The youth don’t have any culture

There is no arts culture for young people and that is why they are protesting. It’s all they’ve got.

Spending a few hours looking at online reels of young people in various states of protest, I have reached the uncomfortable conclusion that young people don’t have any arts or youth culture with which to express themselves, and that is why they are protesting. It’s all they’ve got.

Look around you and compare what is on offer compared to the 1980’s, the 90’s or even pre-pandemic. There is no arts culture for young people.

If we go back to the 1990’s say, let’s look at what was on offer; there were multiple music scenes; various tribes you could join to feel part of through a music culture, with its own fashion and artistic imagery. If you were into Grunge, you had clubs, bands, plaid shirts, baggy jeans. If you were into Madchester music, you had a club scene, album art, haircuts and baggy jeans. If you were into rave or house you had entire warehouses in which to lose you inhibitions, dance the night and day away and wear an assortment of baggy clothes, brandish glow sticks, and sweat through hyperglobal colour t-shirts. And there was mainstream pop culture, a place where teenybop’s could dance, play grown up, make up dance routines and find a non-threatening pre-teen tribe to be part of.

Culture for young people since post-war until very recently had a multitude of varieties and spaces where you could safely express your individuality, your tribe and your unique beliefs. There was music, which had its own fashion, there was the fashion world itself, the UK famed for its ‘street’ wear culture that was unique in Europe. Mods, rockers, punks, goths, new romantics, emo’s, ravers and chavs, Britain’s youth culture was something to be proud of. Entrepreneurial, unique and style conscious, some had a political point, all had a raison d’etre to express new forms of style and sound.

Artwork on albums became seared into our consciousness, Nirvana’s Nevermind cover being as strong a part of the Grunge identity as the shirts and Kurt Cobain’s bleached straggly hair. And people learnt and played instruments, made their own bands and created their own music, art and fashion together.

So what youth culture is there now? Firstly, of all much of day-to-day debate, conversation and gossip has gone online and is no longer face to face in person. Interaction is typed, recorded or meme’d, disembodied, with no shared laughter, hilarity or giggles. The screen and isolation prevent the chemical serotonin reaction of shared jokes, shared space and shared sensibilities. Gone are the days of reciting Monty Python or Blackadder sketches together, boredom is not possible with 20 different platforms to share your opinions or gossip on, instead of making up your own humour.

Screen culture is no longer shared TV or film releases. Most young people admit to binge-ing on box sets, a particularly time consuming vacuum of cliff-hanging dopamine hits, designed to suck you in over multiple 50-minute segments, losing the equivalent of a full day and night to something with little more merit than a weekly soap opera.

There are hardly any nightclubs post-lockdown and there is very little dancing- go to a local high street on a Friday or Saturday night and the night-time economy is certainly nowhere where it once was, and often the domain of older drunk blokes, rather than gangs of energetic young people. If young people are not dancing they are certainly not snogging, or flirting, and we know they are having a lot less sex.

This culture of online, box-setted, non-physical interactivity offers young people no way to let of steam, no method to express themselves, make tits of themselves, be incredibly opinionated and then laugh it off, no way to publicly test your opinions or your anger. No way to shout and laugh and be stupid and silly and right and wrong.

And that’s where ‘Protests’ come in. What do protests give you? They give you a performance outlet, they give you a hit, they give you meaning and expression in your life, a purpose higher than yourself and your meaningless degree course.

The protest movement has all the hallmarks of a youth culture. Check out the pink or blue hair, the mullets, the undercuts and the straggly bleach ends. Check out the nose rings and the piercings. Check out the slogan t-shirt, the baggy jeans (again) and the hi-vis jackets. But instead of music, a culture or a tribe, the protest culture has an ideology you subscribe to, opinions you hold as if only you are justly correct.

Studying ‘Just Stop Oil’ protests I see all the panache of an early 1980’s O-level drama course taught with the enthusiasm of the PE teacher. Awkward youths gambol towards the fine stone pillars of the establishment or landmark they seek to assault, clutching aerosol cannisters of orange spray paint, unfurl a banner of a pre-approved slogan with logo ™. The finale is gluing themselves to a painting or the floor and then sitting or standing together, reciting with all the depth and enthusiasm of the school swot at form assembly, a liturgy of wrongs humans are doing to the planet, which they alone can save us from with their performative amateaur-ville stagings of agitprop activism. Perhaps in a deliberate move to be un-screen savvy, which the rest of the youth treat Tik Tok and Insta as their private reality-style show, their pallor and deadpan delivery reminds me of all the sexiness of a Sunday school teenage jumble sale.

Slight variations on this are the performative props of soup throwing (nod to Warhol) or hammers to crack glass coverings. One memorable event saw protesters, in a demure manner, climb onto the theatre stage and interrupt the finale of the first half of Les Misérables, the actors around them presenting far more vigour and animation whilst waving their flags in support of La Revolution.

What irks me, old fuddy duddy Gen X’er that I am, is that an attack in a theatre or a gallery is a deliberate attack on people’s psyche.  When you go into a space, such as a theatre or a gallery, you open up part of your imagination that allows you to be free. By sabotaging everyone in the genuinely ‘safe space’, they are savaging your spirit of discovery. Well, maybe it stops the audience either drinking themselves illy, joining in the chorus, or starting their own fisticuffs.

But the fact is that ideology has become the new disco. Chants and slogans are the new fashion. Sticking your fingers to concrete the new street fashion.

If young people have no creative outlet, no way to shine or fail or experiment in reality, with each other, with their minds and bodies in space and time together, then this is the appalling culture we are left with. Empty, performative, dopamine addicted little activists, smug in their superiority, but bereft of their own creative destiny.

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