ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relationship between youth and music as this has been represented and theorized since the 1950s. The first section of the chapter examines the socioeconomic circumstances that gave rise to the mass production of popular music during the post-war era and its marketing as a ‘youth’ leisure form. The subsequent section considers the parent culture’s response to popular music and its perceived impact on youth. This is followed by an examination of studies that interpret the significance of popular music for youth in terms of its cultural resonance with issues such as class struggle, economic inequality and racism. Attention then turns to a consideration of work which, influenced by postmodern theory and the cultural turn, has sought to position popular music’s significance for youth not as a direct reflection of socio-economic experience but rather as a more fluid cultural resource through which young people are able to construct reflexive identities and lifestyle projects. The final section of the chapter considers the problem of defining the cultural relationship between ‘youth’ and music in the context of the early twenty-first century when the audiences for musics once termed ‘youth musics’ are increasingly multi-generational.
