Youth Music And Creative Cultures

This book offers an evocative cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives and music practices of young people from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives. Youth from seven urban locales in Australia, the UK, the US and Europe document and reflect on their own learning processes and music activities.

Music and Youth Culture offers a groundbreaking account of how music interacts with young people's everyday lives. Drawing on interviews with and observations of youth groups together with archival research, it explores young people's enactment of music tastes and performances, and how these are articulated through narratives and literacies. An extensive review of the field reveals an unhealthy emphasis on committed, fanatical, spectacular youth music cultures such as rock or punk. On the contrary, this book argues that ideas about youth subcultures and club cultures no longer apply to today's young generation. Rather, archival findings show that the music and dance cultures of youth in 1930s and 1940s Britain share more in common with youth today than the countercultures and subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. By focusing on the relationship between music and social interactions, the book addresses questions that are scarcely considered by studies stuck in the youth cultural worlds of subcultures, club cultures and post-subcultures: What are the main influences on young people's music tastes? How do young people use music to express identities and emotions? To what extent can today's youth and their music seem radical and progressive? And how is the 'special relationship' between music and youth culture played out in everyday leisure, education and work places?

A comprehensive cultural, social and historical overview of post-war popular music genres, from rock 'n' roll and psychedelic pop, through punk and heavy metal, to rap, rave and techno. The author also examines the style-based youth cultures to which such genres have given rise. Drawing on key research in sociology, media studies and cultural studies, the book considers the cultural significance of respective post-war popular music genres for young audiences, with references to issues such as space and place, ethnicity, gender, creativity, education, and leisure. A key feature of the book is the departure from conventional Anglo-Americasn perspectives. In addition to British and US examples, the book refers to studies conducted in Germany, Holland, Sweden, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Japan, Russia, and Hungary, presenting the cultural relationship between youth culture and popular music as a truly global phenomenon.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book explores the rich intersection between faith, religion and performing arts in culture-based youth groups. The co-constitutive identity-building work of music, performance, and drama for Samoan and Sudanese youth in church contexts has given rise to new considerations of diversity, cultural identity and the religious practices and rituals that inform them. For these young people, their culture-specific churches provide a safe if "imagined community" (Anderson, 2006) in which they can express these emerging identities, which move beyond simple framings like "multicultural" to explicitly include faith practices. These identities emerge in combination with popular cultural art forms like hip hop, R-&-B and gospel music traditions, and performance influences drawn from American, British and European popular cultural forms (including fashion, reality television, social media, gaming, and online video-sharing). The book also examines the ways in which diasporic experiences are reshaping these cultural and gendered identities and locations.

Soulja Boy, Justin Bieber, and Tavi Gevinson are hardly representative of typical youth experiences, but their origins highlight many of the realities of youth doing independent creative work. Out of the Basement profiles the variety of youth cultural production in the twenty-first century, and asks what has - or has not - changed as youth attempt to make a living from creative works. Though any young person with a laptop might have greater means to make music, films, or publish writing than in the past, the skills necessary to make a living in today's creative industries are not taught in schools - young artists must find their own way out of their basements. Integrating cultural studies, media education, and subculture studies, Miranda Campbell profiles this process of navigation and negotiation - one largely overlooked in discussions of creative economies - through the life stories of young people who are building careers through cultural work. She considers how existing policies can impede small-scale cultural production and calls for more awareness and support of youth creative enterprise. Moving between the structures directed toward creative life and the initiatives that young people produce themselves in the absence of relevant structures, Out of the Basement offers a timely analysis of the rise of small-scale creative employment.

Presenting the collaborative work of 13 international specialists of contemporary Chinese culture and society, this book explores the spaces of creation, production, and diffusion of "youth cultures" in China among generations born since the 1980s. Defining the concept of "youth culture" as practices and activities that catalyze self-expression and creativity, this book investigates the emergence of new physical spaces, including large avenues, parks, shopping malls, and recreation areas. Building on this, it also examines the influence of non-physical places, especially digital cultures, such as online social networks, shopping platforms, Cosplay, cyberliterature, and digital calligraphy and argues that these may in fact play a more significant role in Chinese civil society today. As an exploration of how youth can be creative even in a coercive environment, China’s Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces will be valuable to students and scholars of Chinese society, as well those working on the links between space, youth, and culture.