I Wanna Rock?: Youth Cultures in the 20th Century

Adults shouldn’t write about youth. They have to, and they always will, but they also very frequently get it wrong. This is why diaries exist, and why the Internet is so great. Unfortunately, Dr Marcel Danesi probably wouldn’t entirely agree with me on this, and I don’t agree with half of his book, From Flappers to Rappers.

As Danesi himself states in the preface, this book was written “to share with readers [his] interpretation of the importance of youth culture in North America and to discuss the likely reasons why it may be coming to an end” (xii). There are six, chapters each detailing a particular period in youth culture, and each chapter concludes with an epilogue that serves to condense and contextualize the preceding chapter. In each chapter, Danesi also includes artistic and bibliographical snippets of artists he considers the posterchildren for each generation.

From the outset, Danesi claims that he bears “no hidden ideological agenda, or particular academic stance” (xii), approaching From Flappers through both his personal experiences as a youth during the rock n’ roll and hippie eras, and the dialogue he has maintained “with young people in [his] own classes” (xii). His goal with the project is not simply to make a historiographical account of youth cultures and how they influenced sociopolitical and cultural changes, but to make his readers “contemplate the importance of youth in the constitution of the modern world” (xii) by exploring “cultural systems and artifacts that young people created for themselves in different eras” (xiii). Through this exploration, the book attempts to determine how digital technologies are responsible for the demise of youth culture, and what that means for society—and its future revolutionaries—as a whole.

Danesi begins his chronological journey in the roaring twenties, a time when culture was “created, promoted, and performed (literally) by young people” (3) who rejected the mainstream, which was influenced and maintained by the puritanical ideals of the previous generation. As he maps the trajectory of youth culture through the 20^th century, he traces its progress by exploring various images, movements, and historical moments, all anchored by the act of rebelling, of being different, more open-minded, and freer than the previous generation—who also believed themselves to be different, more open-minded, and freer than the previous generation (ah, the cyclical nature of youth).

Danesi utilizes and engages with psychological, anthropological, scientific, literary, philosophical, sociopolitical, ideological, and historical movements that have been tied to, or that have tried to categorize, youth culture, in order to develop his own argument for the ‘death of youth culture.’ He discusses how youth culture has constantly been redefined and (re)contextualized by both internal and external influences, and returns a number of times to the Frankfurt School and its reading of culture as part of a commodity-exchange system (105), which he considers “a strange and paradoxical partnership” (46), particularly in the context of ‘rebellion.’

Through the first three chapters, which focus on jazz and the flappers, rock n’ roll, and the counterculture/hippie movement, respectively, Danesi outlines how music is the element that brings about new youth cultures, and that “all other aspects of the culture are derivatives of the music or else intertwined with it” (24). As he states in Chapter 1, all contemporary musical movements tied to a respective culture also epitomize the respective youth movement of the time, “unconsciously stimulating its emotional rhythms” (27), whether it’s Louis Armstrong’s improvisation, the poetry of the folk movement, or the confrontational vitriol of punk and hip hop. Danesi makes these connections explicit, giving the intended reader—whether it’s a teenager or someone reminiscing about their own youth—the opportunity to reflect on the music they consumed, and how it affected them. This emotional connection works in the book’s favour, incorporating and encouraging nostalgia throughout its historical overview.

While the first three chapters—where youth culture is presented as important and radical—are...