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It’s
time to retire
the
teenager
The first subject
to be created almost entirely by marketing was perhaps the
teenager.
Mark Simpson looks
at Jon Savage’s recently out book Teenage: The Creation of
Youth
 OF
all the terrifying new weapons developed in World War II and
unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, the teenager was by far
the most powerful. The supersonic shockwave of Fat Man and
Little Boy was nothing compared to that caused by dropping the
teenager on Japan, Italy and Germany after their surrender - or
Britain after her victory. American post-war global hegemony was
guaranteed not by the Bomb but by the Teen.
Forget the Nuclear
Age; the second half of the 20th century was the Teen
Age.
Like the bomb, the
teenager was an American invention. The Cold War might have
turned out differently if, instead of Los Alamos, Soviet spies
had been installed at the offices of Seventeen magazine.
Launched in a booming USA on the brink of historic victory in
1944, the same year as the word "teenager" was coined,
Seventeen was aimed at the consumer queens of tomorrow
with disposable income to spend today. "Seventeen is
your magazine, High School Girls of America — all yours!"
proclaimed the first issue. "It is interested only in you
— and everything that concerns, excites, annoys, pleases or
perplexes you..." Features on Harry James, Frank Sinatra, a
Hollywood gossip column, record reviews, a "First Date
Quiz" and a regular slot called "Why Don’t Parents
Grow Up?" did their best to prove it.
We’re all
self-centred, celeb-struck American high schoolgirls now (I
certainly am). No one, least of all parents, is in danger of
growing up.
The dominant
"adult" culture is teenage, and Seventeen’s
1940s editorial policy has been adopted by national newspapers.
We all expect — nay, demand! — to be addressed intimately by
a mass consumerism that is only interested in that wonderful
unique thing that is YOU — and everything that concerns,
excites, pleases or perplexes YOU. Teenitis, or deliberately
arrested development, is the modern sensibility. In the words of
the curmudgeonly German Marxist Theodor Adorno, who fled Nazi
Germany and found himself in 1940s Los Angeles, the satanic
laboratory of consumerism: "All will be provided for, so
that none may escape."
The teenager was
perhaps the first subject to be created almost entirely by
marketing. Little wonder that in a post-war world built on ruins
of fascism and the American Dream of marketing and consumption
(the Marshall Plan didn’t just fight the spread of Communism,
it provided the US with markets for its consumer goods), the
teenager became the master race. But if we’re all teenage now,
is anyone a teenager any more? Particularly young people?
Perhaps the teenager, at 63 years, is pushing retirement? Is
there in fact anything "hot" or "cool" or
even interesting, let alone rebellious, about teenagers any
more?
Professor of Punk
Jon Savage, perhaps wisely, doesn’t directly ask or address
these questions in his scholarly book, but proffers an answer of
sorts by offering a history of the Teen Age not from 1945 to the
present day, but from the late 19th century to 1944.
Maybe it’s merely a way of allowing for another two or three
volumes, but it seems to suggest that you now have to dig deep
into the past to unearth something... alive. Savage claims
convincingly enough in his introduction that while the teenage
may have been a product invented in 1944, he/she was in
development for at least half a century before that and that
this is what his book aims to profile.
Savage begins with
the 1870s teen Adam and Eve, Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse
Pomeroy. Marie Bashkirtseff was a dreamy 16-year-old girl in
Nice whose blog-like diaries detailing her daily hopes and fears
(before her youthful death) gained her world fame. Jesse Pomeroy
of Massachusetts (whose plate looks alarmingly like Robbie
Williams) gained fame aged 15 by killing and mutilating several
young boys. Savage, as befits his own punk moniker, argues that
youth is about the eruption of the hormonal Id into the
repressed adult world: "Bashkirtseff and Pomeroy symbolised
the twin poles of youth: genius or monster, creator or destroyer
of worlds... At stake was the future; would it be dream or
nightmare, heaven or hell?" This is also the question you
find yourself asking of the huge volume in your hands.
Along with, how
much older will I be when I’ve finished it? Perhaps it’s
another sign of my own incurable teenitis, but Savage’s book
drags for much of the first half like a triple history class on
a hot summer’s day, and doesn’t pick up speed until between
the wars when the first "modern" kind of youth culture
begins to emerge, with drink, drugs, sex, flappers and frantic
dancing. Savage consummately conjures up a pre-1945 world of
youth culture and mass hysteria that is both fresh and familiar,
exciting and vaguely annoying, robbing us as it does of our own
sense of specialness.
This book makes it
clear that the two world wars of the 20th century
exhausted European ideas/ideals of youth. The hedonistic,
frivolous, slightly solipsistic New World teenager untroubled by
ideology was the perfect antidote to the failure of Old World
notions, whether romantic or patriotic, socialistic or
fascistic. Ultimately, the vital vulgarity of America saved
Europe from its own murderous seriousness.
— By
arrangement with The
Independent
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