Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids

I'm not going to review the book, but rather just plant a few quotes I liked:


P. 183: To embrace Led Zeppelin with all the trimmings was a declaration that you would have no part of it. Your place in your town was set in stone. You flirted with evil, you were dangerous. So the cult of Led Zeppelin helped kids carve some space, communion. Zep was liberation theology in vinyl.


P. 192: Adults worried about protecting kids' "morals" but were completely unconcerned that the minimum wage hadn't gone up once during the whole decade. Since the 1960s kids have lost power in leaps and bounds; but when they turned to 'Satan' or to other youth culture traditions for help, for comfort, for support, adults complained that kids were being seduced by evil.

Everything that kids did to empower or protect themselves in recent years, any refuge they created from adult indifference and brutality, was turned around and used against them. We should have been proud of them. Proud that the kids' religion gave them so much courage to fight back.


P. 254: Because of transformations in the nature of the family and in the global economy, the concept of adolescence as a preparatory stage for adulthood is essentially obsolete.


P. 255: Young people move within social enclaves, just like everybody else. The autonomous history of each new generation operates a lot like an ethnicity. Kids are a priori marginal. They live in a historically specific moment of their own, making sense of the world in new ways, different from the parental generation.