Alan Measles

I’m getting on a bit now. Part of the brief for being a fifty year old is moaning about young people. Now don’t get me wrong, I love young people, someone’s got to mop up after me when I let go on the way to the loo in the home for retired gentleteddies, someone’s got to man all the call centres when I can’t work my computer and serve me my coffee and Marmite toast. After all young people are the future. Unfortunately a future of no jobs, unaffordable housing, huge education costs and constant niggling little wars, oh and don’t forget an overheating unsustainable planet.

In the last week or so we have seen the best and the worst of Britain’s youth. Last Saturday Gray bought a day pass into the middle classes and attended the proms. Gray went to see the 160 or so shiny faces of the National Youth Orchestra. They played a Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra by Gabriel Prokofiev, that, much to his disappointment, Grayson enjoyed it! He wanted to find the fusion of youthnicity and classical music ridiculous but as he gets older and wiser he surprises himself more often by being horribly open-minded.  Then the brilliant young Benjamin Grosvenor played Britten’s Piano Concerto. The evening finished off with music by Gabriel’s grandfather Sergey and a selection from Romeo and Juliet which was fabulous with the whole huge orchestra going flat out. ‘Close your eyes and you would think it was a professional outfit not a stage full of dedicated teenagers’, enthused Gray. Well this new-found joy in youth did not last long. (‘Phew!’ I hear my regular readers say, ‘we were getting worried.’)

Now you know where we are going don’t you? Riots, or psychopathic shopping as it seems to have become. It seems to me that we have raised a generation of whom many only know how to amuse themselves when it involves an exchange of money. We breed perfect young consumers conditioned into keeping the Chinese economy going. What struck me watching the riot porn on TV where the limited fashion choices adopted by young streetwise boys. Middle aged Britons like Grayson like to think this isle as a hot bed of creative ‘street’ fashion, the birthplace of ‘cool’ street-cred styles like Teddy boys, Mods and Punks. These ‘cults’ are just youth club uniforms. Anthropologist Kate Fox calls these alternative dressers ‘eccentric sheep’ because they all rebel in exactly the same way. The worst insult to hurl at a teen seems to be ‘mainstream’ but a hoodie accessorized with a looted plasma screen seems to have become this seasons LBD. Youths in general now seem to dress for CCTV, they are the opposite of peacocks, just indistinct grey blurs, violently pursuing globally branded products. This idea of youth as radically creative seems to have just been a flattering ad campaign designed to sell international consumer durables to conservative teenagers. Put a green Mohican on a basic hatchback or kid them that your new phone is as ‘exciting’ as bungy jumping into a fashion show and dullards with credit might think they are part of a wave of shockingly original culture. No they are merely leisure shopping. Sorry kids the rewards of art and creativity are not conveniently available off the shelf, they are hard won skills. Ask the National Youth Orchestra.

I wonder if they know White Riot?

AM