Cat's Reviews > Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture

Author Jon Savage is best noted for writing what many consider to be the definitive history of punk rock- "England's Dreaming" (personally, I prefer Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces".) In "Teenage"- his new book- he gets all ambitious. Teenage is a straight forward social history of what Savage calls "the creation of youth culture." One of the facts i learned this book, was that socialologist/philosopher Talcott Parsons coined the term "youth culture" in 1943.

I think this book is a must read for professionals in the culture industries- journalists, music industry folks, etc. The 450 page length is a tad offputting, but the length is set off by the structure of the book: episodic, proceeding from the 1890s- to 1945 in chronological orders, most focusing on one specific youth cultures from the U.S., the U.K. or Germany (France is mostly absent, along with Italy, Austria and Spain).

Generally speaking, Savage explicates his (fairly non-controversial) thesis that the industrial revolution stimulated the consciousness of youth as a class (by getting them into the work force early, creating more leisure time on a society wide basis, and weakening the relationship between children and their parents) and that "Youth" emerged in the mid 1920s as the most powerful "demographic" of western market capitalism.

Not a very novel set of ideas- I think most would already "know" the above paragraph to be true at some innate level. The devil, of course, is in the details, and it is Savage's work with the primary sources of each particular era which elevates this work from tedious pop history to a must read classic.

Working with the same careful eye for detail that marked his other work, Savage mines the detrius of low and middle brow culture (with the occasional shout out to contemporary academics and artists) with the skilled eye of a grizzled prospector.

Savage starts off in the 1890s- the earliest chapters are the weakest. The apogee, as far as Savage is concerned is in the 20's:

"The youth movement of the 1920s had been all too scucesful in creating their own discrete worlds. In doing so, they had reminded manufactuers, governments, and ideologues that youth comprised a social force that was far too important to be left to be left on its own."

The next 10 chapters mainly deal with Hitler and his fondness for youth culture(!). Indeed, in Savage's analysis, Hitler's succesful appeal to youth was key in his rise to power within Germany. Hitler, it turns out was a fan of American advertising guru Bernays. Whether the goal is social control or consumer capitalism, the techniques, all too often, are the same. It's hard to read the Hitler Youth chapters without thinking a little bit about some of the common characteristics of youth culture. Specifically, the thought that youth, unburdened by experience- are quick to embrace extreme ideas and have little patience for ideas that invovle gradualness or delayed gratificiation.

One of the intriguing inferences one can draw from this book is that- because of the tight relationship of industrialism and consumer captialism to "youth culture"- it's almost fair to say "youth market" instead of "youth culture." In other words- "youth culture" effectively doesn't exist in the absence of consumer driven market capitalism. Think about it.

Savage leaves many of the bolder inferences the reader can draw from this book unstated. The lack of any kind of theoretical explication makes "Teenage" an enjoyable read.