"Kids of the Black Hole": Youth culture in postsuburbia.
Item
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Title
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"Kids of the Black Hole": Youth culture in postsuburbia.
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Identifier
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AAI9820561
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identifier
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9820561
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Creator
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MacLeod, G. Dewar.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David Nasaw
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | American Studies | Music
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a history of youth culture in postsuburban Southern California. Beginning in the 1960s, suburban areas of Southern California (and the rest of the country) began to undergo changes that would lead, in the 1980s, to the characterization of many such areas as a new social formation--exurbia, edge cities, or postsuburbia. The areas outlying Los Angeles were no longer simply bedroom communities servicing the center city, but full scale, contained regions. These new types of regions contained industry (increasingly information-technology oriented), office parks, services, and shopping centers, as well as housing tracts. At the same time this new social formation was developing, the lives of young people were changing dramatically in the aftermath of the sixties and the aging of the baby boomers. Adolescents coming of age in the 1970s faced a new set of social, political and economical expectations and opportunities.;"'Kids of the Black Hole'" examines these transformations in American society by exploring a development that seemed at the time to be sudden and inexplicable--the explosion of punk rock in seemingly placid suburbs in Southern California (and later throughout the country). Descended from the British punk rock of the 1970s, a mutant offspring was born in the beachside and valley communities of Los Angeles and Orange Counties in the late '70s and early 1980s. This new American version of punk rock, called hardcore, arose not among the working class and artists and bohemians in the cities (as earlier punk rock had), but among the middle class youth in the exurban areas of Southern California. Hardcore took punk rock's anti-establishment message and made it louder, faster, even more angry, and, often, even more violent.;This dissertation examines the history of hardcore punk rock in Southern California, describing the transformation of punk rock from an urban, working class, avant-garde musical form to a postsuburban, middle class, social phenomenon. Combining the methodologies of social history and cultural studies, I examine punk rock musically and aesthetically as well as within the content of the social environment. My purpose is to treat the cultural phenomenon of postsuburban punk rock not simply in musical, formal or stylistic terms, but in social-historical terms as well.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
