Youth culture as a political protest:

Political protests are stereotypically petitions, marches etc, but people don’t think about the fact that people make moving images/music etc to help change view points on certain things. Just because a law has changed doesn’t mean the opinion of s topic will have changed, which leads to the fact that the political, personal and cultural are always intertwined.

Cultural hegemony

Framing ideologies of dominant social groups as the only legitimate ideology- The only ‘real’ belief is the hegemonic one, the dominant one.

Antonio Gramsci:

An Italian philosopher 1930s

Subculture-

● Working-class youth culture
● Unified by shared tastes in style, music and ideology
● A solution to collectively experienced problems
● A form of resistance to cultural hegemony

The song challenges the social theories at the time

Paul Gilroy

Author of the book ‘Ain’t no black in the union jack’, exploring the construction of racial ‘otherness’ within the print media in the 1970s. The book traces the story of UK Post war race relations.

Gilroy argues that the racial representations that were ‘fixed in a matrix between the imagery of squalor and that of sordid sexuality’, marginalised the immigrant black community from the outset – constructing them as racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain.

In 1970s and 80s, newspapers related stories concerning the many community riots of the period, depicting the multi-ethnic disturbing events as only black events, suggesting the black community was prone to lawlessness and incompatible with white British values.

QUOTES FROM ARTICLES

‘no night complete without a fight, Skinheads attacking whoever riled them, flick knives at the ready.’ – The conversation.com

‘nods to cinematic soundtracks and music hall tradition, it reflects and engenders anxiety.’ The conversation.com

 deadpan vocals lamenting how “all the clubs have been closed down” because there is “too much fighting on the dance floor”. The conversation.com

‘England was hit by recession and away from rural Skinhead nights, riots were breaking out across its urban areas. Deprived, forgotten, run down and angry, these were places where young people, black and white, erupted.’ The conversation.com

it expressed the mood of the early days of Thatcher’s Britain for many. – BBC