[Youth culture in late modernity]

Youth Culture in Late Modernity. Edited by Johan Fornas & Goran Bolin. London, Thousand Oaks, & New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995. 198 pp.

Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol. By Van M. Cagle. London, Thousand Oaks, & New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995. 240 pp.

Each of these new books signals modest advances in the areas of youth culture and popular music studies. The direction in both cases is away from heroic narratives of rock music as the preeminent postwar form of cultural resistance. Rather, one finds here more focused and careful accounts of stylistic change within youth culture, and a strong sense of the complex sorts of relations within which youth cultures take shape and unfold. Both books offer, as well, welcome models of a rigour and care which are increasingly rare amidst the strident rhetorics of contemporary popular youth culture research.

Much of the interesting work in youth cultural studies over the past decade has come from Scandinavia. Swedish researchers such as Johan Fornas (one of the editors of Youth Culture in Late Modernity) are prominent in the field of popular music studies, and the journal Young, with which many of the contributors to this book are associated, has become an important venue for interdisciplinary research on youth culture. While the points of departure for the authors included in Youth Culture in Late Modernity are varied, there is an unspoken resistance to many of the dominant tendencies within Anglo - American work on youth culture. Scandinavian work retains a strong emphasis on social class while most work from the U.S. is preoccupied with race and sexuality; it is less easily swayed by a sense of particular musical forms or movements as heroic in their transgressive or transformative possibilities; and the scholars here are likely to set aside visions of postmodernity in favour of a more careful idea of "late modernity." What is most welcome about this...