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„It first precipitated with respect to ‘youth’, which came to provide, for a time, a metaphor for social change and an index of social anxiety.22 Every troubling feature of post-war social change was refracted in its highly visible prism. In youth, social change was not simply projected, but magnified. Inheritors of the Welfare State, harbingers of the post-war world, ‘youth’ was, at once, the vanguard of the Golden Age, and the vanguard party of the new materialism, the new hedonism. All of social change was inscribed, in microcosm, in its innocent face. The public response was, predictably, ambivalent. That ambivalence is registered in the ‘moral panic’ about the Teddy Boys in the mid-1950s,23 where the public gave vent to its collective horror at the spectacle of youth of the white under-class, with its rising social ambitions and its expressive violence, dressed up in off-the-peg, lumpenised versions of an Edwardian style, jiving to what Paul Johnson once described as ‘jungle music’, floating out of its proper habitat ‘up town’, spilling over into the respectable enclaves, dance halls and cinemas, and occasionally running amok to the beat of Rock Around The Clock. 24 The link with violence provided the frisson on which moral panics feeds. A few years later, the remnants of the Teds found their way into the streets of Notting Hill in the first full-scale race riots ever seen in Britain. The Times editorial (‘Hooliganism is Hooliganism’) made the straight transposition from hooliganism and ‘teenage violence’ into lawlessness and anarchy. The growth of racism was neglected; but the existence of blacks as a ‘problem’ was tacitly acknowledged.25“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 231);„It first precipitated with respect to ‘youth’, which came to provide, for a time, a metaphor for social change and an index of social anxiety.22 Every troubling feature of post-war social change was refracted in its highly visible prism. In youth, social change was not simply projected, but magnified. Inheritors of the Welfare State, harbingers of the post-war world, ‘youth’ was, at once, the vanguard of the Golden Age, and the vanguard party of the new materialism, the new hedonism. All of social change was inscribed, in microcosm, in its innocent face. The public response was, predictably, ambivalent. That ambivalence is registered in the ‘moral panic’ about the Teddy Boys in the mid-1950s,23 where the public gave vent to its collective horror at the spectacle of youth of the white under-class, with its rising social ambitions and its expressive violence, dressed up in off-the-peg, lumpenised versions of an Edwardian style, jiving to what Paul Johnson once described as ‘jungle music’, floating out of its proper habitat ‘up town’, spilling over into the respectable enclaves, dance halls and cinemas, and occasionally running amok to the beat of Rock Around The Clock. 24 The link with violence provided the frisson on which moral panics feeds. A few years later, the remnants of the Teds found their way into the streets of Notting Hill in the first full-scale race riots ever seen in Britain. The Times editorial (‘Hooliganism is Hooliganism’) made the straight transposition from hooliganism and ‘teenage violence’ into lawlessness and anarchy. The growth of racism was neglected; but the existence of blacks as a ‘problem’ was tacitly acknowledged.25“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 231)

Type: Quote

Identifier:
WEWTKY4W-24

Related people

Hall, Stuart (creator)
Critcher, C. (creator)
Jefferson, Tony (creator)
Clarke, John (creator)
Roberts, Brian (creator)
Palgrave Macmillan (publisher) (was published at)