Mick Hartley

Many of us will no doubt have thought to ourselves that youngsters nowadays just don't have the same youth cultures that thrived when we were growing up – but, in my case anyway, kept quiet because, well, it's not like I'm an expert about current youth trends. And anyway, doesn't every generation have a good old moan about how much better it was when they were growing up? Well, Rosie Kay has taken up the challenge – and she's persuasive:

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….

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.

So what do they do now, these culture-bereft youngsters? They protest.

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.

Ouch.

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.