We live in an age where it's better to look young, act young, but not be young. Post War rebellion ...and upheval was driven by prosperity, its bearers were the young. Who saw the no material reason why they must defer pleasure or self-realisation, as previous generations did. Anything that stood in the way, the class barriers, organised religion, the education system, had to be razed. An ambigous urge that could be just as much Thatcherite as socialist, you could see it as a class moving up or people moving up out of their class.
That dream has been eroded almost to nothing. Neoliberalism means the end of the future. No one looks forward to the future anymore, compare that to the 1960s... The dream of ever expanding prosperity started to fade between the oil crisisand the IMF bailout. Punk comes after this, it comes in with all the other music trends that have happened since; plenty of good music, plenty more mediocre and awful music, but it does not have the spark, it is the Imitation of Life. It needs repeating. The constant worry about whether pop music and youth culture are vital any more is at best tilting at windmills. Youth culture today makes no impact on wider society because young people have been progressively marginalised.
