Books:

'Teen Spirit' For Sale

A new book on the relationship between music and youth activism draws interesting parallels and offers fresh perspective.

By Brittany Shoot
February 16, 2010

A pedestrian walks past a mural of the cover the Nirvana box set “With the Lights Out,” on the wall of a record store in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In the midst of a global financial crisis it can be easy to look to music as a simple escape from everyday worries. But in his new book, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis, Ryan Moore, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University, argues that a music can sometimes be so much more.

According to Moore, musical movements are often the result of other factors that include changing public policy and urban decay. Moore details the erosion of the American middle class and notes that stagnating income levels have altered the political and musical landscape for young people. He also looks at the ways music has been a catalyst for social change.

As a scholar and a music fan, Moore faces a challenge when writing about music history vis-à-vis social change. In constructing his argument, Moore must write for a general audience while refraining from relying too heavily on the stereotypical narrative found in other pseudo-sociological works like Our Band Could Be Your Life and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. In these works, the narrative very much analyzes how the once-cool underground scene gets corrupted by the greed of the free market. Instead of repeating that cliché in Sells Like Teen Spirit, Moore explains why “selling out” can be subversive and how downloading music to resist capitalism is clearly applicable to younger generations.

Like other accounts of musical subcultures, most of the bands profiled and genres explored in Sells Like Teen Spirit are predictably framed by location: Television and the Talking Heads represent New York; the anti-Reagan Dead Kennedys represent San Francisco; Black Flag is emblematic of Los Angeles, while “brat core” darlings The Descendents stand in for the L.A. suburbs; the Pacific Northwest had the riot grrrls; and Washington, D.C., had the anti-fascist straightedge Dischord scene. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Moore also focuses significant attention on the San Diego punk scene, where he spent some of his own formative years. He puts particular emphasis on San Diego venues, clubs where young people and bands gathered. In this way, his work is especially relevant; anyone who’s ever spent time in a local music scene knows that venue is only a small part of the larger community.

Moore’s deeply personal take on the historical significance of heavy metal is also a refreshing addition to the independent music canon. Moore himself is a self-described former teenage metalhead, and he comes to many a metal lover’s defense when he argues that there is a distinct relationship between social isolation and the rise of mental illness diagnoses in young people in the 1980s. Moral panic that came with parents misunderstanding the connection between metal and satanic worship exacerbates this link. Moore explains in Sells Like Teen Spirit that while some metal bands lean on devilish symbolism, the connection is often more an aesthetic decision than a devotional one. It is more noteworthy that the genre has become an escape for disaffected working-class youth who weren’t into the politicized punk movement. But not all metal bands supplanted politics for nihilistic gloom. Some challenged conventions in unlikely ways, from Slayer’s attack on Christian hypocrisy to Judas Priest’s edgy push for homosexuality to be widely accepted.

Although Moore doesn’t touch on the music and social justice struggles of this millennium at all in Sells Like Teen Spirit, he gives young people considerable credit for their previous contributions to social change via musical involvement. Moore even makes the case for unlikely metal heroes, citing Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman’s desire to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise the building’s “evil spirits” as a radical act rooted in heavy metal themes. Without the acceptance of these themes in the increasingly popular metal communities, Moore wonders whether such inspired actions would have ever taken place.

The musical landscape may change and fans’ loyalties will remain forever fickle, but Moore’s study of the past provides a roadmap for up-and-coming acts that want to do more than just perform. Socially and politically enraged bands don’t have to be boring nor must their fans be passive. In fact, some of most unlikely, creative social disruption has come from some of the most innovative and strange music of the last several decades. When you think about large-scale events of the past, from concert festivals to political rallies, music and social change are almost always intertwined. Thankfully for Moore and for the rest of us, these inspired combinations show no sign of confinement to written histories.

Brittany Shoot is a freelance writer currently living in Copenhagen. She has a master’s of visual and media arts from Emerson College. Read her words at brittanyshoot.com.

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