ABSTRACT
Contemporary popular music, at its belly-button revealing best, is gleaming in its disappointments. Nice girls with strong abdominal muscles and weak politics are hurting feminism as much as the ears. Youth is a crossroads culture, occupying spaces and colonizing times. Images of youth are 'handled' by the media, with opinion polls and marketing surveys monitoring what the young people are thinking, wearing and voting. Adolescents were ill-equipped to face the increasing opportunities for intimate contact. Few differences were found between social classes and ethnic groups. There were differences between the attitudes of males and females, with female attitudes seeming to have changed the most and the fastest. Cultural Studies has always written about a vanishing youth culture. The Birmingham Centre and the Manchester Institute are the clearest examples of this trend. Consumerism has always summoned ambivalent politics. Credit cards also mask inequalities and create a complex muddling of rich and poor.
