ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that youth-directed popular music cultures, indexing a broader field of popular music cultures, are deployed in Buffy with an emphasis on these tensions and contradictions which serves the narrative and aesthetic functions that are central to Buffy's production, consumption, and distribution. Buffy draws out several key points of tension from the idea of youth culture, each of which is especially visible in the field of youth-directed popular music. Setting both Buffy's status quo reality and its most pervasive conflicts in the realm of youth culture almost necessitates a dominant role for popular music as a field of conflicts. Moreover, youth and youth culture as ideas are often summarized by popular music in hierarchized and hierarchizing debates about culture and identity. The youth culture is not confined to music, but the relationship between the two is used to shortcut through exposition of why youth culture itself may be a danger to Sunnydale.
