"Youth Culture's Lament," by Roger Scruton | City Journal, Autumn 1998
Interesting and provocative.
Youth Culture’s Lament
Pop culture’s noise and glamour try in vain to fill a gaping void.
Roger Scruton
Autumn 1998
Youth, as we know it from our modern cities, is a new human type-a "race of new mutants," in Leslie Fiedler's words of a generation ago. It has its own language, its own customs, its own territory, even its own economy. It also has its own culture-a culture entirely indifferent to traditional boundaries, loyalties, and forms of learning. That culture is a global force, propagated through media that acknowledge neither locality nor sovereignty in their easygoing capture of the airwaves: "one world, one music," in the slogan adopted by MTV, a station that assembles the words, images, and sounds that are the lingua franca of modern adolescents.
Because youth culture seems to press on modern life from everywhere, it gives the impression of plenitude, of completeness. But despite its ubiquity, at its center is a void, which it continually tries to fill, without success, and continually bemoans, with characteristic inarticulateness.
You can see the effort, the failure, and the inarticulateness most clearly in pop music. On the surface, the words and images lyricize the transgressive conduct that fathers and mothers condemned in the days when disapproval was permitted. But behind the anarchic words another message is encoded, a message that resides not in what is said but in what is not said, in what cannot be said, since the means of saying it have never been supplied. In the effort to give voice to this cryptic message, words float free of grammar and become flotsam on a sea of noise. Witness Nirvana, once the most popular of all popular music groups and still revered by a cult following:
Was the season, when a round
Earth can do anything.
What's the reason in around,
If the crown means everything?
And then: How uncultured can we get?
A good question, to which Oasis, a group hailed at its birth as the new Beatles, gives an answer:
Damn my education, I can't find the words to say
About the things caught in my mind.
Here, encrypted within the routine protest, is a more strangulated cry-a protest against the impossibility of protest. Trapped as he is in a culture that treats articulate utterance as a capitulation to the adult world, the singer can find no words to express what most deeply concerns him. Something is lacking in his world-but he cannot say what. He excites his fans to every kind of artificial ecstasy, knowing that nothing will be changed for them or him, that the void will always remain unfilled. As the Verve so miserably sings: "The drugs don't work."
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