Some pop-flavoured questions

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I 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.

Comments

[koganbot]

And I wrote Simon that he should read Mary Gaitskill's Two Girls, Fat And Thin, which references music only a little but those uses of music (The Troggs' "Love Is All Around" and Skid Row's "18 And Life") are extraordinary. She makes sense of how a thirteen-year-old girl could connect "Love Is All Around" to Orwell's 1984. But also the novel's really depicting an American junior high school at its most annihilating makes it a novel about rock 'n' roll even if it hadn't mentioned rock 'n' roll. Actually, her latest novel, Veronica, uses music more, and just as well.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I much prefer that to the author who chucks in references liberally, showing their geekdom but adding nothing ti the character. #(Incidentally I've read some of Gaitskill's short stories but not cared for them much.)