The dazzling, dynamic and delightful DJ duo Amber and Nisha who together make up Broken Hearts (surely the world's most stylish DJs) have invited me onto their weekly JazzFM radio show 'Peppermint Candy'. This goes out on JazzFM tonight April 19 between 6-7pm (GMT) but after that it is available whenever you want to listen on the JazzFM site.
Nisha, Amber and I will be talking about Zooties, the 40s, Jazz (natch), influence of the baby boom, street style, Hipsters, and, as always on this show, there's some great music including 'Swing' gems to get your foot tapping. 
Be there or be square.
http://www.jazzfm.com/peppermintcandy

Does 'youth culture' still exist? The creation of middle-aged ad men in the mid 50s, perhaps it was always more fiction than fact. Discussion about this and more in Eve Dawoud's new interview with me at ......http://isysarchive.tv/boom/

DON DRAPER AIN'T NO BABY BOOMER

by Ted Polhemus

I don't often go to the pub but the other night I did and someone I know vaguely, aware that I have just written and published a book about baby boomers, remarked 'You must be excited that that ultimate baby boomer Don Draper is coming back on the tele'. 'Yes', I replied, 'looking forward to the return of Mad Men but whatever gave you the idea that Don D is a baby boomer? The man was born in the 30s or even the 20s!'

1926 according to Wikipedia - I just checked. The post war 'baby boom' began in 1946 and really exploded in 1947 - the year I and a heck of a lot of other 'Boomers' were born (3.9 million of us in the USA alone to be more precise). Don Draper was what might be called a 'Pre-Boomer'. When series 1 of Mad Men kicks off in 1960, Don would have been in his 30s (like my father) while I and the other first wave of Boomers would be just entering our teenage years.

The distinction is important because, ironically, as it turns out so much of what we Baby Boomers are given credit for/slagged off for was actually down to Pre-Boomers like Don Draper.

Indeed, the amazing thing is that virtually everyone who razzled and dazzled in the infamous 60s was born during or before - often, like Don, long before - WWII: John Lennon (born 1940), Frank Zappa (born 1940), Bob Dylan (born 1941), Jimi Hendrix (born 1942), Brian Wilson (born 1942), Mick Jagger (born 1943), Pete Townshend (born 1945), Jack Kerouac (born 1922), Timothy Leary (born 1920), Andy Warhol (born 1928), Ken Kesey (born 1935), Elvis Presley (born 1935). So, interestingly, a demographically small generation (especially tiny for those born in the war years) had a huge, disproportionate impact. Even at Woodstock in 1969, all those zillions of Boomers who claim to have been there would have been sitting on their blue-jeaned butts in the audience rather than up their on stage changing the world.

As Hippies we Boomers chanted 'Never Trust Anyone Over 35' yet, in truth, most of our heroes were approaching or well past that age and, even more importantly, all those things which we Baby Boomers like to see as our generation's unique invention were, in point of fact, created before we were born or during the 50s when we were pre-teen children: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Modern Jazz, Surfing, Recreational Drugs, Let It All Hang Out Do It In the Road Sex, The Electric Guitar, Same Sex Sex, Oral Sex, Experimental Cinema, Streetstyle, Subcultures, Gender Bending, The Counter Culture and so forth and so on, were all rolled out of the factory in the 50s (or long before that) by lone, courageous/mad pioneers who were themselves born long before WWII had even started let alone finished.

Some months ago a student of mine in London exclaimed 'It must have been so cool in the 60s - everything happened in the 60s'. Well, actually, all the really world-changing stuff happened in the 50s - that decade which is so universally dismissed as boring, staid and uneventful. Perhaps most importantly, that 'youth culture' with which we Boomers are forever associated was actually rock & rolling and being target marketed to by the likes of Don Draper and his Madison Avenue predecessors by the mid 50s when even the oldest Boomers like me were still selling Boy Scout/Girl Scout cookies.

There's a slick video doing the rounds at the moment ('We All Want To Be Young' - on Youtube - do we? Not me thank you) which sings the praises of 'youth' as the inevitable wellspring of all things with it, innovative and happening. It's fun - lots of cool looking kids in tight jeans with designer tattoos doing groovy stuff on skateboards and laptops. There's a historical element which argues that my baby boom generation 'invented what came to be known as 'the youth lifestyle'')The implication is that thus it was always - and will always - be: with the hip kids leading the way and the middle aged and oldies trying to keep up as best they can.

Yet when we actually go back to the birth of 'youth culture' in the mid 50s we find (shockingly) that this Brave New World was being forged by adults. When 'Rock Around the Clock' leapt to #1 in both the US and UK music charts in 1954 Bill Haley was 29. Jack Kerouac was 27 when he started writing On the Road in 1949. Even when the Baby Boomers did, finally, become the future of Rock/Rock & Roll - David Bowie in 1972, Bruce Springsteen in 1975 - they were in their mid twenties.

In the same year as 'Rock Around the Clock' exploded onto the pop charts - 1954 - Don and Betty Draper had their first child - the (sometimes) lovely Sally. So it's Sally rather than Don or Betty who is the Baby Boomer and, now as series 5 shifts gears into the second half of the 60s, the interesting thing will be to see how cool dude Don will deal with the freaky, far out, freak out, psychedelic, wear flowers in your hair era which is about to explode in his bunker like that bomb in Korea. For the 60s were two very distinct decades for the price of one: 1960-1966 were cool school, modern and suited the like of Don Draper to a tea. But '66 was the pivotal year of a pivotal decade - when I traded my Modern Jazz Quartet style suit for bell-bottom flairs and a hand-knitted Native American style headband; when I and a zillion other Boomers smoked our first joint; when we resolved to 'Make Love Not War'. Somehow I don't think Don is going to like it.

So just to be clear and to put the cat amongst the pigeons:

- it was the 50s rather than the 60s which changed the world

- these changes were brought about by Pre-Boomers when Baby Boomers like me, David B and Bruce S were still kids

- while there are exceptions (early Punk, early Hip Hop, arguably a lot of computer/internet/gaming stuff today), teenagers have typically been passive consumers rather than wellsprings of pop culture creativity.

There, I said it.

Or do you disagree?

(BTW, the real, fictional 'ultimate baby boomer' would be Tony Soprano.)

Good News - My new book BOOM! - A Baby Boomer Memoir, 1947-2022 is now available in ibook digital format (for iPad, iPhone, iPod)from iTunes [search: Ted Polhemus] and the print version is now also available from www.amazon.com.

So . . .

if you want the paperback print version

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/tedpolhemus

or www.amazon.com [search: Ted Polhemus] or your local Amazon site (e.g. www.amazon.co.uk)

if you want the digital download for Adobe Digital Editions http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/tedpolhemus

[note: Adobe Digital Editions is a free download from http://www.adobe.com/ap/products/digitaleditions/ and in my experience works very well. Download and install the free Adobe Digital Editions before you purchase and download the book]

if you want the ibook digital version for use on your iPad/iPhone/iPod >> Apple iTunes [search: Ted Polhemus]

A (boring old fart) Baby Boomer asks Does youthculture still exist?

Some thoughts and questions from Ted Polhemus

As a member of the infamous baby boom generation, when I was a teenager in the ‘60s, age – youth, magical youth – determined whether you were one of ‘Us’ or one of ‘Them’, the sad, pathetic squares like your parents who were past it. As Hippies in the later ‘60s we warned ‘Never Trust Anyone Over 35’ – ignoring the fact that so many of our Beat and Rock heroes were themselves approaching if not past that point of no return. Then – the horror, the horror – there came a time in the early ‘80s when we boomers ourselves were middle aged. But we weren’t having any of it: we had always seen ourselves as ‘youth’ and we weren’t about to change now. So we became the first generation in human history which simply refused to grow up.

What I’m wondering is whether today’s adolescents – the ‘young people’ we hear so much about but rarely seem to understand – have more sense than we Boomers did. Could it be that today’s youth define themselves more broadly and more meaningfully then did my generation which fell head over heels for the Mad Men’s dream target ghetto of ‘teenagers’?

The baby boom was a demographic tsunami which swept through each and every decade from the late ‘40s onwards and shaped the world around it into its own ageist worldview. It was simply that there were so many of us and a significant proportion of us had the money to spend on records, clothes, soft drinks, fast food and, eventually, cars. The result was that America (and then all other developed countries) underwent a top to bottom youthification which, from the ‘60s onwards, established an inviolate equation between being young on the one hand and, on the other, being hip, cutting edge, avant-garde and in the know.
Even today, despite the fact that youth is now a much less significant demographic than it was in the ‘60s, the presumption persists – and is rarely if ever challenged in marketing, the media, the music and fashion industries, etc. – that if you want to know where it is at, what’s happening and so forth then you had best look to youthculture which, ipso facto, determines what the rest of us will be buying, wearing, listening to, watching, eating, drinking and lusting after in the future.

But is this still true? Is it always youthculture which sets the pace and the direction for tomorrow’s world? And do those who are adolescents and young people today see themselves and the rest of the world fundamentally in terms of age as we Boomers did in the ‘60s? Or is this preoccupation with age – with ‘youth’ and ‘youthculture’ – just a hangover, a misleading preconception which we boring old fart Boomers still cling to? I have a nagging suspicion that today’s teenagers see lifestyle choices (what styles, sports, ethical concerns you opt for) as infinitely more important than what year you were born in. What do you think?

For example: let’s say that you are 17 and into skateboarding. Some guy who is in his 30s comes along and he’s actually very skilled at skateboarding. Do you exclude this guy from your inner circle because he is too old or include him on the grounds that he is good on a skateboard and a true exponent of your chosen lifestyle?

Another example: my nephew Nate has just turned 18 and is into jazz. Does that mean that jazz is 'youth culture' or does it mean that, whatever his age, Nate is a person who can be into whatever he is into?

For the last 30+ years I’ve been writing books which explore how changes in popular culture – streetstyle, music, fashion, film, TV, etc. – give a unique insight into the really fundamental, underlying changes in attitude, beliefs and values which have shaped history since WWII. For the last year I’ve been writing a new book which at the moment is called My Generation: a biography of the baby boomers. I’m looking for a publisher but I’m also looking for some feedback and opinions on questions such as the following . . .

- To what extent and in what ways did the demographic tsunami of the post war baby boom change history and the world we live in today?

- The notion of ‘youth’ and the boundaries of age were a central feature of how we baby boomers defined ourselves. Is this true of young people today?

- Did the baby boomers really change the world in the ‘60s given that (to my mind) the most significant changes (modern jazz, Beats, Bikers, Hipsters, Rock ‘N’ Roll, the origins of the ‘sexual revolution’ and the ‘counterculture’) took place in the ‘50s when we boomers were just children?

- My parents were fairly conventional with appearance styles which, while distinctive, were fairly normal for their times. So my ‘60s ‘counterculture’ rebellion had an obvious direction in opposition to this norm. But if you’re a young person today and your parents were, say, Punks or Goths, is rebellion possible and what course might it take? Back to the conventional?

- My baby boomer generation was the first to grow up with television. Today’s youth is the first Internet generation. Will it make a difference?

- My baby boom generation was focused on creating a brave new world and by and large we were not interested in what had come before in history. Today’s youth, however, no doubt more sensibly, typically take a great interest in what happened in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Indeed, from Mad Men to new/old style packaging and retro fashion, the present sometimes seems stuck in mythological, idealistic vision of the past. Can today’s youth get out from under the shadow of my generation’s ‘golden age’ in order to find their own future?

In the future those in employment will have to financially support all of us aging baby boomers. And they will have to save the world economy and the planet from the mess we Boomers made. Will they accept this less than desirable state of affairs or will the next world war be between the young and the old?

Does youth culture still exist? Yes, of course it does – once the genie of youth was out of the bottle there was surely no way of putting it back. Indeed, even the middle aged now perceive themselves as ‘youth’ – going out raving well past their bed time.

But I’m equally convinced that it is a big mistake to see youth and youthculture today in terms of how youth and youthculture were perceived in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Surely a great deal has changed and, in particular, I suspect that the power of age alone to distinguish between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ has – sensibly – diminished. But what do you think?

Ted Polhemus

www.tedpolhemus.com

Extra! Extra! – new book info >>>>

Writing about
MY GENERATION
by
Ted Polhemus

Contents:

1) Baby Boom
2) Coming Home
3) Suburban Life
4) Modern Times
5) Sex
6) Drugs
7) Rock N Roll
8) & Protest
9) Swinging London
10) Boring Old Farts V Punks
11) Grey Power

>>> I'm currently looking for a publisher - so editors don't be shy and contact me at http://www.tedpolhemus.com/ to arrange to see a copy.

Already published works by Ted Polhemus:

Fashion & Anti-fashion

BodyStyles

The Customized Body

Streetstyle

Style Surfing

Hot Bodies Cool Styles

also check out http://www.pymca.com/