“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f##ing big television... But why would I want to do a thing like that?” (Boyle, “Trainspotting”) With the rocking beat of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’, the film’s opening scene shows two men running down a boulevard giving an account of the society’s instructions to youth and adults alike to live life in a certain manner. The movie ‘Trainspotting’ begins with an act of youth rebellion, something that was a widespread phenomenon during the 1990s in Britain. The characters in the movie are running away from jobs, careers and the conventional lives that people live, to find their own paths (Reynolds, 46). The movie depicts the audacity of youth who are fighting to break the norms …show more content…
The Mid-90s were just not about Britpop as people started dancing to drum ‘n’ bass and techno in the underground hubs of rave culture. “It’s in these clubs that I experienced raving in its purest and most deranged form; blissfully ignorant of the DJ’s identities or the tracks’ names, lost in music, out-of-time”, said Reynolds on experiencing one of the raves (Reynolds, xxv). Drugs were becoming popular in the clubbing scene more than ever. “As football fans turned on to E and house music, soccer hooliganism in Britain dropped to its lowers level in five years by 1991-92” (Reynolds, 404). The community of drug consumers and addicts was taking over the eccentric ambience of the raves and this became a defining moment in the history of electronic music. “Where rock relates an experience, rave constructs an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions, and artificial energies” (Reynolds, xxv). Simon clearly suggests that the raves were an experience like no other. When Renton attends a rave in the movie Trainspotting, he sits against a wall in the corner of the room, slow alienating himself from his surroundings. While he is trying to soak in the ambience of the rave from a distance, his friends mingle with the other people at the night-club. “The situation was becoming serious. Young Renton …show more content…
“Rave spread from the original metropolitan cliques in London and Manchester to become a nationwide suburban/provincial leisure culture”. (Reynolds, 96) The music choices were being influenced as the era of Iggy Pop was being overtaken by techno-dance music from Bedrock and ICE MC. “The world is changing, music is changing, drugs are changing, even men and women are changing”, said Diane as she explained to Renton that he had to find something new (Boyle, “Trainspotting”). She added by saying, “You can’t stay in here all day dreaming about heroin and Ziggy Pop. He’s dead, anyway” (Boyle, “Trainspotting”). Iggy Pop’s music had died as the new Britain turned their faces now towards the popular dance electronic music. Even at the end of the movie when Renton deceives his ‘friends’, the scintillating music in the background - Underworld’s “Born Slippy (NUXX)” with pounding fast beats is an indication of shifting musical culture. Reynolds also talked about this Second wave of Rave in 1991-92s when he experienced an ‘entirely different and un-rock way of using music’. He experienced “a liberating joy in surrendering to the radical anonymity of the music, the meaning of which pertained to a macro level of the entire culture” (Reynolds, xxi). The British music was undergoing a drastic change in the 90s when the old pop from
The early 1960’s to mid 1970s was the start of the counterculture of youth culture. During the 1960’s, there were revolutions including a sexual revolution, a cultural/ racial revolution, a rights revolution, and student revolutions. In addition to revolutions, there also a focus on the transition to adulthood, popularity, consumption, anxiety, and the media. However the movie, American Graffiti, which was set in the 1962 (1960s)–before the peak of 1960’s counterculture–and released in 1973 (1970’s) displays an environment more focused on the anxiety of transitioning to adulthood, dating, and consumerism--music and cars. American Graffiti compared to the set and release dates share similarities with the counterculture, but are depicted in
During the 1970s, the urban underground musical culture ‘Hip Hop’, began to arise through African American youth in East-Coast, New York City (The Bronx). With “noisy, disorganised park jams” (Lazerine and Lazerine, 2008, P.1), a musical revolution was about to begin.
“Men and women can't be friends, because sex always gets in the way”, is the main theme of the movie “When Harry met Sally”. The script is a good example of the interpersonal communication ten stage model by Mark Knapp. This developmental model entails the stages of a relationship from it’s infancy to an ending. In the movie we can clearly identify all ten stages of this model.
Trainspotting presents an ostensible image of fractured society. The 1996 film opens, famously, with a series of postulated choicesvariables, essentially, in the delineation of identity and opposition. Significant here is the tone in which these options are deliveredit might be considered the rhetorical voice of society, a playful exposition of the pressure placed on individuals to make the "correct" choices, to conform to expectation.
2. The mood of the “Beat Generation’ is best reflected in which Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
Although the two decades were different in themselves, there is still a parallel running between the two. Both were times of change, with popular culture culminated for the newly recognised youth, each decade had their own brand of pop music, and their own brand of teenagers.
We all know that Hip Hop’s audience has expanded past our inner city youths. Hip Hop concerts are a melting pot of races, cultures and ethnicities enjoying music. “Hip-hop is as popular among youth in Europe as it is in many parts of the world and has had an active if relatively small underground scene since the early 1980s.” writes
Grime and trap music have slowly found their way to the top of mainstream popular music culture over the last decade. Grime is now one of Britain’s largest and well known musical styles as it is taking over from American Hip Hop and can be widely heard over radio stations such as “Capital 95.8fm” and “Kiss 100 Fm”. What Jazz was from the 1920s to 40’s or what R&B was between the 70’s to 80’s. Like most genres of music which have made mainstream popularity such as Rock n Roll, Grime too tends to have negative perception on the genre and within mainstream outlets, therefore impacting on the public perception of the music and the culture that it has sprung from. Throughout this assignment I will be looking at the negative representations of
“He [Pearson’s father] would freak out when he read the song titles to the cassettes that my friends and I would shoplift from the mall…He was certain that I’d become a Junkie if I listened to that kind of music. But with an alcoholic wife-beater father who didn’t give a shit about his son I was bound to avoid the cliched, nihilist aspects of punk culture” (Pearson 12).
Music has been a long standing form of expression for hundreds of years. More recently however, it has become a way for artists to make social commentaries on the society they live in. During the 1970s, Punk bands and Ska bands emerged in England and rose to become a major source of social commentary through their upbeat music. Specifically looking at music from The Stranglers, The Specials, and The Clash, it is clear that lyrics clouded with anger and passion can be best communicated through upbeat sounds and melodies. Each of these groups communicates a need for radical change in society; but each one goes about this in a different way. Through the songs, “I feel like a Wog,” by The Stranglers, “A Message to you Rudy,” by The Specials, and “White Riot,” by The Clash, these bands point out that there is a common enemy in Society. They are forcing the mainstream to realize unpleasant truths about the culture that they inhabit. The future of England was unknown, and these songs were written during a time where people were worried about their place in the world. Faith in the system was dying and these bands gave way to a future generation to improve upon society that will present a more positive and equal multicultural Britain. Through the music it is clear that multicultural Britain was complicated; there were tumultuous times that these bands were commenting on, which pitted races against each other but also brought them together in fighting back against suppressive societal
“Anyone observing a groups of punks moving through Leicester Square on a Friday night would steer well clear: these guys looked seriously strange,” Chamberlain stated. Punks had an external image that was deliberate. They were shocking. They were
” Williams’ theory therefore suggests that the terms must necessarily co-exist in order to define each other. The “pervasiveness of consent ” therefore characterises the fifties, against which these Beat texts can be contrasted. Theodore Roszak’s 1969 article ‘The Making of a Counterculture,’ helps define beat ideology as “heightened self-expression and often a rejection of political and authoritative institutions… a negative spirit of the times coupled with a specific lifestyle .” Both On the Road and Howl and their author’s lifestyles of their writers reflect this criterion, in idiomatic and contextual terms, lending to the notion that they are, by the overall nature of their existence, countercultural texts. Roszak’s adolescent counterculture often seems the embodiment of Dean and Sal’s ‘beatitude’ in On the Road “when they pulse to music…value what is raunchy… flare against authority, seek new experience, ” but it is similarly descriptive of the naked, sometime vulgar language Ginsberg employs in Howl “who bit detectives in the neck… let themselves be fucked in the ass.” (13) The Beats admire the vibrancy naturally present among youth, and although this is a style for which their writing has been criticised, it is a move away from the traditionally
Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting’s depiction of Scotland’s heroin-addicted subculture elicits a number of questions regarding issues of heroin addiction, choice, and societal dissociation; questions which will be explored and subsequently answered in this paper. Jason Middleton notes that it has been argued that influential pop-culture works such as Trainspotting are to blame for “’glamorizing’ heroin and ‘making it look cool’” (Middleton). However, I argue instead that Trainspotting provides a complicated viewing of a besmirched and quite unglamorous side of Edinburgh through characters such as Mark Renton, whose articulation on the importance of choice highlights the interplay between heroin use and the societal and cultural disconnect he experiences in the novel. Middleton, on the idea of societal disconnect, suggests that “negation of all affect and even the body itself [is] a possible consequence of disengagement from dominant social standards” (Middleton). In regards to the cause of this disengagement, Judy Hemingway contends that “spatial politics of culture are exemplified in Trainspotting through its portrayal of divisiveness which took place during the Thatcherite 1980s when lines of demarcation were drawn between those who were valued and those who were not” (Hemingway 328). Using Middleton’s ideas on “disengagement from dominant social standards” (Middleton) as the catalyst for this paper, I aim to explore Renton’s choice to disconnect from British and Scottish
Introduction: (Play YouTube video from 1:38 – 1:58). What you just heard were the sounds of EDM. EDM stands for electronic dance music. Also you saw first-hand the inside of a rave called Electric Daisy Carnival (a Las Vegas event famous for ‘finding yourself under the electric sky’). What rave culture means to me is a place I can be myself and express my creativity in a judgment-free environment. Today, I am going to explain the history behind the top 3 most popular genres of EDM, and the meaning behind rave culture.
Throughout Hanif Kureishi’s novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, there is a focus on the emergence of the punk scene in London during the 1970s. The first obvious encounter we have with punk in the novel appears on page 129, when Karim and Charlie go to the Nashville and see their first punk band. The Nashville is a popular venue where many punk bands got their start, and a lot of famous bands, such as the Sex Pistols, performed. Karim describes the scene that they come upon with a great detailed description of the outlandish appearances of both the audience and the band members. He also describes the unusual way they are acting, the aggressive way they are dancing and the abuse between the band and audience. Though his attention is mainly on the emergence of the