I agree wholeheartedly with your message. But I think etiology of
contemporary youth culture exaggerates the degree to which its origins, and
especially those related to early rock and roll, were products of the drive
to make money. Your example of "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band" (1967)
is telling: that is the first album the Beatles made after they had given up
doing live concerts. Historically there is a watershed somewhere in the
late 60s when a critical mass of business types began to understand the gold
mine that soon thereafter would become all the notable nothings such as
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (personal bias). Bill Graham of Fillmore fame is
a very good case study and there is a lot written about the conflicts he got
into with Ken Kesey about the very first rock and roll shows in San
Francisco in the mid-60s over the tension between "creating a carnival
space" where the young musicians and their no-less performative audiences
who lived in San Francisco could congregate (spontaneous "happenings") and
"running a viable business venture." Don't forget that the first Woodstock
started out with paid tickets but by the middle of the second day the
organizers, in a truly gracious way, announced, "from this point on this is
a free concert." The youth pushed the walls down and made the event
something much bigger than what the organizers had planned. But at that
time the organizers didn't do a lot about security as the case of Altamont
brought out so vividly. Nowadays security is one of the first
considerations--a clear sign of a change of emphasis, wouldn't you say??
There was also a change from the point where organizers of cultural events
that featured youth artists stopped charging on the basis of costs and
started charging on the basis of "what the market could bear." Marx would
call this the difference between simple and expanded commodity production.
Nevertheless, there has always been forms of rock that emerge out of a true
rejection of commercialized music: the origins of punk and grunge are not to
be found on the notepads of meetings at Capitol, EMI, or MTV. What remains
true,however, is that the business types move in very, very quickly to cash
in on any new form of cultural expression that has an identifiable audience
and hence a potential market.
By the way, if you really go back to the origins of the open air rock shows
(other than the Beatles at Shea Stadium) you are going to have to consider
the role of the Love-Ins and Be-Ins, Kesey's Acid Tests, and the free
concerts that happened on a regular basis in the San Francisco Panhandle
(featuring Janis Joplin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Grateful
Dead) in the period 1965-1967. Totally free, organized by the bands and
their managers (whatever did happen to Chet Helms?).
So while I agree wholeheartedly with you about the commercialization of our
youth, I also do believe that young people do create their own cultural
forms and that youth culture is not simply a corporate creation. Part of
their resentment is at having this pulled away and then resold to them.
Youth culture just becomes another form of alienated labor, the youth
another class of exploited members of society. So do they erupt
occasionally, as you say? Yes and with frightening, unbridled energy at
times--we did the same but our enemies were a lot clearer: an unjust war in
southeast Asia and a system of racial (and later sexist) discrimination in
the U.S. Since the "enemy" isn't so apparent anymore, a lot of other issues
are pulled into the arena as well, in particular the issues to which Gary
made reference in his initial post.
Finally, I also agree with your characterization of middle school as a
"middle passage" having watched how intense the pressures of status-based
consumerism become with the kids in that age bracket.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Rachel Heckert <heckertkrs who-is-at juno.com>
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, September 19, 1999 7:55 AM
Subject: Re: FWD: disturbing trends from youth culture
>You're shocked?
>
>I'm shocked that you're shocked.
>
>Since when is the music industry about anything else except money and
>power? It's an industry, an economic machine which is, like most things
>economic in this country, almost totally without any sense of moral or
>social accountability.
>
>"Youth culture" in this country is not "culture" - it's simply a
>marketing ploy, and has been since the late fifties, when it was
>discovered that young people were vulnerable to mass-marketed alienation.
> I tried telling my friends back in the days of the original Woodstock
>that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Clubs Band" was no call to higher
>consciousness and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" wasn't promoting LSD as
>a road to higher realities. The Beatles just wanted to make money, and
>we were dumb enough to give it to them.
>
>We have been selling our children for close to half a century, and the
>fact that they occasionally decide to express their resentment by blowing
>away a bit of their immediate environment shouldn't surprise us. We've
>made childhood into a form of psycho-economic slavery, with middle school
>approximating emotionally the physical horrors of the slave trade's
>Middle Passage. Don't think the kids don't "get it" when they see the
>marketing of films like the latest "Star Wars" flick, or the rating of
>kid-oriented movies by how much they've grossed at the box office.
>
>What goes around comes around. We are committing massive child abuse as
>a society, and like many abused children, a lot of them are responding
>with alienation and their own forms of violence.
>
>You want an answer? Go to your local drugstore's "toy" section and look
>at the plastic "action figures" of decomposing corpses from "The Mummy"
>being sold to our children as "toys," along with WWF caricatures and
>interstellar killing machines. And we were worried about GI Joe?
>
>We're waging a psychological/emotional Vietnamese war on our own
>children. Why are we surprised when they react?
>
>Very sincerely,
>
>Rachel Heckert
>