History of subcultures

To be able to understand the youth culture in Manchester today it is important to understand some of the history behind it all. It is important to know how it all started and where we stand now. This is a chronological description of the most important events and a short background to the most wellknown subcultures of the time.
At the beginning of the 20th century leisure and leisure activities were strictly limited to those who could afford membership fees. Poverty had a profound impact upon working class life throughout the beginning of this century. The need to make ends meet dominated the domestic lives of many working-class families. Unemployment was a serious problem at this time, both for skilled and unskilled workers. After 1918 the conditions for the working-class improved drastically. Raising real wages, a narrowing of the gap between the wage rates for skilled and unskilled manual workers, the extension of state welfare and a decline in family size changed the material conditions for the working-class. The increased number of people going to the cinema and the number of wireless gramophones owned by working-class people shows that life was becoming easier for the workers. Never the less almost one third of the working population of Manchester were living in or on the margin of poverty during the 1930s. Despite the poverty money for entertainment was found in the working-class districts of the city, supporting a network of leisure facilities centered upon pubs, cinemas and bookmakers.Traditional leisure was male-dominated. It was central to the formation of the male identity. Pub life was especially important to men since they established their relations with friends and relatives through drinking. Men without work were left with no money for leisure at all. This undermined the collective life of these working-class men. The only way for them to come to terms with this problem would be to keep some of their unemployment allowances to themselves, even though it would mean that they ran the risk of leaving their families in very severe domestic poverty.
Women were much less likely to indulge in leisure activities, even though they did go to cinemas, music halls and less frequently pubs. The family was a woman’s first responsibility, and the running of the home rested entirely upon her. Prior to marriage young women enjoyed much greater freedom and financial independence.
The period between starting work and getting married was one of the most prosperous stages in the lives of working-class people. Young people earned a bit of money, but they were not burdened with the costs of running a home. As a consequence of this financial independence leisure was widely associated with youth throughout the beginning of the twentieth century. Even among youths the world of commercialized entertainment was restricted to those with sufficient funds.
Popular culture and youth culture as we know them emerged in England after World War II. After the war English industry was in desperate need of labour and this made it possible for the young in England to, for the first time, make their own money and to spend it on whatever they wanted. A new group of consumers was born.Out of this developed the first youth culture in the 1950s. A culture born on the streets as the result of the disapproval of the mainstream culture of the time. The followers of this subculture soon got the name Teddy boys. Appearances became more important than ever before. The clothes people wore and the music they listened to all indicated which particular subculture they belonged to.The Teddy boys were highly influenced by the films they went to see, trying to copy the looks of their favorite stars. Since almost all film were produced in Hollywood the influence was American. This American streamlining was seen as a threat to many of the older generation British. The critics thought it shocking that these youths spent all their money on expensive clothes, pop-records, scooters, drugs and clubs.
In 1964 a new subculture appears in London; the Mods. The mods subculture proceeded to demonstrate how the objects and contexts of commercial popular culture- clothes, records, dance, transport and drugs- could be transformed and modeled by the particular realities of this time and this place.The Italian scooter became one of the most famous mod icons. The Mods were young middle- and working-class men who had made a bit of money and wanted it to show. They socialized in groups and if you were not a Mod you were not welcome. The Mod culture spread all over the country, but it was in the big cities that it could best be seen.
In 1976 yet another subculture emerged- Punk. Punk is associated with violence, pins and bad behavior. Punk was closely related to working-class youths. It was their way of showing their disapproval of the current system. Young misunderstood British who rebelled against everything and everyone. The use of drugs has been an important part of the punk era. As John Robb so accurately put it "Everybody did it, nobody cared". But punk has also been a big source of inspiration for the bands that emerged after the punk era was over. The famous Manchester band the Stone Roses once said that without the punk bands they would never have got together to play at all. The impact on the youth culture of the time was enormous.The most famous punk bands of the time were the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Young people everywhere wanted to copy the styles of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, the front figures of the bands. These legends live on through their music today.
After the punk the subcultures slowly died away. You no longer needed a subculture to show which social class you belonged to, since the social classes were becoming more fluid. Music was becoming more accessible and the music industry was booming. The old form of subcultures were not important any more, instead different music genres became the issue. Even in the nineties today you find that with the appearance of a new music genre you also get a new type of "fashion" to go along with it.People still find themselves through music. Music is still as important as ever before. The only difference is probably that today you don't have to choose one type of music to listen to, you can like them all.

BRITISH CULTURAL IDENTITIES – YOUTH SUBCULTURE

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1- Research online to find out about: Teds/mods/skinheads/hippies/punks/raves/subcultures and their respective tastes in music and style.

I found my research in the Internet from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The Teds or Teddy Boy subculture started in London in the 1950’s and they liked to listen American rock and roll music. They wore long dark jackets, narrow trousers, a smart shirt and a loud tie. The boys used long hair and the girls ponytails.
They were shadowy figures at the dancehalls, lurking around the bars and driking. They formed gangs who had a common uniform like a particular colour of jacket or socks.

The Mods subculture appeared in London in the early 1960’s. They had an obsession for fashion. The boys wore a light-weight continental suit with a three-button, two-vent jacket, narrow trousers, button-collar shirt, narrow tie, zip boots and shot hair, and a long green military-style anorak known as a “parka” to protect the clothes. The girls wore mini-skirts, heavy, bright make-up, thick mascara, and shot straight hair. They used to ride the Vespa r Lambretta scooter. And they liked to hear black American soul music.

The skinheads subculture originated among working class youths in the United Kingdom in the 1960’s. I know that they spread to other parts of the world and still exist today in many countries. They like to use close-cropped hair and usually shaven heads. They were influenced by West Indian (Jamaican), rude boys in terms of fashion, music and lifestyle. Originally their subculture wasn’t base on politics or race. But their attitudes had become more political and more racial. They wear straight-leg jeans, steel-toe boots, button-down shirts and braces. They enjoy to listen to soul, bluebeat and rocksteady music.

The hippie subculture appeared in the United States during the early 1960’s and spread around the world at the time. They inherited the countercultural values of the Beat Generation, created their own communities, listened to folk, blues and psychedelic rock music, and used drugs to explore alternative states of consciousness. They wanted to free themselves from social restrictions.
They wore brightly coloured clothing such as bell-bottom pants, vests, tie-dyed garments, dashikis and long full skirts for the girls. They maintained long hair. Both genders wore sandals or went barefoot.

The punk subculture emerged in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa in the mid-to-late 1970’s and spread around the world.
They seek to outrage propriety with a highly theatrical use of clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, jewellery and body modification. They like to wear leather, rubber and vinyl clothing and their style hair stands in spikes, dramatic shapes, often colouring it with vibrant and unnatural hues. They like to listen to an aggressive and heavy genre of rock music.

2- Write a comparison of British and Portuguese youth subcultures of the same period.

I’m not very familiarize with the Portuguese youth subculture despite the fact that I’m Portuguese because I lived my adolescence in France. And I couldn’t find any text that would characterize the Portuguese youth.
As I remember, the French youth were, and still is, much more liberal than the Portuguese youth. At the age of 16 young French people already had sex, smoked, drove a car and drunk alcohol. The British youth was also more liberal than the Portuguese youth. They had sex and smoked at the age of 16, they drove a car at the age of 17 and bought alcohol at the age of 18. I think that Portuguese youth was conservative, oppressed, very religious and submitted in part due to the dictatorship that ruled in Portugal in this period.

3- To what extent do you think that young people have more in common with the youth of other nations and cultures, than with older people from their own country?

As I’m mother of a seventeenth boy, and as I remember being a teenager, the only reality that young people have in common with other youth of other nations is their age, their issues with themselves, their conflicts with their parents and above all the need of being different from anyone else and the need of breaking all the social, parental rules, and the fact that they don’t know what they really want. And sometimes they choose a way of life, a subculture which they identify in some points such as the clothe, the hair style, the drugs, the political or racial attitude or the music to outrage and to escape from their lives, their own personal conflicts, their parents, the society, all the things they think they hate.
They don’t really realize that they find an escape from the real life and they aren’t being original despite the fact that they want to be different from everybody else, like Jimmy in the movy Quadrophenia who said “I don’t wanna be like everybody else…” but he was a reflection of someone else.
So I don’t qualify this question as a big extent because the older people had their personal, parental and social conflicts in their youth, so most of them should communicate a lot with the young people, understand them, teach them, support them and help them to simply cross the youth to the adult life with less problems and damages.

Banksy works to be painted over

I think graffiti is art and also vandalism.Graffiti is art because of the use of the colours, the delivered messages from some extraordinary artists, and the representation of beautiful paintings. Sometimes viewing graffiti art on the walls, in subways and on buildings is much like viewing contemporary art in a gallery and a graffiti piece can totally decorate an appropirate location.But graffiti is also vandalism in some points of view. I wouldn't like to wake up one morning and find the walls of my new house covered in a graffiti piece. It wouldn't fit with the decoration I choose for my home.