It must by now be apparent that high culture in our time cannot be understood if we ignore the popular culture which roars all around it. This popular culture is pre-eminently a culture of youth. There is an important reason for this, and my purpose in this chapter is to bring this reason to light – to show why it is that youth and the culture of youth have become so visible, in the world after faith.
Among youth, as we know it from our modern cities, a new human type is emerging. It has its own language, its own customs, its own territory and its own self-contained economy. It also has its own culture – a culture which is largely indifferent to traditional boundaries, traditional loyalties, and traditional forms of learning. Youth culture is a global force, propagated through media which acknowledge neither locality nor sovereignty in their easy-going capture of the air-waves: ‘one world, one music,’ in the slogan adopted by MTV, a channel which assembles the words, images and sounds which are the lingua franca of modern adolescents.
MTV exaggerates. There is not one music of youth, but many. Nevertheless, there is a particular kind of pop music, typified by such cult groups as Nirvana, R.E.M., the Prodigy and Oasis, which has a special claim on our attention, since it represents itself as the voice of youth, in opposition to the world of adults. In the music of such groups the words and sounds lyricise the transgressive conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the days when disapproval was permitted. But behind the anarchic words another message is encoded. This message 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:
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?’ To which question Oasis gives an answer:
Damn my education, I can’t find the words to say About the things caught in my mind.
Encrypted within the routine protest, therefore, we find another and more strangulated cry – a protest against the impossibility of protest. Trapped as he is in a culture of near total inarticulateness, 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 sing: ‘the drugs don’t work’.
What is this thing that is missing, and for which the singer has no words? The answer is contained in the music. Melody, rhythm, harmony and tone-colour are all ‘externalised’: they seem to come not from within the music itself, but from elsewhere. The music is assembled with a machine-like motion, with repetition as the principal device. Rhythm is generated by percussive sounds which often have little or no relation to anything else that is happening. The music itself may draw attention to this – opening with some mesmeric sound-effect or cheesy crooning, and then bringing in the drum-kit with a barrage of amplified noise, as when a gang which has been waiting quietly on the staircase suddenly breaks down the door.
The external nature of the rhythmical force is matched by the special kind of processing given to melodic phrases. Pop melodies are made up from curt modal or diatonic phrases, with no internal variation or prolongation, and key-changes are largely unprepared. Even when pop aims to be lyrical, melody is synthesised from standardised phrases, which could be rearranged in any order without losing or gaining effect. It is not that such music is tuneless: rather that the tune comes from elsewhere, like food from the supermarket shelf, to be heated in the microwave.
What is true of rhythm and melody is true also of tone colour. The electric guitar owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is strapped on and brandished like a dildo. But it is also a machine, which distorts and amplifies the sound, lifting it out of the realm of human noises. If a machine could sing, it would sound like an electric guitar. Techno-music is the voice of the machine, triumphing over the human utterance and cancelling its pre-eminent claim to our attention. In such music we encounter the background noise of modern life, but suddenly projected into the foreground, so as to fill all the auditory space. However much you listen to this music, you will never hear it as you hear the human voice; not even when it sounds so loudly that you can hear nothing else. You are overhearing the machine, as it discourses in the moral void.
More significant still is the treatment of harmony. Chords are composed of notes, which stand in horizontal relations to one another, and which should therefore sing like separate voices. This has been the acknowledged basis of harmonic organisation not only in the classical tradition, but also in jazz, and in all forms of popular music before the present. But for many young people the principle has no real meaning. Part singing has disappeared from their world; the instruments immediately available to them – the guitar and the electronic synthesiser – pluck chords out of the ether with a single gesture. Whether sounded in distorted form on the electric guitar or churned out of a synthesiser, chords become relics of the harmonic thinking which first invented them. They do not move but merely replace each other, since none of their notes bears any melodic relation to its successor. A perfect illustration of this characteristic (and most of the other peculiarities of the kind of pop that I am describing) is ‘In Bloom’ from Nirvana’s second album. The chords succeed each other in exactly the arrangement produced by moving the hand along the neck of the guitar while hitting all the strings. The resulting sequence makes sense in none of the voices, save that which generates the paltry tune.
Modern pop rarely comes to a conclusion. The music bursts out, repeats itself, and then fades away. Lacking any harmonic movement of its own, it cannot move toward anything – certainly not toward anything that requires careful preparation, like a cadence. There is, to put it another way, a lack of musical argument – a lack, indeed, of musical thought.
This externalised approach to the musical material serves a function. When the accompaniment is deprived of any melodic organisation and re-processed as noise, the singer becomes the focus of attention. The music is not designed for listening; it is designed for hearing – or rather, overhearing. It is the accompanying sound-track to a drama. The singer is projected as the incarnation of a force beyond music, which visits the world in human form, recruiting its followers in something like the way religious leaders recruit their sects. The CD often contains instructions as to where to write for further information, with a help line and support service, in the form of posters, diary items, and bulletins, like the circulars and briefings offered to its congregation by an activist church. The group offers membership. It is therefore imperative for the fan – or at least for a certain kind of fan – to choose his group, and to exalt it above any rivals. The choice is, in the end, arbitrary – or at least, not guided by any criterion of musical merit. But it is a choice that must be made. (This aspect of the sociology of popular music has been well documented by Simon Frith, who notes the ease with which the fan receives any insult to his group as an insult to himself.38)
The fan belongs to his group, which also belongs to him. Like the totem animal of the tribe, the pop star is an icon of membership, set apart from the everyday world in a sacred space of his own. His appearance on stage is not like that of an orchestra or an actor: it is a ‘real presence’, an incarnation of an otherworldly being, greeted by a release of collective emotion comparable to the Dionysiac orgies described by Euripides. Tribal totems are species – and therefore immortal. By identifying with the totem you partake of its immortality, and take your place in the tribe. The pop star is an individual, but in his own way sempiternal, immortalised on disk, set against a background noise which dramatises his eternal recurrence. Hence the treatment of rhythm, melody and harmony: this processed music is like the sacred procession to the shrine, the harbinger of an incarnation.
The modern adolescent finds himself in a world that has been set in motion; he is beset by noise, by external pressures, and by forces that he cannot control. The pop star is displayed in the same condition, high up on electric wires, the currents of modern life zinging through him, but miraculously unharmed. He is the guarantee of safety, the living symbol that you can live like this forever. His death or decay are simply inconceivable, like the death of Elvis, or, if conceivable, understood as a sacrificial offering, a prelude to resurrection, like the death of Kurt Cobain.39
We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that, in the music of youth, singer and song are fused. Popular songs grew from a tradition of ballad and folk music, in which an expanding repertoire of favourite tunes and devices formed the foundation of music-making. Until recently the song has been detachable from the performer – a musical entity which makes sense in itself, and which can be internalised and repeated by the listeners, should they have the skill. Of course, there is a whole branch of popular music which is improvisatory. But modern pop songs are not improvised as jazz is improvised, and do not owe their appeal to the kind of spectacular musicianship that we witness in Art Tatum, Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk. Modern pop songs are meticulously put together, often by artificial means, so as to be indelibly marked with the trade mark of the group. Everything is done to make them inseparable from the group. The lead singer projects himself and not the melody, emphasising his particular tone, sentiment and gesture. The melodic paucity is partly explained by this. By subtracting the melody, or reducing it to stock phrases that can be reapplied in any context, the singer draws attention to the song’s one distinguishing feature, namely himself. The croaks and the groans with which he delivers it become the central features of the melodic line. The singer stands revealed exactly where the music should be. (Contrast here the tradition of classical performance, in which the singer is the servant of the music, hiding behind the notes that he produces.)
The harmony is surrendered to a process of distortion, involving much mixing and editing. It is therefore impossible to reproduce it by any means normally available. Sometimes serious doubts arise as to whether the performers made more than a minimal contribution to the recording, which owes its trade mark to subsequent sound engineering, designed precisely to make it unrepeatable. The music is simultaneously ephemeralised and eternally transfixed. It is an unrepeatable moment in the life of the great machine, which, by means of the machine, can be repeated forever. (When it was discovered that Milli Vanilli did not in fact perform any of the music recorded in their name, they were stripped of their Gramophone award for the Best New Act of 1990. But they lost none of their following.)
Hence pop fans find themselves deprived of one of the most important gifts of folk music – the gift of song. It is almost impossible to sing the typical pop-song unaccompanied and still make musical sense. The best you can do is to impersonate the idol during karaoke night at the local, when you have the benefit of full instrumental backing, amplification and audience, and can briefly fit yourself into the empty groove where the sacred presence lay. This intense and cathartic experience over, the fan must step down from the stage and reassume the burden of silence.
In effect, we witness a reversal of the old order of performance. Instead of the performer being the means to present the music, which exists independently in the tradition of song, the music has become the means to present the performer. The music is part of the process whereby a human individual or group is totemised. In consequence it has a tendency to lose all musical character. For music, properly constructed, has a life of its own, and is always more interesting than the person who performs it. Much as we may love Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald, we love them for their music – not their music for them. And this is music we can perform for ourselves.
This fusion between the singer and his song promotes another and more mysterious fusion – that between the singer and the fan. You can sing the song only by becoming the singer. You are for a moment incarnate in him as he is in you. But the song is musically inept. Anybody (given the right machinery) can sing it, since nobody can. The fan knows this, and through his idolisation of the singer runs the thought: ‘what has he got that I haven’t?’ The answer is: Nothing. To the fan in the audience the gyrating figure on the stage is himself, enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame. As he fuses with the totem the fan is transfigured, relieved at last of his isolation.
From this there follows the iconisation of the totem. Singers, groups or lead performers are not constrained by musical standards. But they are constrained by their totemic role. They must be young, sexually attractive, and with the plaintive voice of youthful desire – like the girly group called All Saints. Of course, popular musicians have always been idolised, as were Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Cliff Richard. But those old-style icons grew up in time, passed over from adolescence to adulthood, became mellow, avuncular and religious. The modern pop star does not grow up. He grows sideways, like Mick Jagger or Michael Jackson, becoming waxy and encrusted as though covered by a much-repainted mask. Such spectral creatures haunt for a while the halls of fame, trailing behind them the ghosts of their vanished fans. And then, overnight, they disappear.
Modern pop stars and groups often refuse to answer to a normal human name, since to do so would compromise their totemic status. The name must be an icon of membership. Sting, R.E.M., Nirvana, Hanson, Madonna, U2 are like the species names assumed by tribal groups, in order to clarify their social identity, with the difference that it is not biological species that are invoked by the titles, but glamorised human types.
The transformation of the pop star into an icon is assisted by the music video. This is perhaps the most important innovation in the sphere of pop since the electric guitar. The video sublimates the star, re-cycles him as image, more effectively than any painted icon of a saint. It is expressly designed for home consumption, and brings the sacred presence into the living room. And it completes the demotion of music, which now becomes background, with the pop-star, transfigured into the divine status of the TV advert, occupying the foreground. The idol has entered the condition familiar from the other forms of youth art. Like Damien Hirst and Young British Art, he has become the advert which advertises itself.
The societies studied by the great anthropologists were organic communities, bound by kinship, which sustained themselves through myths and rituals devoted to the idea of the tribe. In such communities, the dead and the unborn were present among the living. Rituals, ceremonies, gods and stories were the private property of the tribe, designed to enhance and fortify the experience of membership. Birth, marriage and death were collective and not merely individual experiences, while the crucial process of acculturation – the transition from raw human material to a responsible adult member of the community – was marked by rites of passage, trials and ordeals, through which the adolescent cast off his childish wilfulness and took on the task of social reproduction.
In the society of the anthropologists themselves (certainly of such anthropologists as Frazer, van Gennep and Lévy-Brühl), there existed a common store of myths, rituals and ceremonies which created a comparable sense of the divine origin of society, and its absolute right to sacrifice. Adolescents were instructed in the ancestral religion, and made to respect its rites. Crucial human experiences like birth, marriage and death were still collective experiences, in which individuals passed from one state of membership to another. Erotic feelings were regarded as the preparations for marriage. They were duly sublimated – which means, not idealised only, but also ordealised, hemmed in by interdictions. Marriage was (as it has always been) the principal means to pass on moral knowledge and the habits of social constraint. But all the institutions of society played their part, and all contained their ceremonies of initiation. The transition from adolescent to adult was marked by complex forms of induction, which reinforced the view that all stages of existence prior to the adult state were but preparations for it. In exploring primitive societies, the Victorians were delighted to discover simpler and more transparent versions of an experience which lay at the heart of their own civilisation – the experience of membership, enhanced by a common religion, and by the rites of passage which lead to the full adult state, the state in which the ancestral burden is assumed.
None of that is true of modern adolescents, who have neither the tribal nor the modern urban experience of membership. They exist in a world protected from external and internal threat, and are therefore rescued from the elementary experiences – in particular the experience of war – which renew the bond of social membership. They have little or no religious belief, and what religion they have is detached from the customs and rituals that form a congregation. Television has confined each young person from childhood onwards before a box of intriguing platitudes. Without speaking, acting or making himself interesting to others, he nevertheless receives a full quota of distractions. The TV provides a common and facile subject of communication, while extinguishing the ability to communicate. The result is a new kind of isolation, which is as strongly felt in company as when alone.
Moreover the modern adolescent is heir to the sexual revolution, and to the disenchantment of the sexual act which I referred to in Chapter 2. It is impossible for modern adolescents to regard erotic feelings as the preliminary to marriage, which they see as a condition of partial servitude, to be avoided as an unacceptable cost. Sexual release is readily available, and courtship a time-wasting impediment to pleasure. Far from being a commitment, in which the voice of future generations makes itself heard, sex is now an intrinsically adolescent experience. The transition from the virgin to the married state has disappeared, and with it the ‘lyrical’ experience of sex, as a yearning for another and higher form of membership, to which the hard-won consent of the other is a necessary precondition. All other rites of passage have similarly withered away, since no social institution demands them – or if it does demand them, it will be avoided as ‘judgemental’, hierarchical or oppressive. The result is an adolescent community which suffers from an accumulating deficit in the experience of membership, while resolutely turning its back on the adult world – the world where membership is offered and received.
Now all human beings, whatever their condition, are social animals, and can live with themselves only if they also live with others. There is implanted in us the need to join things, to be a part of some larger and justifying enterprise, which will ennoble our small endeavours and protect us from the sense that we are ultimately alone. The deficit of membership must therefore be made good, but in another way – without the passage to a higher or more responsible condition. Hence new forms of ‘joining in’ arise. Unlike armies, schools, scout troops, churches and charities, these new forms of joining in need not involve participation – unless of a rough and undemanding kind that imposes no discipline on those who opt for them. They centre on spectacles rather than activities.
We follow the actions of our favoured team or group or idol, and adopt those actions as our own. Hence the emergence of professional sport as a central drama in popular culture. In Europe football has lost its original character as a form of recreation and become instead a spectacle, through which the fans rehearse their social identity, and achieve a kind of substitute form of membership, not as active participants in a real community, but as passive respondents in the virtual community of fans. The fan is, in some sense, a part of the group, in just the way that the football supporter is a part of his team, bound to it by a mystical bond of membership.40
Of course, the old tribal feelings are there just below the surface, waiting to be activated, and erupting every now and then with their usual tributes to the god of war. Football hooligans are not the peculiar and perverse criminals painted by the press. They are simply the most fully human of football fans – the ones who wish to translate the vivid experience of membership that has been offered to them, into the natural expression of a tribal right. For it must be remembered that modern adolescents are encouraged to define their own social order, their own history, their own loyalties, and their own sense of who they are. This is the logical outcome of the ‘child-centred’ approach to education recommended by Dewey and enthusiastically adopted by a generation of teachers. The fan is trying to rescue himself from the predicament in which adults have placed him – the predicament of having to invent his own identity, in a condition where being young is the only way of being anything.
In a sense, the membership offered to the fan – in which a mesmerised passivity neutralises the desire for action – is the greatest safeguard we have, that modern societies will not fragment into tribal sub-groups, contending for scarce resources in the asphalt wilderness. For when tribal groups emerge in modern conditions, they take the form of teenage gangs, whose initiation ceremonies forbid the transition to the adult world, and are designed to arrest their members in a stage of rebellion. The first concern of such a gang is to establish a right to territory, by violently erasing all rival claims.
The teenage gang is a natural response to a world in which the rites of passage into adulthood are no longer offered or respected. Such, since the sexual revolution, is our world, and we have to make the best of it. Youth culture is an attempt to make the best of it – to make oneself at home in a world that is not, in any real sense, a home, since it has ceased to dedicate itself, as a home must dedicate itself, to the task of reproduction. Home, after all, is the place where parents are. The world displayed in the culture of youth is a world from which the parents have absconded – as these days they generally do. This culture aims to present youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life, rather than a transitional phase which must be cast off as an impediment once mature commitment calls. It promotes experiences which can be obtained without undertaking the burdens of responsibility, work, child-rearing and marriage. Hence sex, and especially sex divorced from any long-term commitment, becomes of paramount importance; so do experiences which involve no cost in terms of education, moral discipline, hardship or love – the paradigm being drug-taking, which has the added advantage that it shuts out the adult world completely, and replaces it with a cloud of wishful dreams, the very same wishful dreams that float across the screen of MTV.
I doubt that any coherent account can be given of youth culture which does not give a central place to drugs, not merely as the means to exaltation, but as the means whereby exaltation is put on sale. It is essential to the appeal of drugs that they are not found but purchased; and their consumption is bound up with the expertise of purchase. The person who dispenses the drug is not a priest but a salesman, and his product is etherealised and enchanted by his salesman’s patter. Those who consume the drug do nothing to alter their spiritual standing; nor do they set themselves apart from other consumers. At the same time, they are offered an experience of collective elevation, a sudden release of dammed-up social feeling, as they melt into the crowd of affectionate strangers.
The resulting experience belongs to fantasy rather than imagination. It is an unreal ecstasy which also penetrates and pollutes what is real. Actual human relations, with their demands and trials and embarrassments, are blotted out by the drug, and the fantasy community meets in an unreal space where the spirit and its scruples cannot venture. It is not the soul but the body that is exalted by the drug, and sex between two bodies high on E or marijuana takes place in a world from which all demands and commitments are shut out. This is the experience that achieves a fitting encomium in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, and whose inadequacies are sentimentalised by The Verve in ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’.
The drug is additionally important on account of its addictive quality. Young people make a careful distinction between safe and unsafe, soft and hard, clean and dirty drugs, knowing that these distinctions are part of an elaborate ritual of pretence. For addiction both repels and attracts them. It repels because it brings ecstasy down to the day-to-day level, and removes its holiday character. But it attracts because it freezes ecstasy as permanent: the junkie is the adolescent not just stoned but set in stone. Addiction is the dead end where only youth exists, and from which you pass not to adulthood, but to death and transfiguration.
Youth culture announces itself always as radical, disconcerting, infuriating, disorienting and lawless. The group Prodigy, recently in the charts with ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, makes the point explicitly in its techno-slam entitled ‘Their Law’: i.e., the law of adults, which is there to be trampled on. But the explicit incitement contained in such a number should not blind us to the fact that transgression is also institutionalised by pop, so as to become a new conformism. The group Future Bitch, for example, announcing its debut at the Ministry of Sound – the club which is the heart of London’s youth culture – declares its aim ‘to disorientate its audience, pushing the current cultural scene to its limits and towards the millennium. Future Bitch,’ it goes on, ‘is challenging, radical, disconcerting, stimulating, unpredictable, subliminal and unprecedented’. And what could be more predictable than that?
Now there is an academic industry devoted to representing youth culture in general, and pop in particular, as genuinely subversive, a response to oppression, a voice through which freedom, life, and revolutionary fervour cry from the catacombs of bourgeois culture.41 If the adepts of ‘cultural studies’ are to be believed, youth finds itself hemmed in at every point by an ‘official culture’ dedicated to denying the validity of its experience. On this view the profane and anarchic messages of pop are gestures of protest against a life-denying social order.
The fact is, however, that the culture of youth is the official culture of Britain, and probably of everywhere else. Any criticism of it is greeted with scorn or even outrage. Every public space in our country is filled by pop, politicians of all persuasions seek endorsement from those who produce and market it, and those who seek the few pockets of silence are an endangered species, though one that will never be protected by the conservationists. It is unsurprising that the owner and director of the Ministry of Sound, James Palumbo, is son of one of the pillars of the former modernist establishment, Lord Palumbo; unsurprising that he is a friend and advisor to Peter Mandelson (the Labour Party’s leading light); unsurprising that the first role-call of guests at no. 10 after the last election included Noel Gallagher of Oasis. The culture of youth seeks and finds legitimacy with the very transgressive gestures which deny that there is any such thing. Gestures of defiance are now passports to wealth, power and fame, and a kind of ossified rudeness defines the manners of a new state-sponsored elite.
The youth culture prides itself on its inclusiveness. That is to say, it removes all barriers to membership – all obstacles in the form of learning, expertise, allusion, doctrine, or moral discipline. For these would be rites of passage, constituting a tacit admission that to be young is not enough, that the world expects something, and that there is a higher stage of existence to which we all must eventually proceed. This very inclusiveness, however, deprives the youth culture of human purpose. It remains locked in the present tense, looking for good causes, spiritual icons, ways of representing itself as legitimate, but without crossing the fatal barrier into responsible adulthood. How lucky it was, for those who found themselves trapped in this frame of mind, that Princess Diana should have achieved the perfect post-modern death, and been beatified by Elton John as the holy single-parent family. Like Princess Diana, the heroes of youth culture are self-advertisements, famous for being famous, but no different in the end from you and me.
It is in similar terms that we should understand the iconography of modern youth, and especially the graffiti which disfigure our cities. Most graffiti are executed in lettering taken from an expressly pre-literary source – the comic strip. Moreover, the vast majority of them do not form coherent words, nor even genuine letters. They are a kind of revenge taken against the written word, in a gesture which lays subversive claim to the very public space where the written word has for so long been sovereign, but where, thanks to TV and advertising, it is sovereign no more. The artlessness of graffiti is an act of defiance, a declaration that the knowledge enshrined in the written language is now superfluous. Remember that the written word is the most vivid symbol we possess of adult competence: it is the first obstacle set before the growing child, the original source of adult power and of the mystery of power, which in the hands of adults is propagated and exploited without force or commotion, but through signs alone. The graffiti are spells cast against the written word, designed to neutralise its power and liberate the spaces which once it occupied. Hence graffiti become badges and symbols of the new form of membership. They are the heraldic emblems of the gang. Every place disfigured by the gang’s insignia is a place reclaimed from the public world. It has been privatised by youth, to become a site for the new kind of membership – membership with no rites of passage, and for the time being only.
Membership finds its ceremonial endorsement through the dance. In almost all tribal communities dancing has had an important role in reinforcing the communal spirit, and in particular in ceremonies of initiation and marriage. It represents a supreme act of surrender to the tribe and its ruling deities. In dancing we set all purpose aside and are governed by the spirit of the dance. At the same time, dancing has a peculiar social intentionality – in the normal case dancing is a ‘dancing with’, a fitting of one’s steps and gestures to the steps and gestures of others.
In the old culture of Europe dancing was therefore a part of courtship – a kind of stylised intimacy in which the sexual allure of the body could be displayed and enjoyed without social catastrophe. For young lovers, dancing was a way of going ‘part-hog’, as Harold Pinter would put it, while behaving with proper decorum and with an excited consciousness of their embodiment. But it was not only young lovers who danced. Traditional dances were formation dances, like the minuet, the jig and the saraband, in which you changed partners, to find yourself dancing with someone (your grandmother perhaps) in whom you had no sexual interest whatsoever. In the Mediterranean, it was even unheard of for the sexes to dance together: the men performed in a troupe, and then the girls, each sex with an eye for the other but decorously removed from physical contact. In this way dancing became a ceremony, in which the community’s bid for eternity was enacted beneath the stars.
Love, sex and the body are perceived differently by young people today; courtesy and courtship have disappeared from their dancing, since they have disappeared from their lives. The idea of dancing as an orderly affirmation of community is dead. Dancing has become a social and sexual release, among people who expressly represent themselves, in the dance, as sexual objects, even when, and especially when, they dance without a partner. Indeed the concept of the partner – of the one with whom you are dancing, and who agrees to dance after an exchange of courtesies – hardly engages with the new reality. You all dance together, and every step or shake or gesture is right just so long as it feels right. Nor is this new kind of dancing of marginal significance. On the contrary, it is the central episode in the youth culture, the moment when the individual renews his attachment to the group and is raised to a heightened level of excitement and a sense of the rightness of being what he is and doing what he does.
The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep coined the expression ‘rites of passage’ after noticing the important structural analogy between ceremonies of birth, puberty, initiation, marriage and death. The ceremonies, he argued, involve three components, ordered successively: separation of the individuals or groups from their previous condition; existence on the margin (marge) during which they remain suspended in limbo, and incorporation (agrégation) as participants in their new condition.42 Thus the initiation into full membership is preceded by a period of alienation, as the youth is cast out from childhood and care, and forced to earn the fruits of adult freedom.
Imagine, however, a situation in which the adult world is clouded over: everything pertaining to adulthood has become dark, forbidding, treacherous. The only freedom lies in youth itself. Identity must be forged by the youth from his own adolescent experience – the experience of alienation, in which the protection of the adult world has been withdrawn, and nothing put in place of it. The traditional totems, which represent the continuity and longevity of the tribe, now lose their significance. The youth must construct his own totem, his own ceremonies of initiation and membership, his own sense of togetherness, while borrowing nothing at all from the expertise and knowledge of his forefathers. His dances must be formless and violent, so that only youth can dance to them; sexual pleasure, the mark of youth, must occupy the foreground of the ritual, but sex must be meticulously divorced from marriage and the birth of children. His totems must be formed in his own image – perpetually young, perpetually transgressive, perpetually incompetent.
As he dances among his kind, such a youth will be conscious of a lack. All this commotion ought to mean something; it ought to be lifting him to a higher plane. But it leaves him exactly where he was – on the margin of society, enjoying a freedom that is empty since it has no goal. He tries to lift himself with drugs, and as a result sinks further into the void. His protest resolves itself at last in a strangulated cry – a song which sounds like music only when the drumming feet of adolescents sound along with it. And if he discovers words for this song, they will probably be these:
I can’t find words to say
About the things caught in my mind.
I have dwelt at length on the pop phenomenon, since it shows that there are new spiritual forces at work in the popular culture of our day. We find ourselves in a world of strange superstitions, ephemeral cults, fantasies and enthusiasms which spring from the lack of a common culture, and which may suddenly and unexpectedly crystallise, as at the death of Princess Diana. The need to belong, to be part of a group, to be inside and protected – this need is as strong as it ever was, for it is a need of the species. The vastness and mobility of modern societies have effectively destroyed the possibility of a common culture, while a process of organised forgetting is corroding high culture too. Pop culture is the spontaneous response to this situation – an attempt to provide easy-going forms of social cohesion, without the costly rites of passage that bring moral and emotional knowledge. It is a culture which has demoted the aesthetic object, and elevated the advert in its place; it has replaced imagination by fantasy and feeling by kitsch; and it has destroyed the old forms of music and dancing, so as to replace them with a repetitious noise, whose invariant harmonic and rhythmic textures sound all about us, replacing the dialect of the tribe with the grammarless murmur of the species, and drowning out the unconfident stutterings of the fathers as they trudge away towards extinction.
The gap between the culture acquired spontaneously by the young, and that which, according to Humboldt and Arnold, should be imparted in the university, is so cavernously wide that the teacher is apt to look ridiculous, as he perches on his theatrical pinnacle and beckons the youth across to it. Indeed, it is easier to make the passage the other way, to join your young audience in the enchanted field of popular entertainment, and turn your intellectual guns on the stately ruin across the chasm. Increasingly, therefore, modern intellectuals define their position as one outside the high culture to which they owe their status. Their task, they claim, is not to propagate Western culture, but to question its assumptions, to undermine its authority, and to liberate young people from the ‘structures’. Before examining this task, we must acquaint ourselves with a peculiar product of Enlightenment high culture – the intellectual.