The end-of-the-century party by Steve Redhead

Author:Steve Redhead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

Also emphasised in this mode of youth culture analysis is the expression of a certain political attitude associated with youth and youth culture. Laurie Taylor specifically declared that he could find, in July 1984, ‘no rebel rock here’, quoting Boy George, at face value, as saying ‘I am very conservative – And I love Coronation Street’ though Taylor did acknowledge some significance in the ‘gender-bending’ of George, Marilyn and others. Similar arguments are constantly cited about the continued popularity (both on record and live tours) of 1970s ‘progressive’ rock music made by bands such as Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Yes: youth in the 1980s consuming such product were simply assumed to be doing so out of a sense of political and cultural conservatism.

Polling evidence on the youth vote in the 1980s suggested that Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election in 1984 was partly due to conservatism amongst American youth, and Margaret Thatcher’s third term victory in June 1987 was seen to be ensured by young voters supporting her, defying stereotypes and psephological conventions, despite – or because of – Labour’s self-consciously ‘pop’ youth campaign. The polls further questioned the significance of the emergence of Red Wedge7 as one highly publicised strand of a Political Pop formation which had become identified in Britain since the previous General Election in 1983. Impressions of such a neo-conservatism in youth culture are, nevertheless, dangerously ambiguous: for example, soccer casuals partly subverted the uneven regional recession effects of so-called ‘Thatcherism’ by parading the appearance of wealth in the supposedly ‘dull’, ‘grey’, and ‘gloomy’ regions on match days.8 These practices constituted a kind of respectability off the peg, but were – and indeed still are – frequently sustained by a criminal subculture and the black or ‘casual’ economy (exuding a menace, smartly and succinctly captured by Latin Quarter in their lyrical snapshot ‘No Ordinary Return’ on their debut album). They were, too, inextricably connected to local economies and cultures. The persistent connection between Factory bands A Certain Ratio and, especially, archetypal scallies Happy Mondays and local football fans from the Greater Manchester region as well as the obsessive following of ‘dinosaur’ 1970s rock bands on Merseyside form part of another long running chapter in such a story which cannot be explained in terms of the ‘resistance’ of subcultural rituals.

Furthermore, a substantial focus of Britain’s ‘style wars’ obsession has been on the upper-middle class who have benefitted most from the taxation policies of the new right in the United States of America and United Kingdom, and the de-regulation of financial and other sectors, especially in Britain. Advertising discourse pervaded this concern to spot, and create, new styles throughout the 1980s: yuppies, new georgians, young fogies, sloanes and so on have been in one sense grist to business consultancies run by style-pundits such as Peter York. York’s one-time radicalism rapidly became simplistic self-parody. A poem written by scally-wag ‘Joe Average’ in the Merseyside fanzine The End in 1987, greeted a lecture by York on ITV’s South Bank Show – to

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