playing a part in its evolution. As writer Thomas Frank suggests, the counterculture was not the nemesis of the consumer society but ‘may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful instalment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity’ (Frank, 1997: 120). For advertisers, especially, the countercultural scene offered images of ‘youthful’ pleasure and freedom commensurate with consumerist agendas. As one American adman affirmed in a 1968 editorial for Merchandising Week: ‘Everywhere our mass media push psychedelia with all its clothing fads, so-called “way-out” ideas etc. Youth is getting the hard sell’ (cited in Frank, 1997: 120).17
In Britain, as in the US, the 1960s counterculture attracted its share of opprobrium. The counterculture’s overtly political elements attracted particular ire. Responses, however, were not uniformly negative. As in America, the counterculture’s aesthetics and lifestyles elicited fascination, sympathy, even a degree of media admiration. The attitude was exemplified by reactions to The Rolling Stones’ drugs trial of 1967. Amid a blaze of publicity, the Stones’ frontmen, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, were convicted and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for possession of illegal drugs (though both walked free after an appeal). Rather than denouncing the Stones, however, significant sections of the media rallied to their defence. Famously, The Times published an editorial asking ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ - the newspaper defending Jagger and Richards and attacking their prison sentences as draconian (The Times, 1 July, 1967).
And a similar enthusiasm for youth resurfaced in Britain 30 years later. In the 1990s the buzzing phrase ‘Cool Britannia’ was coined by the media to denote what was seen as a renaissance in British art, fashion, design, and music. But the term also encapsulated the broader sense of a nation newly invigorated in the wake of the election of Tony Blair’s (‘New’) Labour government in 1997.
In this imagery of a revitalised Britain, notions of ‘youth’ had particular resonance. National rejuvenation had been a key theme in Blair’s electioneering, the Labour leader promising that his government would ‘make this the young country of my generation’s dreams’. And, as prime minister, Blair — much like Harold Wilson during the 1960s — strove to attach himself to the upbeat cachet of youth culture. Blair, for example, enjoyed photo opportunities with the allgirl pop group the Spice Girls, while Noel Gallagher (boisterous singer with the rock band Oasis) was invited to a reception at Downing Street, and Alan McGee (founder of Creation Records, a leading indie label) was appointed as a special advisor to the government’s Creative Industries Task Force (CITF) - a body where government ministers and leading media figures joined forces to map out the economic potential of Britain’s creative industries.18
