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the responsibilities and distractions of modern life typical of a working and
consumingadult.Amiddleclassyoungpersonhasthefreetimetotakeinthe
media of the world, attempt to understand it, and create a material response
to it. This process can proceed with few repercussions to the means of main-
taining a livelihood - parents typically take care of that, even if their children
have tattoos, piercing or colored hair. And even with some personal repercus-
sions considered, the fact that young people are less obligated to property and
its continuous acquisition allows a freedom of expression that usually is not
revisiteduntiloldage,ifeveragain.
Youth culture responds to two social pressures. First from the young, there
is the urge to acquire power in a social system that is abundant with contra-
dictions. When the notion that a hard worker will be amply rewarded is fre-
quently confounded, resistance to conformity has its first powerful rationale.
Why conform to this notion if it is seen to be untrue? Sociologists Widdicombe
and Wooffitt (Widdicombe & Wooffitt 1995: 17) answer the question:
Subcultures offer a solution at a symbolic level. Subcultures solve at an imag-
inary level the problems which remain unresolved at the concrete material
level, and this is why the solution is necessarily symbolic. Style enables the
young person to achieve in image what they cannot achieve in reality.
Second, the dominant culture seeks to teach the young how to gain power.
In a capitalist culture, this goal is accomplished by teaching the young how
to buy, and more importantly, how to construct identity with what one buys.
Once contradictions are realized, the incentives for resistance are discovered.
From this resistance, a theme in the social history of urban post-WW II in-
dustrial society is realized - the handmade creation of identity through youth
culture, its fashion and music. The materials, the artifacts and their symbolism
are dynamic. Each generation finds its signifiers and modifies them constantly.
Similarly, their meanings are modified (Hebdige 1979). Likewise, the young
grow up. Many cease to resist. They accept the contradictions, or at least, they
repress them.
The challenge of documenting this process is finding a way to accommo-
date massive change - change in the subject and in the audience. With few
exceptions, most films I have seen on punk culture struck me as either too cel-
ebratory or too analytical. They either excessively subjectify or excessively ob-
jectify. But, perhaps the real culprit was me. At age seventeen, I was alienated by
the objectification of punk in Penelope Spheeris' film,
The Decline of Western
Civilization
(1981). But fifteen years later, I found it uncritical and accommo-
dating. Can one film accomplish multiple objectives in the audience? Likewise,
