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Introduction: a Sea of Possibilities?

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Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983

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Abstract

The introductory chapter of Youth and Permissive Social Change in the British Music Press, 1967–1983 first provides an overview of what music papers typically wrote about. It then locates music papers within the historiographical literature regarding youth. It goes on to offer a conceptual framework for ‘permissive social change’ that relies on a dynamic view of social change rather than one that implies a gradual, unassailable progress towards a more tolerant society or, for that matter, a ‘cultural revolution’. Finally the chapter outlines the scope and structure of the following chapters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paul Rambali, personal interview (2011).

  2. 2.

    Circulation figures are according to Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures provided by IPC Media (2010). The number of readers-per-copy is found in the National Readership Survey (NRS). NRS (January–June 1972). NRS (January–June 1978).

  3. 3.

    Mark Abrahams, The Teenage Consumer (London: London Press Exchange, 1959): 5–14.

  4. 4.

    NRS (January–June 1972). NRS (January–June 1978).

  5. 5.

    Selina Todd and Hilary Young, ‘Baby-Boomers to “Beanstalkers”,’ Cultural and Social History 9:3 (2015), 451–467.

  6. 6.

    Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture Society and Politics (London: Pearson Education, 2005), 35.

  7. 7.

    Keith Gildart, Images of England through Popular Music (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (London: Penguin, 1972). Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming (London: Faber & Faber, 2005). Matthew Worley, No Future!: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Also see, Jon Garland et al., ‘Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of “Consensus” in Post-War Britain,’ Contemporary British History 26:3 (2012): 2.

  8. 8.

    Louise Jackson, ‘“the Coffee Club Menace: Policing Youth, Leisure and Sexuality in Post-War Manchester,”’ Cultural and Social History 42:4 (2007): 289–309. David Fowler, Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c.1920–c.1970: From Ivory Tower to Global Movement – A New History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008): 166–170. David Fowler, ‘From Jukebox Boys to Revolting Students: Richard Hoggart and the Study of British Youth Culture,’ Journal of Cultural Studies 10:1 (2007): 73–84. Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (London: Pimlico, 2008). Melanie Tebbutt, Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014). Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

  9. 9.

    Jackson, ‘Coffee Club Menace’: 289.

  10. 10.

    Gillian A.M. Mitchell, ‘A Very “British” Introduction to Rock ’n’ Roll: Tommy Steele and the Advent of Rock ’n’ Roll Music in Britain’: Contemporary British History 25:2 (2011): 219–221.

  11. 11.

    Worley, No Future!: 15.

  12. 12.

    Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).

  13. 13.

    Stuart Hall, ‘Reformism and the Legislation of Consent’ in National Deviancy Conference (ed.) Permissiveness and Control: The fate of the Sixties legislation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980): 1–43.

  14. 14.

    Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subculture in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 2006).

  15. 15.

    Stuart Hall, John Clarke, Tony Jefferson, Brian Roberts, ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview,’ in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson eds, Resistance through Rituals (London: Routledge, 2006): 11–16.

  16. 16.

    Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 128–135.

  17. 17.

    Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, Tavistock Publications, 1974). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Popular Culture (New York, NY: Psychology Press, 1992).

  18. 18.

    Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out, 83–84.

  19. 19.

    Andrew Hobbs, Review of Hoskyns, Barney, ed., The Sound and the Fury: 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism: A Rock’s Backpages Reader. Jhistory, H-Net Reviews (August, 2006).

  20. 20.

    Anthony Aldgate, ‘Defining the Parameters of “Quality” Cinema for “the Permissive Society”: the British Board of Film Censors and This Sporting Life,’ in Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick eds, Windows On the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010): 26–32. Martin Cloonan, ‘Exclusive!: The British Press and Popular Music, the Story So Far’ in Steve Jones ed., Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002): 114–133. Martin Cloonan, Banned!: The Censorship of Popular Music in Britain, 1962–1997 (Aldershot, Arena, 1996). Louise Jackson, ‘Review Article. Youth and Modernity,’ Journal of Contemporary History 42 (2007), 639–47. Jackson, ‘Coffee Club Menace’: 289–308.

  21. 21.

    Marcus Collins, ‘The Pornography of Permissiveness: Men’s Sexuality and Women’s Emancipation in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain,’ History Workshop Journal Issue 47 (1999): 99–108.

  22. 22.

    Marcus Collins, ‘Sucking in the Seventies?: The Rolling Stones and the Aftermath of the Permissive Society,’ Popular Music History 7:1 (2012): 5–23.

  23. 23.

    Marwick, The Sixties: Social and Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, 1958–74 (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1999); Jonathan Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London: Pimlico, 1999).

  24. 24.

    Beatrix Campbell, ‘A Feminist Sexual Politics: Now You See It, Now You Don’t,’ Feminist Review 5 (1980): 1–18.

  25. 25.

    Rosalind Brunt, ‘An Immense Verbosity: Permissive Sexual Advice in the 1970s’ in Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan eds, Feminism, Culture and Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982): 143–170.

  26. 26.

    Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out: 57.

  27. 27.

    Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1978), 1–16.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 17–18

  29. 29.

    Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990); Judith Halberstram, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press: New York, 2005).

  30. 30.

    Halberstram, Queer Time and Place, 5.

  31. 31.

    Allen Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’ in Collected Poems 1947–1997 (London: Penguin, 2013): 144.

  32. 32.

    Andrew Davies traces youthful street gangs known as ‘Scuttlers’ to Victorian and Edwardian Manchester in The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers Britain’s First Youth Cult (Preston: Milo Books, 2008).

  33. 33.

    Bill Osgerby, Youth Media (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004): 42.

  34. 34.

    Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (London: Yale University Press, 2010).

  35. 35.

    Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 348.

  36. 36.

    Helen Smith, Masculinity, Class and Same-sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895–1957 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  37. 37.

    H.G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003); Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 7–11; Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–57 (London: Chicago University Press, 2005): 3; Chris Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999): 139.

  38. 38.

    Nick Thomas, ‘Challenging the Myths of the 1960s: the Case of Student Protest in Britain,’ Twentieth Century British History 13:3 (2002): 278.

  39. 39.

    Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life, and the Popular Press in Britain (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011): 121.

  40. 40.

    Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis ‘“A Field for Private Members”: The Wolfenden Committee and Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1950–67,’ Twentieth Century British History 15:2 (2004): 175–176. Also see, Frank Mort, ‘Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution 1954–57’, New Formations, 37 (1999): 92–113. And, Frank Mort, ‘Scandalous Events Metropolitan Culture and Moral Change in Post-Second World War London’, Representations 93:1 (2006): 106–137.

  41. 41.

    Donnelly, Sixties Britain, 116.

  42. 42.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, 11.

  43. 43.

    Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Inter-War Press in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 16. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Hobson eds, Culture, Media, Language (Abingdon: Routledge, 1980), pp. 107–110. Anna Gough-Yates, Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readerships (London: Routledge, 2003), 6–7.

  44. 44.

    Angela McRobbie, ‘Jackie: Romantic Individualism and the Teenage Girl,’ in Feminism and Youth Culture from Jackie to Just Seventeen (London: Macmillan, 1991): 81–134. Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987).

  45. 45.

    Gough-Yates, Understanding Women’s Magazines, 19–21. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996):10. Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (London: UCL Press, 1996). Paul Du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work (London: Sage, 1996).

  46. 46.

    Simon Frith, “‘The Magic That Can Set You Free:’ The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community,” Popular Music 1 (1981): 159–168.

  47. 47.

    Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out, 57.

  48. 48.

    Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 1–2.

  49. 49.

    Simon Frith, ‘The industrialisation of popular music,’ in James Lull ed., Popular Music and Communication (London: Sage, 1987), 54.

  50. 50.

    Derek B. Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 88. George McKay, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 73–86.

  51. 51.

    Alf Arvidsson, ‘“Mike” disc-courses on hot jazz: discursive strategies in the writings of Spike Hughes, 1931–33’, Popular Music History 4.3 (2009): 251–269.

  52. 52.

    Matt Brennan, ‘“Nobody Likes Rock and Roll but the Public”: Down Beat, Genre Boundaries and the Dismissal of Rock and Roll by Jazz Critics’, Popular Music and Society 36:5 (2013): 561–564.

  53. 53.

    Gestur Guðmundsson, Ulf Lindberg, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisthaunet, ‘Turning Points in British Rock Criticism, 1960–1990,’ in Steve Jones ed., Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press 2002): 41–64. Gestur Guðmundsson, Ulf Lindberg, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisthaunet, Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-Headed Cruisers (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).

  54. 54.

    Jayson Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning up Grunge: the Music Press and Generic Change in British Pop and Rock,’ Popular Music 12:3 (1993): 289–300.

  55. 55.

    Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Aldershot, 2007).

  56. 56.

    Guðmundsson et al., ‘Turning Points’: 55.

  57. 57.

    Steve Jones, ‘the Intro,’ in Steve Jones ed., Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press 2002): 4. Roy Shuker, Key Concepts in Popular Music (London: Routledge, 1998): 199. Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia’: 290.

  58. 58.

    Worley, Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1976–84: ‘While the world was dying, did you wonder why?’ History Workshop Journal 79:1 (2015): 84. Teal Triggs, Fanzines (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010).

  59. 59.

    Simon Frith, ‘“The Magic that can Set You Free”: the Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community,’ Popular Music 1, (1981), 159–168. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place; John Stratton. ‘Between Two Worlds: Art and Commercialism in the Record 1ndustry,’ Sociological Review 30 (1982), 267–85; and Carys Jones, The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 23.

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    Patrick Glen

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Glen, P. (2019). Introduction: a Sea of Possibilities?. In: Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_1

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