Developmental points of essay

Resistance through Rituals

Youth subcultures in post-war Britain

Edited by Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson

Culture is the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted. (11)

-link to commercialism and how the initial subculture wasn't correctly interpreted, only the surface was looked at.

These structures- of social relationship and of meaning- shape the on-going collective existence of groups. But they also limit, modify and constrain how groups live and reproduce their social existence.

-link to social circumstances of the Z-boys. Many had bad home life, low-to no income- and this links to their sell out.

Each group makes something of it's starting conditions- and though this 'making', through this practice, culture is reproduced and transmitted. (11)

-again links to what the z-boys started with- surfing in the morning, leading to the development of skateboarding in pools. This further developed into the rise of skateboarding among teens.

Minority group- Z-town boys -turned mass consumed industry-surf/skate industry- and subcultural group recognise around the world- so widely diffused that they loose their distinctiveness.

Subcultures...take shape around the distinctive activities and 'focal concerns' of groups...[some] develop a clear, coherent identity and structure...which have reasonably tight boundaries, distinctive shapes, which have cohered around particular activities, focal concerns and territorial spaces.(14)

-link to the territorial nature of the Z-town boys and the dead wonderland that they reside in, the Zephyr store, the zephyr team dress and style as perceived in the movie and the documentary.

Members of a subculture may walk, talk, act, look 'different' from their parents and from some of their peers: but they belong to the same families, go to the same schools, work at much the same jobs, live down the same 'mean streets' as their parents. (14)

-link to the union of the z-boys, and how this is severed through the purchase of each skater by skateboard companies. The film is more expressive of this, as it shows a more dramatised distintion between the boys- particularily between Tony Alva

Through dress, activities, leisure pursuits and life-style, they may project a different cultural response or 'solution' to the problems posed for them by their material and social class position and experience.(15)

Post-war youth did engage in distinctive cultural pursuits, and this was closely linked with the expansion of the leisure and fashion industries, directed at the 'teenage market'.(15)

Sections of working-class or middle-class youth where a response to their situation took a distinctive sub-cultural form. (16)

Youth groups fed off and appropriated things provided by the market, and, in turn, how the market tried to expropriate and incorporated things produced by the sub-cultures: in other words, the dialectic between youth and the youth market industry.(16)

The term youth culture appropriates the situation of the young almost exclusively in terms of the commercial and publicity manipulation and exploitation of the young.(16)

Youth culture is a result of such 'mindless' imitation by teenagers fostered by a shrewd and 'manipulating' commercial interests.(19)