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Surfing The New Wave Analysis

Decent Essays

In Surfing the New Wave: Music, Leisure, and Consumption, Valeria Manzano explains that rock n’ roll and jeans are products of the juvenilization of mass culture caused by an increase in youth culture consumption in 1960s Argentina. These products allowed the youth generation to distinguish themselves from other generations, often raising moral concerns, while also placing them within the internationalized youth culture and aiding socioeconomic class distinction within the youth generation. To begin, rock n’ roll emerged as a youth-led movement largely due to El Club del Clan which represented Argentine youth and their musical tastes. Rock n’ roll in this context abided by traditional gender roles, family values, and restrained fun. Popular …show more content…

This is because jeans were the first clothes targeted to, and appropriated by, the youth of Argentina; previously youth clothing was the same as the clothing of their parents’ generation. Jeans also helped to connect youth with the international youth culture and, thus, their peers abroad because they were unified through the same generational marker. However, jeans also aided class and gender divides within the youth generation. The middle-class projected their intolerance of class tastes onto jeans, thus, promoting class division through their view of imports as authentic and a form of cultural renewal. Due to the emphasis on the value of imported jeans and their exclusivity, these brands, primarily Lee and Levi Strauss, became a socioeconomic marker of the upper and middle classes, distinguishable through their fade and loose fit style. Far West, the national brand of vaqueros, or jeans, that the working-class could afford to wear, and did wear, were bluer and tighter. Working-class men who wore jeans were subject to class specific anxieties that those who wore jeans had a social and sexual disorder and, thus, were a threat. This class prejudice was portrayed in Argentine films in which working-class men wearing vaqueros were rapists or homosexuals. Additionally, women were largely excluded from wearing jeans, due to formal and informal dress codes preventing them from wearing them for anything but leisure, but they still adhered to the class values placed on American brand jeans preferring them over national brands which they dubbed

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