When you look closely, it appears that Western youth has little to rebel against. When fashion and music tips are traded with your best friends, your parents, there is no reason to rebel. The generation gap has been blown away. This sad news for those in the music, entertainment and fashion industries, for whom youthful rebellion was once a catalyst for new exciting movements of change, of which, punk and grunge are but two examples. So today's teens are not growing up like teens of previous generations, they are "conforming up" to be adults as quick as possible. Political and economic pressure from globalization is playing a key role here.
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For teens, rebellion, like everything else has been pre-packaged and sold as look. Teens Influx has talked to in research, tell us that they like to have "rebel Fridays, where they dress all punky".
Looks like global capital really does have us all taped. It's no good, the rest of us will have to rebel, we just can't trust youth to do it anymore.
And then there's this article too, in which we find,
This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent.
It goes on to say, perhaps not entirely fairly,
It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.I wonder whether we need to clarify what we mean by 'grown up' here. Perhaps we are just using different definitions from those who grew up in the first half of the 20th century? I can't get out of my mind Jesus' words about 'becoming as little children'. I kind of wonder whether growing up used to mean no longer being particularly interested in fashion or changes in music style, whereas now ... And at the end of that article there's something that about describes some of it for me,
[it] isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth—or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise.
And yet as I listen to what my teenaged kids are listening to this seems strangely familiar.
“All of the really good music right now has absolutely precise parallels to the best music of the eighties, from Franz Ferdinand to Interpol to Death Cab—anything you can name,” says Michael Hirschorn, the 42-year-old executive vice-president of original programming and production at VH1. “Plus, the 20-year-olds are all listening to the Cure and New Order anyway. It’s created a kind of mass confusion.... some of the older parents I know who have teenagers claim that there’s no generation gap anymore. They say they get along perfectly with their kids. They listen to the same music. To me, that seems somewhat laughable. But I do remember when I was young, trying to explain the Beatles to my dad, and he didn’t even know who they were. I don’t think that’s possible today.And only earlier today I had the eerie experience of walking past a trendy clothes and shoe shop in Newcastle only to see them selling the kind of stuff I was wearing in the early 80's. So I can so relate to this,
"The embarrassing thing for me,” says Hirschorn, “is seeing the actual culture of my youth recycled as a kind of ironic hipster kitsch. What’s my access point into that? If I still have the clothes from the first time around, does that mean I get to wear them again?” In other words, if you’re 35 and wearing the same Converse All-Stars to work that you wore to junior high, are you an old guy sadly aping the Strokes? Or are the young guys simply copying you? Wait, how old are the Strokes, anyway?
teens rebellion generationY consumerism aging
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