Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times today is nostalgic for the Nineties and the golden age of youth magazines:

Magazines didn’t just tell you what to do — they told you who you were. If you wanted to be known for your musical knowledge, you read The Word, Q, Select and Mojo. If your personality was being cool, you bought Dazed & Confused, i-D and The Face. My favourites were Smash Hits and Empire, confirming my identity as “dorky enthusiast”….

This is not just nostalgia for a time when people bought magazines, but nostalgia for what they meant. In documentaries about 1990s magazines the journalists invariably say that working on them felt like “being part of a gang”, and that’s how it felt reading them, too. You might look out for your favourite journalists’ names (Tom Hibbert on Smash Hits, never forgotten), but you bought the magazine to be part of its tribe. There were no personal brands back then, no journalists launching their individual Substacks. It was all about the group.

Searching for an identity is a crucial developmental stage for teenagers. Individuation, therapists call it, meaning the process of becoming an individual. But for young people it is also the opposite of that: becoming an individual separate from their parents, yes, but also finding a group to fit into outside the home. Music and fashion have long served this function, creating subsets like goth, biker and punk, and magazines became part of that in the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of youth style publications. But what happens when those magazines disappear and parents insist on listening to the same Spotify lists and wearing the same sportswear as their kids?

The answer, it turned out, was identity politics. Here, like an old-style magazine, was a system that divided people into subsets and told millennials what to think, how to talk, how to present yourself and who you were. It definitely shocked their boomer and Gen X parents, who were astonished their kids were using their ethnicity or religion to define themselves when so many of us had rebelled against that when we were young. Best of all, unlike the old magazines, identity politics gave young people a moral high ground, allowing them to scold their bosses into attending anti-bias workshops and acknowledging National Asexual Day.

We used to think this was the natural order of things. After WW2, when teens had some money and freedom at last, it was one style after another. Hadley here is looking at the magazines, but – perhaps because I'm older – it's the music that sticks with me…music and clothes and, yes, style. Teds started it off in the Fifties (rock'n'roll), then Mods and Rockers, Hippies, Glam, Punks, Goths, New Age Romantics, Acid House….

Skinheads were an interesting exception, perhaps. Very much a working class movement, prefiguring punk, they were originally prime National Front material, nasty and thuggish, but then a remarkable thing happened when they discovered Jamaican music – ska, and, later, reggae. It was the sheer joy of the music, I think – music which was genuine, undeniably from the streets, and as far away from middle-class hippies as you could hope for. And the connection with alienated black youth. So we got all that Skinhead Moonstomp and the like, which was built on by Madness and the whole Two-Tone thing. But I digress…

Now, recently, this perpetual style revolution seems to have stopped. Teens are stuck in their bedrooms, on social media. They're prey to all these social contagions, like gender dysphoria. They (seem to be) miserable, anxious, wondering which particular form of mental problem suits them best.

Back in the day there was always this thing about corporate culture catching up and taking over. The Man. As soon as a youth movement was established, the suits moved in and soaked it up, and rebellious youth moved on to the next style. That was part of the dynamic. Now the suits – the tech bros – seem to have won. Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok and the rest. With, on the other side, the dictates of DEI and identity politics providing the predetermined categories into which you're allowed to fit.

Hadley ends with the hope that things get better:

It will be fascinating to see how young people define themselves in this Trump era. I hope they find a way to do it with more joy than last time around, when Greta Thunberg’s anxious, unhappy face seemed emblematic of her generation. Say what you want about 1990s magazines as a youth movement, but at least they had a sense of humour. And I hope they find something that allows for a collective experience, rather than the atomised loneliness fostered by the internet. Yes, things are bad, but the style magazines emerged in the Thatcher era, so you can create fun in the bleakest of times. It’s your turn now, Gen Z: put your best Face forward.

Well…we'll see.