Some pop-flavoured questions
Jun. 14th, 2007 09:42 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
mippy.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poptimistsI know there'll be someone here who can help - apols if this is off-topic.
* What was the socio-economic situation in small-town Scotland in the 1980s? Was it roughly like Liverpool? Manchester? Were there actually YTS schemes in place if you wanted them?
* What was the situation with sectarianism, outside of the bigger cities? Was it a constant prescence, rather like racial conflict is in small Northern towns, or something that flashed up occasionally cf. Notting Hill, Toxteth?
* I might be wrong here as I've been thinking about other things all day and am a bit fuzzy, but I would say the kind of music working-class kids listen to *outside big cities* tends to be, as a generalisation, happy hardcore or West Coast hip-hop from about 1993. (I'm thinking Bodycount or Cypress Hill here..) Or, if female, chart dance that gets played on TMF. In mainstream terms. You know, small towns that are so...insular that they seem to have a pop culture all of their own, like a version of the Eden Centre but with more graffiti. How different was this twenty years ago? Goths? Heavy metal? The post-punk/indie stuff that came back into fashion in the past few years (remember small towns catch on a couple of years after the big cities)? As a pointer, my sister was sixteen in 1986 and has never heard of The Smiths, but liked Depeche Mode. So I am slightly confused.
* How instilled with ambition were 'secondary modern' kids in the early 80s? I mean, I could use my sister as an example as she went to one, but her dream was always to settle down and have kids so the idea of going on to career/higher education wouldn't have been there.
* Are there any novels which touch on pop culture (s as much as everyday life/plot, as in, the two are firmly intertwined and one could imagine what song the character might be humming at any given point, say? The only 80s Scottish novels I can recall right now are The Trick Is To Keep Breathing and Lanark - one being magical-realist, one being very much an interior monologue. There are a lot of sub-Coupland pop-lit writers who namedrop bands/artists to fit in with the zeitgeist, but I don't mean that. I vaguely remember a slacker-lit (!) novel with a green cover where the waiters sung REM songs, but that was about it. Amis probably hasn't been near a HMV outside of Christmas time. *Maybe* The Buddha of Suburbia, but I haven't actually read any Hanif Kureshi since I was about sixteen. The fact I am having to think hard about this suggests it doesn't happen very often, and that can't be right.
* What was the socio-economic situation in small-town Scotland in the 1980s? Was it roughly like Liverpool? Manchester? Were there actually YTS schemes in place if you wanted them?
* What was the situation with sectarianism, outside of the bigger cities? Was it a constant prescence, rather like racial conflict is in small Northern towns, or something that flashed up occasionally cf. Notting Hill, Toxteth?
* I might be wrong here as I've been thinking about other things all day and am a bit fuzzy, but I would say the kind of music working-class kids listen to *outside big cities* tends to be, as a generalisation, happy hardcore or West Coast hip-hop from about 1993. (I'm thinking Bodycount or Cypress Hill here..) Or, if female, chart dance that gets played on TMF. In mainstream terms. You know, small towns that are so...insular that they seem to have a pop culture all of their own, like a version of the Eden Centre but with more graffiti. How different was this twenty years ago? Goths? Heavy metal? The post-punk/indie stuff that came back into fashion in the past few years (remember small towns catch on a couple of years after the big cities)? As a pointer, my sister was sixteen in 1986 and has never heard of The Smiths, but liked Depeche Mode. So I am slightly confused.
* How instilled with ambition were 'secondary modern' kids in the early 80s? I mean, I could use my sister as an example as she went to one, but her dream was always to settle down and have kids so the idea of going on to career/higher education wouldn't have been there.
* Are there any novels which touch on pop culture (s as much as everyday life/plot, as in, the two are firmly intertwined and one could imagine what song the character might be humming at any given point, say? The only 80s Scottish novels I can recall right now are The Trick Is To Keep Breathing and Lanark - one being magical-realist, one being very much an interior monologue. There are a lot of sub-Coupland pop-lit writers who namedrop bands/artists to fit in with the zeitgeist, but I don't mean that. I vaguely remember a slacker-lit (!) novel with a green cover where the waiters sung REM songs, but that was about it. Amis probably hasn't been near a HMV outside of Christmas time. *Maybe* The Buddha of Suburbia, but I haven't actually read any Hanif Kureshi since I was about sixteen. The fact I am having to think hard about this suggests it doesn't happen very often, and that can't be right.
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