Colin MacInnes, “Pop Songs and Teenagers”, The Twentieth Century, February 1958

The “two nations” of our society may perhaps no longer be those of the “rich” and “poor” (or to use old-fashioned terms, the “upper” and “working” classes), but those of the teenagers on the one hand and, in the other, all those who have assumed the burdens of adult responsability. Indeed, the great social revolution of the past fifteen years may not be the one which redivided wealth among the adults in the Welfare State, but the one that’s given teenagers economic power. This piece is about the pop disc industry - almost entirely thier own creation; but what about the new clothing industry for making and selling teenage garments of both sex? Or the motor scooter industry they patronize so generously? Or the radiogram and television industries? Or the eating and soft-drinking places that cater so largely for them?

The hostility of some adults to teenagers - which often takes the form of a quite unbalanced loathing of their idols, particularly of Tommy and poor Elvis - is as sterile as is that hatred educated people often seem to have for television: a morbid dislike of these symbols of popular culture which they feel are undermining not so much culture itself, as their hitherto exclusive possession of it.

And what are they like, the teenagers (...)?

  1. They are much more classless than any of the older age groups are, or were. In the days when I was a teenager, it was impossible to step outside your class unless you joined the army or went to jail; but now the kids seem to do this quite effortlessly. (...) In contrast with the earlier generation (say, now aged 25-35) that was emancipated by the Welfare State and who, in spite of economic gains, still seem almost ferociously obsessed by class, the kids don’t seem to care about it at all.
  2. They are not so much hostile to, as blithely indifferent to, the Establishment. (...) I have the impression that a play like Look Back in Anger, with its cry of protest that so shook the old and staid, would seem quite meaningless to them. What is all this about outside lavatories and having to open sweet shops when you’ve got plenty of “spending money”? (...) Osborne’s play exists within the context of the old order, and only takes on its meaning by being , in a sense, part of it. To a teenger, it would seem thoroughly old-fashioned.
  3. They are not “Americanized”. The paradox is that the bearded skiffle singers with their Yankee ballads, and Tommy Steele with his “rock”-style songs, seems so resoundingly, so irreversibly English. I do not deny an influence (...) but the kids have transformed this influence into something of their own... in a way that suggests, subtly, that they’re almost amused by what has influenced them.
  4. I think that they are more internationally-minded than we were; and not, as we were, self-consciously but intuitively. They are much at ease at the Moscow congress as at the jazz festival in the local Trocadero.
  5. In their private lives, they don’t like to be told. Because of their economic power, and perhaps because those born in the war years were forced towards independence at an early age, they’re undoubtedly more mature than youngsters used to be. (...) They’re undoubtedly cleaner than kids once were. (...) and the improvement is not only in their persons. Dry cleaners, rare 20 years ago except in bourgeois quarters, now abound. The bright, coloured jeans and sweaters worn by both sexes invite the laundry (...) With their hair, they take immense pains - the boys as well as the girls.
  6. They don’t drink; and have thus created yet another industry, that of the non-alcholic beverage.
  7. As for their sex life; it’s mysterious (...)

In general, they’re gayer than English people seem to have been for 50 years at least. Contemporary England is peculiar for being the most highly organized country, in the social sense, for ensuring the moral and material welfare of everybody - pullulating with decent laws, with high-minded committees, with societies for preventing or encouraging this or that - and yet it has produced, in consequence, the dullest society western Europe (except for that of the Federal Swiss Republic) (...) The teenagers don’t seem to care for this, and have organized their underground of joy.

This is, on the whole, an optimistic view. But it would be equally possible to see, in the teenage neutralism and indifference to politics, and self-sufficiency, and instinct for enjoyment . in short, in their kind of happy mindlessness - the raw material for crypto-fascisms of the worst kind.

(In the Notting Vale riot of 1958, the worst offenders were boys who were technically (if not ideologically) teenagers. After the Kelso Cochrane alert of 1959, real teenagers (that is, not just teenage Teds) were more, and more disastruosly, in evidence. In complete and wonderful contrast to this: round about London you can now see teenagers of both “colours” in close and casual communion (...)

Never before, I’m convinced, has the younger generation been so different from its elders. Therefore, let moralists - especially political moralists - take heed. England is, and always has been, a country infested with people who love to tell us what to do, but who very rarely seem to know what’s going on.