1955 Notting Hill Teddy Boys (Ken Russell) by Paul Townsend on Flickr under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 |
With roots in the 1940s-50s, the birth of teen consciousness, youth tribes successfully permeated society: music, fashion, art, sexuality, and politics all wrapped up in little doppelganger bundles. I don't mean to sound snide or superior here, I edged around the fringes of tribes myself in my late teens in 80s Sydney. It was an exciting time, with danger in the air as skinheads and punks and mods and new romantics rubbed shoulders and punched heads in the pubs, music venues, house parties, and cramped inner suburban streets of the city.
These tribes are all but gone now, and this is a trend worldwide. Where did the all the tribes go? Two recent articles, from The Conversation and The Telegraph, summarise a number of theories around the demise of youth tribes, and even give hope that they may not be gone for good. But should we mourn the loss of a sense of belonging, youthful passion, artistry and creativity, healthy rebellion, political awareness? Or celebrate the end of robotic conformism, ugly attitudes, reactionary sentiments, crowd mentality, exclusivity, and sometimes violent extremism?
I'd like to look at some of the myths and facts of tribes today and in the past, and as usual, I'd love you to throw up your thoughts or memories about youth tribes in the comments. I'll also profile some of the newer tribes witnessed in our culture in recent years. If you're not overly familiar with the youth tribes of the past 70 years, try these lists first for a brush-up:
Subcultures List http://subcultureslist.com/
Urban Dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=subculture
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subcultures
The Free Dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/youth+subculture
We're not talking here about subcultures, like surfers or skaters, about gangs or syndicates like the Chinese triads, or even persuasions, like yuppies or the Black Panthers. Tribes are/were distinguished by commonalities in:
- clothes, hairstyles and accoutrements
- musical tastes - including a dislike of other forms
- attitudes, agendas, interests, desires
- what is 'fun' to do
- location - even for global tribes
- sense of otherness/dissatisfaction/disenfranchisement
- forms of rebellion
- objects of derision - be they parents, police, the government, capitalism, other tribes.
English photographer Derek Ridger's photos offer an unsettling black-and-white glimpse of the tattooed and glowering youth of London over this period, where the hated Thatcher government reigned over a harried underclass. These tribes banded together for support and shared outrage.
Tribes are still around, they're just not called that anymore
There is a sense of anachronism around tribes for the reasons I list later but they are not entirely gone. Recent articles on tribal behaviour in Sydney, Madrid, London, and the Northern UK list tribes that can still be seen in these cities but there's no doubt this is in reduced numbers. The Northern UM slideshare from Channel 4 has 23 unique tribes but there is a sense that the teens interviewed are taking the interviewers for a ride with some of these names. And are they really tribes at all? Visiting a bar dressed in certain clothes doesn't define a person as a tribe member, and it seems the term is most commonly attributed by journalists and bloggers.
No generation have faced the levels of technological development and societal change of the current 'millenials'. Respected UK music journalist Alexis Petridis bemoans the loss of youth tribes and puts the fault squarely on the current 'internet' generation and culture, claiming "the internet doesn't spawn mass movements, bonded together by a shared taste in music, fashion and ownership of subcultural capital: it spawns brief, microcosmic ones."
With crowdsourcing, social media, content creation, and a hundred other online activities and personalities to manage, it's no surprise the homogeneity of youth tribes is unattractive to today's multitasking youth. Urban, middle class 'tribes' like hipsters are now more common, but also both uncomfortable with the associations of the term 'tribe' and possibly even dying out as a subculture.
Today's youth have a global consciousness
Why hang out with the few sad metalheads in your suburb when there are infinite styles or looks you can access, browse and buy from your smartphone? This Huffington Post article suggests the majority of current tribal behaviour is actually from thirty- forty- fifty-somethings reliving their tribal youth, or perhaps never having grown out if it. Today's youth are variously described as tolerant, accepting and open to new experiences, the earnest Raising Children 'family support' website from Australia glibly surmising that belonging to a subculture is about "experimenting with who you are and what you stand for".
The First World is generally richer and more complacent
Many historic youth tribes were based around a socio-political reaction to prescriptive or submissive governments: punks, hippies, greasers, skinheads. While these governments haven't all gone the rebellion has taken on other forms, like hacking and lobbying and clicktivism, which don't require a uniform or gang. Today's First World youth are richer, more educated, travel more often, and are arguably more self-focused than their forebears. We have also witnessed the massive rise of celebrity culture in recent years, and particularly its influence on the young, spawning curious transitory tribes like Seapunk below.
Tribes have almost always been based around shared music interests. One tribe that has survived and is mentioned in almost every article is Metalheads, or Metallers, basically fans of all the metal music genres. Another argument explaining the decline of tribes is that there is just so much music, and it's so easy to obtain new sounds, that youth consider themselves fans of 'music' rather than one genre.
And it's not always about music, of course, youths being equally prone to entering into tribal behaviour for motivations of comradeship or family, geography, poverty or even history. But music is closely associated with rastas, metalheads, emos, punks, home boys, greasers, skinheads, goths, ravers - the largest and most enduring youth tribes.
Today's tribes can be really scary
There have always been strong reactions by parents. schools and 'the establishment' against severe tribal behaviour. But nobody can completely monitor the internet, and tragedies like the recent Parramatta shooting prove beyond doubt that extremists are using the internet to recruit and train and radicalise certain disaffected youth. Going back to the list of commonalities earlier in this post, you can see how similar these
The future of youth tribes
It seems impossible to predict where tribal behaviour will flare up next, or even if it will exist at all. Many of the articles above pronounce them next to extinct, while others see glimpses of tribes that have never really left at all, just gone underground or thinned their ranks. One thing for sure is that young people finding their identity or leaving home or starting tertiary study won't just have a few distinctive, restrictive tribes to choose from like we had back in the 1980s. Many will choose no tribe at all. But if you're young, and impressionable, and find someone with similar attitudes to you, then more of the same, it no longer makes you a tribe member or robot because the edges are now blurred, the uniforms adaptable, the tastes malleable.
The tribes may be gone, but the need to belong never does.