Subcultures

THESIS STATEMENT

Youth is a complicated path that we all have to go through in life. We all handle this excessive production of energy and hormones in a unique way. Being curious, identity, authenticity, feeling excluded and wanting to become part of a group are special qualities of youth people. Qualities that complemented with society issues had led to the formation of groups of that youth people, making them adopt a unique character according to the group they belong. Fashion, attitude, art, music, dance, and consume of substances was a way of differentiation the diverse youth subcultures. They are called this because they became groups with untypical cultures to the general.

Youth subcultures have made a great part of our life up to now. So it’s important for us to know the origin of some of our styles, actions. That’s why I am going to develop some basics questions about this and go deep down in some big subcultures. Subcultures are very similar between them; they all have the same sort of objectives like living life the way they think they will enjoy it the most. After World War II people wouldn’t know how long they would live and they wanted to live all, there was pandemonium. The original subculture groups began to form in the UK with the teddy boy and USA with the beatniks. I’m going to base mostly in the UK subcultures.

The teddy boys (1950) were the first group to differentiate as teenagers, helping to create a industrial production for youths. After the war, the teddy boys was the group, that dressed in fancy clothes and made other teenagers think it was good to call the attention with your unique clothes and hairstyles. They also have a tendency to rock and roll music but the mainly listened and danced jazz and music.

Going ahead in time, rockers were born and they considered the teddy boys as their spiritual ancestor. After the WW2, people kept the war values, so rockers were the rebels, “bad boys” in this society. Society those days was very hypocrite and oppressive so rockers were a group that helped break this situation. They are characterizing by riding a big motorcycle, it was possible for then to afford this motorcycles, which were considered as transport for rich people, because the work for young people increase therefore motorcycles became a middle class transport. Their motorcar was a way of intimidation, masculinity, showing power and being reckless. They wore heavy leather jackets with dark colour, tight jeans and leather boots. They had a pompadour hairstyle that became popular for rock and roll musicians.

Their dislike of anyone connected with drugs was intense. Like the mods, they were rivals. The media exaggerated their fight in 1964, making people believe they were very problematic and young devils. We know hoe the rockers were, now lets describe the mods, who was centred on fashion and music, and many mods rode scooters. Mods wore suits and other clean-cut outfits, and preferred 1960s music genres such as soul, blues and beat music. For me, they are too close and similar just with a few differences in style.

I want to change a little bit the subject and focus on how influential music, art fashion is in these subcultures even books. Reading a book or seeing a movie can lead you to think and act in various ways for example “a clockwork orange” Stanley’s Kubrick movie was very influential in UK, because teenager really started to forms drugos groups and doing crimes in the night, therefore this movie was banned for some time in the UK. This is an amazing example of how can some peoples innocent thoughts can cause changes in societies thinking.

Actually, we can see lot of subcultures all across the world like emos, hipsters, rockers, etc. Few years ago it was the common to see and easy to identify emo people because the outfits they wore to identify themselves as group. For example the dark T-shirts and black-dark colors

...