Buying In - (Page 34) 34 rob walker that step to hang with those kids, would I have ever found out what my life could become? So I look back on that very fondly, finding skateboarding. Finding a group of kids who were into skateboarding completely saved me.” Deep down, they were all the same. So Ed Templeton took a look at those skaters, and he did what millions of kids have done since the days of the Zephyr skaters: He joined. oh, dotage—up yours! Most of these groups Hebdige wrote about, and their modern descendant groups, were and are made up of young people. In fact, youth culture hardly seems like a site of marginalization from mainstream society lately—American pop culture generally, and particularly the commercial persuasion business, is obsessed with youth. But people search for ways to resolve that tension between feeling unique and feeling like part of a community whether there is a marketing research firm there to document it or not. Consider, for example, the Red Hat Society, notable for bright costumes, exuberant group behavior, and the fact that it is made up of women age fifty and over. Here the subculture motive is to challenge the way that society expects older women to behave. “It’s a very genuine feeling—‘You need to get off the stage now and go sit somewhere in the back,’ ” Sue Ellen Cooper, the sixty-year-old “founder and Queen Mother” of the society, told me. “Well, no, I’ll tell you when I’m ready to do that.” This is not exactly the same as punk’s generalized middle finger to society, but there is an element of refusal to go along with mainstream values—a bit of an “up yours” to assigned social roles.
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.