My Little Plastic Cool
Youth Cultural Change and Loss Through Trends


“You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.”
                                                                        —Eric Hoffer

“I want the G.I. Joe with the Kung-Fu action grip. I want Nintendo with the extra-graphics-microchip. Tackle football with rocks, and sticks, and knives, and pain... I want a truck with the four-wheel drive train. You'd rather see me get good at book keeping. I could clean house in the time that I'm not sleeping! I live to serve you, and I don't want to be rude, but you should see that the wizard needs food!”
                                                                                                                              —Five Iron Frenzy


Reaching for the Painted Stars

“And I live to be cool,” a girl once snidely told me years ago. At the time the importance of this was lost on me, fourteen or fifteen and not knowing the girl very well and probably not really caring what she was talking about anyway. I forget her name now just as much as the conversation, but despite this, that one statement sticks with me, ‘living’ to be cool. Seemed like a worthy thing to exist for at the time I was told it, since I was equally caught up in the world of cool myself. Much of American life for youths is built around the want to be accepted through the status symbols of cool, and there is a complete and encompassing enculturation process prevalent in almost all aspects of American youths’ lives to be cool.

Is there any single constant in what is to be cool? The change is never ending, and as fast as one trendy concept of cool is adopted as the normal status quo, it is lost, since the concept of ‘cool’ is a vague notion that shifts and deforms and alters like swirls and eddies in the waters of a river. The true meaning and reality of what it is to be cool is often lost within the shimmering miasma of trends that absorb the lives of youths striving towards those distant horizons, longing for the pinnacles of cool that is usually unobtainable. Youth today, ages too young to care on up to too old to be still concerned with such nonsense, live and work and play and try to cope in the neon opera of modern cool culture. Youth in the United States are grooving on out to the honking horn orchestras and hooting and hollering cavalcades from the popular and the causes that come and go and are rife with false dedication and cheer. There is an endless droning of mock credibility at thirty second a pop advertisement intervals on the television convincing the targeted demographics of youths to trust in themselves, their bodies, their ideas, and their own individuality, while simultaneously being duped into the mass consumption of products to ‘aid’ them in such noble, individualistic principles. Later on, no matter how hard any given youth tries, most all eventually fall by the way side where reality exists, sometimes roughly bounced off the run away train of mass produced cool, and their once staunchly cool culture now turned cold on them. This is often the point a youth is transformed into an adult, maybe a square.

Youths in the United States love trends, which according to Webster Dictionary is an intransitive verb meaning to extend in a general direction: to follow a general course, and American culture has no shortage of these general directions. To know what American trend is, one need only walk in the places youths are, namely high schools, colleges, malls, and other hang out points of interest. Signs of the times can be found in the latest music blasted from the best stereos, the coolest movies, and the neatest technology gadgets, all being blades of grass in the green pastures of cool. Today it seems people can have their very personality gleaned merely by the ring tone emitting from their hip clasped cell phones. Thick leather belts with dual lines of steel studs dotted along with rail road spike conformity are the normal, chic girls’ belt, and name brand, ‘trendy’ clothes with names like Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, and Nautica are badges of cliché acceptance. The black boys often wear clothing so large and droopy as to resemble some form of ancient Persian royal finery. There are a thousand different symbols of multiple levels of cool knowledge and material status such as, but not exclusive to, cigarettes and lighters, DVD players in cars, cars modified with near silly spoiler fins, video games, magazines, shoes, fast food, tattoos (fashionable one on the small of a girl’s back, for example), malls, labels, slogans, coupons, amusement parks, everything an orgy of trend, and on and on; is it any surprise youth become overwhelmed in the inundation of it all? Can there be any expectation other than complete disorientation and confusion from the totality of the assault from the things that go into their eyes, ears, mouths, upon their skin, to the very thoughts filtering through their brains?

Where is the harm, anyway? Is there any? All is not well in the land of American abundance, for certain factors run through those flowing green plains of trendy goodness. American youth culture could be thought of as a specially raised and designed breed of modern consumers, trained from earliest comprehension to want and to continually want, always reaching for the next layer of achievement through trend driven status. The early wants are things like toys, cartoons, and food products like fast food and snacks. The want for things extends beyond objects only to other things such as friends, education, love; it is always good to have a cool group of popular friends, take the appropriate amount of effort in school early, and later on it might be cooler to go to certain Universities over others, and what high school student hasn’t seen the love optional cool couple? Even ideological and conceptual cool can happen as in the case of movement trends such as Beatniks and Hippies and New Wavers.

In a culture of excessive freedom and over indulgence where there is ample encouragement of greed and consumption, the American pursuit of happiness through means of being cool is insatiable, and the desires rise to a feverish, even reckless pace, and it becomes a near sickness that people hunt down these concepts of cool. It is never enough, for there is an all too common reciprocity between passing trend and new trends. A renewing of desires for trends to the next series of wanted objects occurs near the end of the life span of an aging trend, making youths continually search for the latest and greatest, making for more things to buy, things to want, things to need.

This constant removal of old trends at the whim of a new, upcoming trend leads to incredible loss in cultural elements that were only recently highly favored. An example is when one popular trend pushes another out of the acceptable cool, disposed of into cultural oblivion, such as with bell bottoms and Afros replaced with something like boots and torn jeans and dyed hair in the disco to punk trend shift in mid to late seventies New York. So much change makes loss the natural byproduct, and as is the case with any form of loss, someone has to suffer the losing, which in the case of American youth culture, it is children and young adults taking the brunt of the ever decaying mass culture phenomenon of trends.

Through the ever changing trends of American youth and the loss entailed, there are consequences, and when looking at American trend obsession, we can ask what are the affects to the youths that have these changes crashed upon them, and what lasting effects does the aftermath of loss from all of these changes have? Attempting to look further is a murky affair.

Plastic Cool

Avant-garde was the flagship, and post war modernism the banner of sail. Change was good, anything was art, and the decay of the old world was washed away in the crystal waters of adventurous innovation. Blast on through with dynamite fires the old notions of what was acceptable in American culture, business to fashion to slang, and all other aspects of life. And the 50s through the 60s was indeed one tough mountain to burrow through. No matter the damage, no matter the questionable merit, the notion of what was cool took hold with the pierce of steel hooks, and from there on to modern, twenty-first century living, the hooks have only dug deeper. LSD driven philosophy mixed with Dada relativism of generations past intermingle in the grungy streets of urban possibility, applauding with snapping fingers the mired, dreary, dead-end reality. Bright and shining desires were set up in glass boxes called television and the stars on the silver screens showed false truisms and the radio hummed the latest self-important tunes. The world was taking on a fake, plastic feel, the fertile fields of the rise of trend growing brilliantly.

Leisure time increased incredibly in the late nineteenth century, and with free time came the want for things to do. The growth of organized entertainment was astounding and came to the forefront of American life. Popular culture would create trend after trend in the coming decades, but prior to the days after World War II trend was mostly non-homogenized and had resisted what they called “standardization” in the 1920s. This made trends and the old notions of cool more organic, living entities that mostly thrived in their own regions, far removed from the mass communicated and mass produced cool of corporate trend that would soon be the norm (Kammen 70-71). From there on after, mass culture would overwhelm any distinct trends and any new trend that would arise would be hastily absorbed and commercialized and packaged before long, such as Hippie culture, Punk culture, Grunge culture, etc.

The last widespread cultural trend of Americans before WWII was jazz culture, populated by late teen and twenty something urbanites. After this era the change was drastic. Modernized ideology and commercial changes affecting youths in significant new ways took a firm hold. The old culture trend of being cool was no longer restricted to smoky, alcohol fueled jazz joints and Big Band boogie bops where tweed was shunned and hair was tussled, the sweat and smiles driven by the intoxication of the something that was happening and new, the moving of youthful energy. Now trend was surging forward lead by the corporations that were on the rise, money the charismatic leader, and the plastic settings were poured from the chemical refiners of pretend importance, laying the scene for what would become the all consuming pursuit of American kids to this day.

In her essay, Children of the Revolution: Fiction Takes to the Streets, Elizabeth Young stated a point of view relating to the sixties and the trend driven culture reluctance of young writers to write about their own generation, and the words remain relevant about all decades since. “In the early years of the sixties the culture shock was immense and no one, it seemed, could establish a language or tone to encompass the confluence of bohemianism, squalor, excess and black humour that comprised the counter-cultural world” (57). This is highlighting an example of not being able to place what the culture was actually becoming in one of the eras after WWII, fiction writing the element of American culture being spoken about, but it is also an acknowledgment of the difficulty in explaining something such as American youth trends.


Disposable Trends

Caught up in the culture shifts, trend is often thought of as a way of standing out as an individual for many youths, but ironically, individualism being attained by means of a mass-produced cool can prove to be the opposite. Negative results can come from such trend consumption such as confusion as to who you are supposed to be in the brave new American culture. Parents and schools and conformity told kids one thing, but the culture of trends said another. Children became caricatures of themselves as they adopted trends of cool throughout the last few generations.

Simply put, it was all disposable. Concepts of cool came and went and just as fast as one trend was popularly accepted, another took its place. And onward they come and go, disposed and changed, used up and tossed away. Youth no longer benefits from such individualism if there is no time to hold onto the individualism these trends give the child. Youth can become resentful of other trends and those that follow them, as well as the inevitable tensions between parents and the youths that follow certain trends. Family troubles, run-ins with the law, academic and social problems can all come from trend driven life styles, some more so than others. For example, people that are into the hip-hop culture and the lurid lyrics of some rap music might tend to follow a lifestyle portrayed through the lyrics, which can involve crime, misogyny, and violence.

Trends in American youth can extend to more than just object driven obsessions but to behavior as well. More time is spent on the pursuit of ideals of fashion and music than on things like responsibility and schoolwork. Also advocates against culture driven trends state there are even horribly dire consequences from the things youths find cool. William J. Bennett writes, “Most of us already know that too many of our movies, television shows, music songs, and video games are filled with trash: grisly murder scenes…nonstop profanity, rape and torture scenarios” (23). Bennett believes that cultural trends such as these are swallowed up gleefully by American youth, and they have resounding negative effects. He goes on to write:

“For most kids…the popular culture works as a coarsener, desensitizer, and dehumanizer….Another difficulty is in the very small percentage of kids who are…taken over by the popular culture. Who see the movies as a game plan. Who hear the dark, pounding music as a hymn. Who are basically severed and metaphysically separated from their parents, families, and communities. Who begin…to live in a dark parallel universe” (24).

A dark, far off place is where Bennett sees trends ‘generally directing’ American youths, but Mike Males gives an opposing viewpoint that trends might not be so maliciously driven. He states that dangerous and violent behaviors kids exhibit based upon popular culture trends is not really the blame for such behaviors as Bennett wrote, as instead more situational:

“In 2000, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that law enforcement “policy changes” rather than a real violence crime increase might have sparked more arrests….murder and other violence by youth is not spreading but becoming more concentrated. Today, America’s poorest youths are 40 times more likely to die by homicide and gunfire than the wealthiest, and five-sixths of California’s teenage gun deaths occur in just one-tenth of its populated zip codes. While the mega-threats clarioned by the culture war should have killed every American teenager five times over by now, teens today actually display the lowest violent death rate in 50 years!” (30-31).


The crusades against trend driven behavior actually lead to the rise of new trends for adults and other institutions that look after kids, sometimes coming in the form of notoriety, and these sought out ways of curbing the cool:

“Political movements to strip youth rights and institutional youth-fixers have proliferated to profit from fear, generating more scary “studies” proclaiming ever “new,” “alarming,” and “rising” youth crises that are even recycled by culture warriors as if special-interest self-promotion equaled science. The Carnegie Corporation recasts the healthiest, safest generation of young teens age 10-14 ever as a mass of “grim statistics” and “tragic consequences.” (In truth, violent fatality rates among today’s younger teens are an astounding 48 percent lower than in the supposedly pastoral 1950s Carnegie extolled). Carnegie deplored the “freedom, autonomy and choice” among teens for unprecedented “threats to their well-being” (32).

Affects of trend driven culture in America are undecided as Bennett and Males highlight in their essays, and the mountains of conflicting evidence soar to the skies.

Trend is never to be underestimated when it comes to youth and their early enculturated love of being cool. The tribe of America all but chains their psyches to the stone of expectation, these being things like responsibility, cliché, and success, and these are explosive contradictions to the trend cultures kids get caught up in. When conformity pulls a youth one way but the same culture they live in accepts the philosophy put forth by trend setters and corporations that create them, asking of them to make cool their highest priority, the predictability wanted for the developmental turn out of youths is sometimes derailed and trend hurts them. Individualism through acceptance of trend driven culture is where they find themselves.

Check It Out

Kids caught up in trends take on characteristics of those trend’s, such as slang from hip-hop culture in the 80s to current times, black clothing of Goths, chains and boots from rockers, and onward. These trends seem to have given youth a precarious position in American culture. Fifty years ago, those that were outside of conformity were delinquents and looked down upon, and dealt with harshly, but today the delinquents of yester-year are now the norm of all youths, and only the most radical youths stand out from this throng as equivocally delinquent. Neil Cambell states in the book The Radiant Hour, “Lauded as both a symbol of hope for the future and a threat to the existing society, youth occupy increasingly unstable and politically disadvantaged positions within the diverse public spheres that constitute contemporary social orders” (71). I infer that Cambell’s work shows the inconsistencies of youth’s place in America, and the trends they are made to accept by mass media and mass culture makes them unable to obtain serious respect and importance. While the obsession over the welfare and importance of children and teenagers has grown incredibly, the actual acknowledgement of them as important persons with needs and merits of respects more than doing what education and parental raising dictates has all but disappeared. America has made them feel unimportant despite being constantly told they are, and in the void of no longer a child but neither an adult with adult accountability, kids have turned to trends to be cool and find acceptance, and those around them that are into the same things will aid each other in coping with the facts of their inability to be free of inconsistent restriction. Sadly, this is exactly where they are wanted to be because they can be bought and sold in this demographic limbo. Cambell goes onto say:


“Increasingly denied opportunities for self-definition and political interaction, youth are transfigured by discourses and practices that subordinate and contain the languages of individual freedom, social power, and critical agency…. Associated with coming-of-age rebellion, youth become metaphor for trivializing resistance. At the same time, youth attract serious attention as both a site of commodifcation and profitable market” (71).


Irony is the call at the end of the trendy day for youths of America, as all trends they catch themselves up in to be cool and individual amongst the myriad of other trends ultimately cheat them on many fronts; they are reaching for individualism by conforming to a mass produced, plastic cool that usually tens of thousands of others conform to as well, and in their attempts to be so unique, they set themselves as a threat, and thus unable to obtain any actual recognition as anything more than a commodity to be reared the proper way and weaned eventually of their childish obsessions with trend; all the while, consumerism, born and bred, has no qualms with exploitation of an eternally self renewing sector of young people apt for profitable exploitation. “Put bluntly, American society at present exudes both a deep rooted hostility and chilling indifference towards youth, reinforcing the dismal conditions that young people are increasingly living under” (Cambell 72). After kids do make it to adult hood, the scars of the early trend driven years of youth may never go away fully, and are merely replaced by new wants, such as Platinum cards, boats, RVs, SUVs, low percentage mortgages, financing, insurance policies, and a thousand other trends for adults, but that is the subject of an entirely different essay. ‘Living’ to be cool, indeed.

And the Story is Told…

Hip to the bone, praying to the liquid plasma alter, more real than reality, 32 bits, 16.4 million colors simultaneously dancing, and on we march, consuming what trend is convenient at the time. Perhaps culture in America is the celebration of loss as much as change and innovation. We look back fondly at our past trends, write books and make TV sitcoms about them, craft popular movies that long for the times of these generations full of trends and past cools, and reinvent old trends that were tossed out, giving them a good polishing and setting them out as new. In Michael Kammen’s book, American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen reflects on the voices of the advocates against popular culture such as Herbert Marcuse, Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg. Culture is a culmination of historical and ironic factors to Kammen, and “Whistle-blowers abounded among cultural critics and historians through the 1950s and 1960s. Where would such trash lead? When would such trends end?” (222). In the confines of such a small essay it is difficult to capture even a little of the enormous amount of concepts and prudent pieces of information concerning American youth and the trends they are marketed to live for. Kathryn Montgomery Ph.D. said in a conference about youth and digital media facts that are equally prudent when put to juxtaposition with youth trends:

“What little research there has been on new media and youth is often out of date by the time it is published. The explosion of new digital media culture is occurring so rapidly that its growth is surpassing the ability of scholars, health professionals, and educators to grasp fully its nature, its direction, and its impact on young people” (62).

This is perfectly applicable to mass trends as much as mass media, and the ability of anyone to comprehend the magnitude of this can probably not be kept up with, either. Till that time when trend is no longer the driving force for American youth, changes will occur and probably occur faster and faster, making any given trend last no more than the length of the popularity of a hit song, and at least the celebration of constant loss helps ease the hurt for those that have hit hard on the ground of reality, thrown from the plastic platforms of a trend. I feel certain most will find there is life beyond living for the cool.


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Notes

1. Wizard needs food; this is the phrase spoken by the voice recording in the popular arcade video game, Gauntlet, released by Atari in 1985. As the wizard character neared death, the voice would say, “Wizard needs food” as an indication to find food and gain more health and continue playing.


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Works Cited


Bennett, William J. “Popular Culture Negatively Influences America’s Youth.” Espejo 20-26.

Cambell, Neil, ed. The Radiant Hour. United Kingdom: University of Exeter Press, 2000

Espejo, Roman, ed. Opposing Viewpoints America’s Youth. Farmington Hills:
Greenhaven Press, 2003

Five Iron Frenzy. Wizard Needs Food, Badly.

Kammen, Michael. American Culture, American Tastes.
New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1999

Males, Mike. “Popular Culture Does Not Negatively Influence America’s Youth” Espejo 27-33

Merriam-Webster OnLine. www.webster.com

Montgomery Ph.D., Kathryn. “Youth and digital media: a policy research agenda”

Journal of Adolescent Health 27.2 (2000): 61-68

Young, Elizabeth. “Children of the Revolution: Fiction Takes to the Streets.”
The Radiant Hour. Ed. Neil Cambell. United Kingdom: University of Exeter Press, 2000