A Single Youth Culture Essay Research Paper

A Single Youth Culture. Essay, Research Paper

Youth culture and youth subcultures have been a subject of research since the early 1930s. It is most certainly true today that there is not one singular youth culture but a variety of different youth subcultures. The 90’s can not be described as the same as the 60’s or 70’s or even the 80’s.There are many reasons put forward by sociologists for this such as there are more styles available today, media influences us more and there is a higher disposable income per household to spend on fashions. This paper will explore the reasons behind the existence of youth cultures in previous years and why the same format has not occured in the 1990’s. Defining ‘youth’ can be difficult and is described in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as: “the state of being young, the period between childhood and adult age” – Oxford Dictionary (1990). This would indicate that youth is described as an age group and people can be distinguished by the different age groups. However, it could be questioned that not all children stop being children at the same time. Frith describes youth as “not simply an age group, but the social organization of an age group” Sociologists of youth, according to Frith, describe youth culture as “the way of life shared by young people”. Subculture, as defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is a ‘cultural group within a larger culture often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture’. This would imply that a subculture is a subdivision of a national culture; it exists between the parameters of certain cultures. TalcottParsons saw youth subcultures usually having important positive functions in easing the transition from childhood to full adult life in marriage and occupational status. It would appear that the majority of people leave these youth subcultures at some latter point, often at the point of marriage, therefore Parsons theory could be justified. Empirical observation carried out by sociologists find that youth sub-cultures have a distinct individual style. They have certain ways of dressing (i.e. shoes, clothing and hairstyles),speaking (i.e. slang), listening to music and gathering in similar places i.e. bikers at race meetings and bars and ravers at dance clubs or outdoor raves. It is then assumed that shared activities reflect shared values. Firth states that “culture is all learned behavior which has been socially acquired” To concentrate on the bikers of the 60’s seems fitting. This was one large youth culture and still exists is a smaller section of society. It could be said that not all bikers today share the same values and enjoy the same activities as do the 60s style of bikers. This could be because members of the subculture break away from a particular group or never ‘join’ in the first place. Age could have implications here; the transition from youth to adult may determine how long a member stays in one particular subculture. Although there are variants of bike-boys they were broadly from a working class background and were seen as outsiders and loners linked by the love of motor-bikes and heavy rock music. Their style was masculine and their appearance was aggressive. The motor-cycle gear looked tough with its leather studs, denim and heavy leather boots. Hair was worn long in a greasy swept-back style and many were tattooed on the hands, arms and chest. A typical evening for the bike boys would consist of permutations of the same activities: a drink and a game of darts in their local pub, a game of pinball and a coffee in the coffee bar and general horseplay and chatter in a club. Paul Willis conducted an ethnographic study of a group of bikers during the 70s and described the group as being almost all male and from typical working class backgrounds. The composition of Willis’s group revealed members working backgrounds included scaffolders, foundry workers, students, a milkman and a number of unemployed. However, it could be argued that today’s bikers come from a variety of class and professional backgrounds from bricklayers to bankers. In Britain, the general fears about young people and youth subcultures have been focused on working class youth styles. The young people concerned, according to Frith “come from working class families and neighbourhoods, have a working class experience of growing up, in lower stream of school and leave as soon as possible often becoming unemployed or going through a succession on dead-end jobs.’ This appeared to be the case in Willis’s study which seemed to follow a Marxist perspective. However different youth groups are from each other, i.e. bikers as opposed to the more ‘recent’ ravers, they appear to outrage ’straight’ society and are often labelled deviant or delinquent. Youth has been seen as a ’social problem’ for at least one hundred years. Analysis of youth culture in Britain has been influenced mainly by Marxist thought. Marx believed all cultures are produced by ’social conditions’ and that these ’social conditions’ depend upon social class and the problems social class provides; age, according to Marx, was also a contributor. It is fair to say that social conditions have greatly improved in Britain since the 1960’s and social class seems almost a thing of the past with John Major’s ‘classless society’ and Tony Blair claiming that we are ‘all middle class’. If a youth culture is attatched to a social class and social classes are now partly di