Quote of the Week.

“One role of popular music in socializing the young may be to create … a picture of childhood and adolescence in America as a happy-go-lucky time of haphazard clothes and haphazard behavior… Thus the very real problems of being young are evaded. …A small minority is … not only aware in some fashion of the adult, manipulative pressure but is also resentful of it.

The rebelliousness of this minority group might be indicated in some of the following attitudes toward popular music: an insistence on rigorous standards of judgment and taste in a relativist culture; a preference for the uncommercialized, unadvertised small bands rather than name bands; the development of a private language and then a flight from it when the private language (the same is true of other aspects of private style) is taken over by the majority group; a profound resentment of the commercialization of radio and musicians…; an appreciation for idiosyncrasy of performance goes along with a dislike of “star” performers and an insistence that the improvisation be a group-generated phenomenon.”

- Sociologist David Reisman, writing in 1950 in an essay entitled “Listening to Popular Music”, certainly had an eerily concise line on “why we’re all here”, circa 2010 or at any point in between for that matter.

I’ve appropriated this quote straight from Kevan Harris’s piece on the new Touch & Go collected fanzine book over at Dusted - worthwhile reading for anyone with a passing interest in ‘80s punk/hardcore and the offensive chauvinism boiling-over-into closet conservatism it so frequently used as a crutch.

Labels: punk, quotes