Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post-War Britain

Garland, Jon; Gildart, Keith; Gough-Yates, Anna; Hodkinson, Paul; Osgerby, Bill; Robinson, Lucy; Street, John; Webb, Pete; Worley, Matthew

doi:10.1080/13619462.2012.703002

Cited by 22 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The Mini therefore existed at a sensitive intersection of contemporary issues, exposing, like youth culture, 'critical fault-lines in the very conception of a post-war consensus'. 148…”

Section: Class Gender and Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking an Icon of Sixties Britain: The Mini and Its Place in the Post-War Motor Revolution

Harris

2022

Twentieth Century British History

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The Mini was launched in 1959 during Britain’s motor revolution. This iconic car has long been analogized with the popular iconography of the Sixties, but I argue here that this association only scratches the surface of its more complex meanings. Rather, the Mini embodied the tension arising from a motor revolution that was transformative yet limited. By looking at how the Mini was marketed, perceived, and used (and by whom), I suggest that it was a conduit through which Englishness and national decline were mediated against the backdrop of mass motorization. It also reflected the motor-car’s growing importance as a public and private space. I draw on a number of historical sources to make this argument, including automotive advertising, a source that is currently underutilized by historians. In doing so, I seek to overcome the normative tendency in academic history to overlook the car’s cultural significance.

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“…The Mini therefore existed at a sensitive intersection of contemporary issues, exposing, like youth culture, 'critical fault-lines in the very conception of a post-war consensus'. 148…”

Section: Class Gender and Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking an Icon of Sixties Britain: The Mini and Its Place in the Post-War Motor Revolution

Harris

2022

Twentieth Century British History

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“…Rutherford-Johnson draws a correlation between post-1989 aesthetics and the end of the 'social democratic consensus that had steered the West through postwar reconstruction' (2017, 6). Consensus, of course, was in part a nationalist myth with limited power to reshape the ideological character of established institutions (Prasad 2006;Garland 2012;Davies 2017;Moyn 2018). Curiously, the decades since the advent of Thatcherism have also been marked by a steady increase in government spending on cultural programmes and institutions of all kinds; the problem is that instead of spending its money on bolstering its own capacity to provide services, the state in Britain focuses on bolstering a parasitic class of private and charitable 'providers' that it expects to operate in competition with each other-indeed, it frequently enforces that competition as a control mechanism (Offer 2008;Tomlinson 2016).…”

Section: Periodising Neoliberalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Music and Its Futures

Valiquet¹

2020

Contemporary Music Review

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extraterrestrial colonisation. The miraculous tesseract turns out to be the work of the future people whose advanced intelligence is the implied result of that colonisation process. Note that, despite the prominent thematisation of inter-dimensionality here, linear causality and intentionality in the universe of Interstellar still seem to work as humans would normally expect: without at least some basic abstractions it would be difficult to produce fiction at all. 1 The film's message seems to be that the solution to the catastrophe of global degradation is to be found not in the knowledge we have now, but 'out there' in one of many possible futures. Justice and peace, the trope implies, are matters outside of history: all humanity can do now is try to stay competitive and keep up the appearance of progress. The power of this plot device lies in the way it politicises the present. In Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred, for example, a mysterious force shuttles the protagonist inexplicably between past and present. The book's narrative follows what is in effect a kind of fold in history, linking relationships of care and moments of trauma across two intersecting plot trajectories. The fragmented present forces the reader to confront the horror of slavery not as a bounded, finished historical event but as a process working at the level of the protagonist's genetic code; slavery transposed to the level of metaphysics. Hypothetical changes enacted in the past enable the reader to encounter an apparently harmonious present in the subjunctive, to consider the ways that things could be going differently, and thus arrive at a better understanding of the necessities and contingencies which constitute the now of everyday experience. The name for this imaginary time of hypothetical resolution in French is uchronie. The term comes from the title of an 1876 novel by Charles Renouvier, a central philosopher of history, religion and law under Napoleon III, and an important influence on the pragmatist thinking of William James (Renouvier 1988). In a lengthy preface, Renouvier leads his reader to understand that the core of the text has been passed down in secret by a scholar fleeing the inquisition in the years following the execution of Giordano Bruno. The fictional author of this text finds himself intellectually hamstrung by the church's failure to reconcile the new empirical science with its metaphysical commitment to a single, personalised Absolute. If Europeans in the past had chosen to remain polytheistic, he asks, would they today be better equipped to accept the pluralist metaphysics that the new sciences seem to demand? What, for example, would have happened to philosophy if the Roman empire had chosen not to back Christianity? Renouvier's novel is both the answer to that question and an experiment in the kind of critical history that he saw his pluralist metaphysics as making possible. It treats the Absolute as an event like any other, a specific node in a chain of relations with no necessary outcome at any given time...

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“…8 Social historians have, appar ently, been slow to exhibit sustained interest in manifestations of youth culture such as popular music. 9 The study of performers from this formative period, especially in the years immediately preceding the rise of The Beatles, has been particularly neglected; frequently dismissed as artistically sterile, the era is often deemed interesting only as a precursor to the more imaginative, sophis ticated rock of the later 1960s.…”

Section: Inter-generational Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mod Movement in Quality Street Clothes’: British Popular Music and Pantomime, 1955–75

Mitchell¹

2017

New Theatre Quarterly

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From the late 1950s onwards, young rock ‘n’ roll musicians and popular singers were introduced into commercial Christmas pantomime productions. While this practice, which constituted an extension of their involvement in the broader sphere of variety theatre, has been previously noted, it is seldom accorded much sustained attention. In this article Gillian Mitchell explores the impact which such performers made upon pantomime, while observing the ways in which involvement in pantomime productions affected their careers and aspirations. ‘Pop stars’ brought much-needed revenue to struggling theatres, and, while their presence onstage alongside experienced pantomime performers sometimes attracted criticism, they also contributed in many ways to a reinvigoration of the medium, whether by offering fresh scope for topical gags, or by giving ambitious producers the chance to more more experimental types of production. The article also questions the notion that, by the late 1960s, pantomime had become a ‘last refuge’ for those popular musicians who were apparently unable to maintain a foothold in the increasingly ‘serious’ world of rock music. Gillian A.M. Mitchell is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. This article forms part of a larger project which explores adult reactions to popular music and inter-generational relations in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s.

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Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post-War Britain

Cited by 22 publications

References 10 publications

Rethinking an Icon of Sixties Britain: The Mini and Its Place in the Post-War Motor Revolution

Rethinking an Icon of Sixties Britain: The Mini and Its Place in the Post-War Motor Revolution

Contemporary Music and Its Futures

‘Mod Movement in Quality Street Clothes’: British Popular Music and Pantomime, 1955–75

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