England's Dreaming: Jon Savage

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After moving on to write for THE FACE in 1980, Savage’s cultural curiosity had him attend aNew York vogue ball with Malcolm McLaren, commentate on the rise and fall of Britpop and, over the past 20years, write three of the most significant, cohesive books on youth culture. My interest in this now looks at teenage superstar Greta Thunberg. There’s going to be a huge shift, I think, in the next 25 years, away from the idea of youth as consumers, and into something else. Ultimately, the way we live is not sustainable, and that’s got to be something for your generation or people younger than you to grapple with. Savage's book, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, was published in 2007. It is a history of the concept of teenagers, which begins in the 1870s and ends in 1945 and aims to tell the story of youth culture's prehistory, and dates the advent of today's form of "teenagers" to 1945. [5] The book was adapted into a film by Matt Wolf. JD: As middle-aged men, we are marinated in pop music, and we need to come to terms with the fact that we are potentially doomed to obsess over Top Of The Pops performances, B-sides and album covers. We are just so expert at the absolutely useless information of the pop culture we’ve absorbed. We would be into steam trains if we were 30 years older; Jon rescues punk from that “steam-train syndrome”.

England’s Dreaming introduced me to the power of urban

Compared to how it was when I was growing up, when you really had to fight hard to find out about anything, when records were deleted and you couldn’t find them except when you went hunting in the bargain bins… It’s fantastic that all of this stuff is available now. All I wanted when I was young was information, and then I could go ahead and do what I wanted with it. It's taken me a while to get through this, not because the book was dull or hard work, but because of the sheer volume of information inside, covering a relatively short time span. plus the fact it was too unwieldy for reading on my commute (how punk does that sound!) SK: It’s like what you said about being in bed all day – reading this book – still living at home and your mum and dad probably thinking you should be going to get a job. But, in fact, you were actually researching something that would eventually lead to what you do for a living. I don’t really remember what it’s like to be a 17-year-old, but I think if I were to read it now, at that age, I’d be enthralled and thrilled by it. An awful lot of it is about suburbia and how ordinary, young people transformed their own lives, and he paints a great picture of how boring most of Britain was at that time. If I were a kid at school, I’d certainly rather read this than about the Corn Laws.

Counterculture is often a reaction against politics. It’s been a particularly difficult time for the young under Tory rule over the past 10 years, hasn’t it? For Gareth Southgate, England’s coach, this will have felt like something different entirely. Sunday’s game will be the culmination of a task that in many ways was set out for him from the moment he stepped off the Wembley pitch after missing a penalty against Germany in 1996, and which – despite everything – still remains tantalisingly incomplete. England had lost their last four tournament semi-finals. They have not won a major trophy since 1966. That hoodoo has never felt closer to being broken. Face front, we got the future/Shining like a piece of gold/But I swear as we got closer/It looks like a lump of coal' - The Clash: All The Young Punks. The book built a picture of, to quote Savage quoting McLaren, “the human architecture of the city”, and provided an apocalyptic vision of England on the eve of Thatcherism – for Savage, a mirror image of punk’s suburban sado-masochism and its contempt for the woolly compromise of the welfare state. First of all, the book made me notice London. Suburban Southampton is an interminable, Americanised sprawl. England’s Dreaming’s conundrum is the pop-modernist dialectic, and the only writer who caught it as well as Savage was Marshall Berman, who wrote about Hollywood both offering a “dream of escape” from capitalism to his parents’ generation and a “force that bound them to it”. So too with punk: this generation – that of my parents – owed everything to the welfare state, yet they destroyed as much of it as they could.

Britain’s Dreaming: Jon Savage on the future of youth Britain’s Dreaming: Jon Savage on the future of youth

Predictions for apost-pandemic future are all over the shop. Will the nine-to-five resume? Four-day weekends? Four-day benders? Something great could be on the horizon. Asisitiremos a como Malcom McLaren creo desde su tienda de ropa transgresora al grupo que haria del nihilismo y la crítica social su bandera y como otras bandas se encargaron de llevarlo a su esplendor. Frohman, Jesse (2014). Kurt Cobain: The Last Session. Contributions by Jon Savage and Glenn O'Brien. London: Thames & Hudson. Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana – Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977–96 Publisher: London, Chatto & Windus, 1996 ISBN 978-0-7011-6360-0That’s alright. A lot of adults bang on about youth culture being inauthentic these days, perhaps because of the massive influence nostalgia has had on our generation – particularly in fashion. What do you make of that? Jon Savage has managed to produce a very excellent and readable book. This must have been quite a task given the plethora of material but the complete, and in some cases deliberate camouflaging of events and reasons, that could have led to either some kind of hero worshipful bible-like book or to the usual skim, have generally been avoided. Mr Savage has made an excellent review of the period and analysed the precursors whilst managing to keep the sense of wonder that was there all through the punk years. Having been there (but hardly 'in' them) I found his book to be absolutely fair and very astute in it's analysis. The machinations at record companies and the frankly mad, bad and downright chaotic behaviours of Malcolm Mclaren are fascinating and well told. How the band interacted (or not) with their manager and each other and well as with others within the Punk movement and without is also interesting.