Bill Osgerby

Brighton Rocked: Mods, Rockers, and Social Change During the Early 1960s

This chapter unpacks the 1960s’ mythologies of youth, affluence, and social change that underpin the storyline of Quadrophenia. Particular attention is given to the way the furore that surrounded the mod “invasions” of British seaside resorts in 1964 was indebted to the growing social significance of youth culture after the Second World War; together with the profound transformations taking place in working-class life as a consequence of shifting patterns of employment and the growing impact of consumerism. National angst about youth culture, it is argued, was given an especially sharp inflection in Brighton as the town navigated its way through a period of profound change in its economy and social make-up.

Girls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America

This chapter analyses the rise of ‘bad girl’ books in America during the 1950s. Chronicles of the criminal and sexual misdeeds of errant young women, ‘bad girl’ books were a subgenre in a broader flood of cheap and lurid ‘juvenile delinquency’ novels that traded on contemporary anxieties about youth crime and gang violence. The chapter shows how ‘bad girl’ books successfully exploited popular anxieties surrounding gender, morality and crime. It also demonstrates how their success was indebted to wider shifts in the fields of production, demand, reception and regulation.

Introduction: Making a Difference by Making a Noise

Youth Culture and Social Change maps out new ways to historicise two overlapping political responses to economic and social change: public unrest and popular culture. Throughout the 1980s young people took to the streets, whether in formal marches organised by trade unions, political groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) or Reclaim the Night, or in spontaneous, collective outbursts of disorder. Wherever young people were present in forms of protest there, too, was music. The riots of the 1980s have their own soundtrack that has formed part of the collective memory of the decade. People rocked against racism, sexism, ‘the bomb’ and the fragmentation of working-class communities. The popular music charts recognised the voices of protest in singers like Pauline Black, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Morrissey and Paul Weller, whose songs of resistance gained both commercial and critical success.

Book Review: Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture

towns, these dynamics are invisible in the book; at times the stores are represented as philanthropic organizations rather than profit-driven enterprises. Furthermore, the notion of citizen consumers remains problematic, and is not addressed critically by the author (see Cohen, 2003; Binkley, 2004). A better map would have been useful for transatlantic readers in this otherwise interesting and readable book.