4 January

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often refer to, the first half of the 20th century, when 4 major catastrophes smashed societies (WW1, Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2) was also the time when mass schooling took off. The confluence of those two things led to the teenager. Teenagers owe their existence as a distinct social group to the decoupling of child life from adult life, in schools. In schools kids developed their own separate culture - teenage culture. The first totem or rallying point for that culture was the car, the second was bands and music. Think Grease and its drag races (1950s teens) and The Beatles (1960s). The world we now live in arose from that teen culture then becoming all of adult culture, as teenagers left school. They remade the adult world as a giant high school. Cars and bands became critical adult reference points, popularity (including trends and fads) became the currency of adult life. Social media is this same shift, on steroids. The ‘triumph of youth culture’, as LIFE calls it here. Everybody is a youth now, even the elderly.