Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues

The Transformation of Soccer Culture

Steve Redhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415115278
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134821136
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Soccer fandom has traditionally been seen as an important part of adolescent, generally male, identity making. In Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues , Steve Redhead shows how this tradition of youth culture of fandom has been eroded in the last years of the twentieth century by the more fleeting, style conscious allegiances inspired by television, films and music. The clubs that young people follow are determined by advertising and popular music; the games that they watch are brought to them by the globalized culture of television, as in the world cup staged in America; even their fears of so-called soccer hooliganism are determined by media-engendered moral panics at a time when the phenomenon itself seems to be dying away.

1
POST-YOUTH

This book is about ‘post-youth’, the aftermath of youth culture at the end of the millennium. In today’s accelerated culture mediatisation, hyperreality and disappearance combine to pose new questions about the ‘reality’ of youth deviants such as ‘soccer hooligans’. Youth cultures themselves increasingly become self-regulating domains; soccer hooliganism, for example, is marginalised and unfashionable within a heavily masculinised sporting fan culture reshaped by advertising and media culture. Law and other forms of regulation continue to police the contours of such domains, but are themselves ‘disappearing’ into forms of popular culture. The post-fan culture of soccer (formed out of literaturisation and musicalisation of soccer, footballisation of pop music and associated processes) is the instance of such popular culture most clearly and regularly presented in this book.

DEVIL FOLKS AND PANIC MORALS

Folk devils (and moral panics) are making something of a comeback. In Britain in the early 1990s, the Tory Prime Minister of the time, John Major, rhetorically singled out ‘New Age Travellers’ (Lowe and Shaw, 1993) and ‘Ravers’ (Redhead, 1993a, 1995) as the contemporary equivalents of earlier youth subcultures like the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ from the 1960s (Cohen, 1987). In 1994—after massive media focus on them—a Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was passed enacting measures designed to criminalise, and outlaw, these contemporary examples of youth culture. From the violent police raids of 1985 (celebrated, or rather commemorated, in ‘The Battle of the Beanfleld’—a song by ‘crustie’ band The Levellers) there had been an escalating moral panic about the ‘new dispossessed’ in British youth culture, culminating in a spiralling law and order campaign when Ravers met (literally and metaphorically) New Age Travellers at festivals up and down the country from 1991 onwards. There are, however, numerous other young folk devils in Britain and other countries: urban rioters, heavy metal kids (Gaines, 1991); dongas (eco freaks who protest at major new motorway and trunk road building and other environmentally unfriendly acts across England’s green and (un)pleasant land; dockers (street corner sellers of crack cocaine); gangsta rappers; riot grrrls; ragga/bhangramuffins and junglists (Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma, 1996); computer hackers; phone phreakers; ‘natural born killers’; yardies; joyriders; twockers (an acronym for those taking away cars without owners’ consent); slackers; and, of course, the ubiquitous focus of ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson, 1983), the ‘hooligan’.

SOCCER HOOLIGANS AND MORAL PANICS

The ‘football hooligan’ of the soccer violence-vandalism-and-disorder variety now featured in a film travesty i.d. (1995, directed by Philip Davis) as well as a burgeoning literature (Dunning, Murphy and Williams, 1988, 1989, 1990; Canter, Comber and Uzzell, 1989; Williams and Wagg, 1991; Giulianotti, Bonney and Hepworth, 1994; Kerr, 1994) in sociology, psychology, leisure studies, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, criminology, soccer jurisprudence and socio-legal studies—is the shadowy figure pervading the whole of the present book. As a collection of essays on ‘soccer hooliganism’ in the 1970s put it:

Football hooligans are the folk devils of our age. Few other groups hit the headlines with such force and consistency; few other groups arouse such strong feelings of outrage or terror or lead to such cries for retribution. A great deal of publicity is given to the views of football administrators, directors and managers, police chiefs, judges and magistrates. Government ministers pronounce on the subject and periodically set up working parties to investigate it. Declining attendances at football matches are blamed on it and many people, despite having no direct contact with the problem, have very strong views on it. This book considers the issue in a wider context than that usually adopted by newspapers and official reports. Our view is that before a problem such as football hooliganism can be resolved, both the context in which it occurs and the dynamics of the processes taking place within this context must be understood.

(Ingham et al., 1978:7)

The intervening years of New Right government, social decay, economic decline and accelerated growth of media culture have changed the ‘wider context’. Further, soccer hooliganism is frequently (and in many ways misleadingly) said to be ‘disappearing’ in the 1990s. But this book is, in a sense, a (heartfelt) plea for a return to the study of the ‘wider context’ which Ingham, Marsh and their ‘contemporary cultural studies’ contributors such as Hall and Clarke identified as crucial for deviance, law and youth culture studies almost two decades ago. Crucially, all of these folk devils—and many more—are connected by the general panic about youth crime which manifested itself—at least in the British media—in 1991 after riots in apparently unrelated urban estates in places such as Bradford, Blackburn, Oxford and Newcastle (Campbell, 1993) and in 1993 around the chance kidnapping and subsequent murder of toddler Jamie Bulger by two pre-teenage boys on Merseyside (Smith, 1993). They are figures in a complex modern morality play full of youthful ‘images of deviance’ or deviant ‘representations of youth’ (Griffin, 1993). It is a case of the familiar story of ‘trouble with kids today’ (Muncie, 1984). We have, though, been down this road before. Stan Cohen’s prescient, classic study of the creation of the mods and rockers (Cohen, 1987) in the full employment, affluent society of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s still provides a reference point to the narratives of police and media-driven law and order crackdowns on youth in the 1990s. But these post-monetarist, end-of-the-millennium dog days are different from the era of post-war Keynesian consensus. Acute economic and social ‘hard times’ accompany today’s fast proliferating ‘images of deviance’—simulated media portraits of juvenile bogeymen with mass (especially youth) unemployment seemingly here to stay. ‘Youth’ culture, once a glossy advertising video in the now far-off 1980s (Redhead, 1990), is once again a scapegoat for all of the multiple social ills of western consumer culture, inexorably exported all over the earth. The ever-increasing hard-edged moral panics generated around contemporary youth culture are a global feature as world market capitalism fails to reign back insecurity of what Will Hutton has called the 40–30–30 society (Hutton, 1995)—where 40 per cent are in secure employment, 30 per cent are in insecure employment, and 30 per cent are unemployed—to produce sufficient portions of the ‘culture of contentment’ (Galbraith, 1992) and the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1991) which were so fulsomely promised at the end of the Cold War.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUTH CULTURE

However, none of this means that youth (mainly male)—biological/psychological—has, as in the predictions of media and cultural commentators, come to an end or in any simple sense ‘disappeared’. ‘Youth culture’ as a formation, however, has tended to disappear, becoming (in Baudrillard’s formulation) ‘hyperreal’ in the process—a ‘hereafter of youth’. What has also happened, at least in Britain, over the past 20 years is the virtual disappearance of a ‘field’ of ‘appreciative’ contemporary sociological and cultural studies of youth culture (Redhead, 1995, especially chapter 6). As Rupa Huq put it in the Times Higher Education Supplement in reviewing an overview of law, youth deviance and cultural studies becoming ‘unpopular cultural studies’ (Redhead, 1995):

…academic work in youth culture has not been fashionable since the 1970s, when it flourished at departments like Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Changed 1980s priorities (the demise of the Social Science Research Council) left it largely moribund. Signs of a recovery in its fortunes however are currently detectable.

(THES, 10 November 1995)

There have, of course, been sociological studies and ethnographies of youth (Willis, 1990a, b), many showing youth as victims as much as hooligans (Anderson et al., 1994; Brown, 1994; Brown, 1995) in the intervening years, but ‘youth culture’ research has been largely given up to advertising agencies and lifestyle marketing companies like Mintel, as well as political and cultural think-tanks like Demos. Indeed, obituary of deviance studies in general (Sumner, 1994)—and not simply the sociology of youth and soccer deviance—is now the order of the day. This is particularly the case in my view, from long experience as a practitioner and participant observer/ethnographer in the area of the study of soccer hooliganism or soccer deviance. This present book uses the idea originally put forward by Ingham of ‘wider context’ of soccer deviance (representing postmodern sporting culture more generally) as a vehicle for making new theoretical arguments on ‘youth’, ‘fandom’ and ‘culture’ at the end of the millennium. In previous books on these themes I have signalled the black hole into which the ‘field’ has disappeared in various ways. Sing When You’re Winning (1987)—out of print for many years—had the subtitle ‘The Last Football Book’, partly to parody Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons’ notorious subtitle ‘The Obituary of Rock and Roll’ for their own Pluto Press book The Boy Looked At Johnny (1978), the original model for a jokey and ironic look at the ‘post-culture’ of soccer deviance in the mid-1980s. A later look at the post-culture of youth as a whole (Redhead, 1990) bore the stolen (from Jean Baudrillard) title The End-of-the-Century Party to signal the late 1980s collapse of all sorts of sociocultural barriers—rock/dance, east/west, high/low, Left/Right, local/global, masculine/feminine, straight/gay, black/white—and to capture the complex double-coded ‘hedonism in hard times’, ‘subculture into clubcultures’ condition (Redhead, 1997b) that permeated the 1980s and 1990s, especially the Thatcher/Major years in Britain. The ‘End’ in The End-of-the-Century Party signified both the short-lived nature of the party (the ‘right’ to party, or rave, was soon to be legally constrained by government statute) and the events (such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the communist bloc and the Cold War) then exploding as if the 1990s were not going to even take place at all. All of these accounts drew heavily on ‘postmodern’ theories or, better, theories of the condition of ‘postmodernity’. However, these were cut up and reworked mercilessly. They were employed—together with their related strategies—some distance from the traditional output of the academy in order to pontificate about the accelerated post-culture of ‘youth and pop’ which academics in general (though not some astute cultural writers and journalists) were struggling to grasp. Studio recordings, television and radio broadcasts, news interviews, magazine articles, photographic exhibitions all served as the sites for the ‘publication’ of the research as much as academic books, journals and official reports, although all were also used. The End-of-the-Century Party became a most apt title of Bristolian singer/toaster Gary Clail’s On-U Sound LP from 1989, and my ‘field’ tape recordings ended cut up, William Burroughs-like, on another of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound albums, the Barmy Army’s The English Disease, where they were accompanied by Doug Wimbish on bass, Style Scott on drums and Skip McDonald on guitar among others. It is perhaps only fitting in the light of the earlier focus on The End-of-the-Century Party that the title of the present book is (jokily yet seriously) Post-Fandom and The Millennial Blues.

THE MILLENNIAL BLUES

The phrase ‘millennial blues’ is unashamedly borrowed from Tony Parsons’ pop music column in the right-wing Daily Telegraph (Parsons, 1995). Parsons used it then to distinguish the ‘old’ recycled rock of listenable bands (such as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and other ‘Britpop’) from emergent 1990s avant-dance culture. ‘The millennial blues’ was the description of new dance cultures (see Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma, 1996) as best exemplified by the haunting, edgy, dangerous (dark) ‘trip-hop’ of performers like Portishead (ultimate winners of the 1995 Mercury Music Prize for their album Dummy) and Tricky (purveyor of the ‘Black Steel’ single in all its five versions and the appropriately named second album Pre-Millennium Tension). These were, in truth, 1990s Bristolian (Johnson, 1996) successors of Gary Clail and Mark Stewart (of The Pop Group and, later, The Maffia)—as well as Massive Attack—and indebted to On-U Sound for their sound and style, exhibited especially by Skip McDonald and his post-Tackhead and Barmy Army ‘bluesy’ Little Axe project aimed at producing ‘blues for the twenty-first century’. Readers can play McDonald’s Sherwood-produced ‘Hammerhead’ on On-U Sound’s Pay It All Back Volume 4 or the Little Axe (McDonald on guitar, Wimbish on bass and Keith Le Blanc on drums, Sherwood as co-producer) LP’s ‘The Wolf That House Built’ and ‘Slow Fuse’ on the Wired label in 1995 and 1996 (or else a remix of the 1995 album track ‘Out in the Rain and Cold’ on Pay It All Back Volume 5) for one sonic representation of ‘the millennial blues’. The more DJ/club dance-floor-oriented Leftfield’s Leftism LP (another record shortlisted for the 1995 Mercury prize), plundering dub reggae, African and ambient sound in a related popular music cultural category, provides an alternative soundtrack, but Adrian Sherwood’s dub production of the Primal Scream (with Irvine Welsh) ‘The Big Man and the Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown’ single is a classic of the genre, released for only two weeks in June 1996. The stripped-down instrumental version—minus Welsh’s blasphemous ‘vocal’ track—was released as part of RCAs Various Artists The Beautiful Game for Euro ‘96, the European Soccer Championships held in England in 1996 (an album also containing Massive Attack’s ‘Eurochild Ninety 6’). The shuffling, ‘druggy’ sound is reminiscent of Primal Scream’s title track for the film of Welsh’s hit ‘litpop’ novel (drawing on his own ethnographic knowledge of mid-1980s Edinburgh soccer casuals) Train-spotting.¹

Nevertheless, ‘the millennial blues’, like The End-Of-The-Century Party, is a phrase pregnant with possibility for analysis of a wider cultural condition and not simply a helpful description—and ironic marketing ploy—for popular music culture. Jungle (or drum ‘n’ bass as it became known) star, Goldie, purveyor of his own dark version of the millennial blues² in his music has claimed that:

People have to understand that it’s about putting their heads up and looking to the future. We have to remember that we’re going to witness the millennium and the generation that was buzzing at the age of 21 will see it in full swing. We’re going to be in the year 2000, man. A hundred years either way and you’d miss that situation. And whatever runs, witnessing the millennium and witnessing this music taking you into the millennium, with the technology behind it and the barbarians from within it, it’s just…it’s height, man. An abyss of ideals.

(Goldie in Champion, Breakbeat Science CD booklet)

The way ‘the millennial blues’ is used in the present book, drawing on the theoretical insights of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio (though projecting them onto a very different terrain), suggests that The End-Of-The-Century Party has already bitten the dust and that acceleration of popular culture requires a different description in the late 1990s. Initially, as already pointed out, The End-of-the-Century Party title, and theme, originated from an idea by Jean Baudrillard put forward in a very different context. What has been labelled ‘Popular Cultural Studies’ has persistently and widely ‘sampled’ Jean Baudrillard’s provocative, uneven, but always illuminating ‘post-Marxist’ or ‘post-68’ (Baudrillard, 1996c) writings for rewriting analyses of regulation and policing of youth and popular culture, though by no means committing such analyses to a genre of ‘Baudrillardian’ theory, whatever that may be thought to comprise (Redhead, 1993a, 1995). Baudrillard is an arch anti-modernist, anti-postmodernist writer whose singular contribution—however infuriating—is indispensable to those who wish to theorise the media culture of the end of the millennium. My view is that Baudrillard’s notion that (increasingly) ‘TV is the world’ captures some characteristics of the condition in which youth culture finds itself at the modern fin de siècle, but also leaves much unanswered, especially about the lives of ‘ordinary youth’—as Cohen (Cohen, 1987, introduction to the second edition) refers to them—excluded economically, culturally, technologically and geographically from the consumer culture advertised on their television screen. After 50 years of spectacular and highly visible youth subcultures, the search is on (more than ever) for a way for youth to be made to ‘disappear’, either by conforming to mainstream values (entrepreneurship, home ownership, deferred gratification) or by refusing to vote, work, register and enrol. This is partly a condition caused by the economic and social changes brought in many countries by the pursuance since the mid-1970s of free market, economic and social neo-liberalism, but also partly by panic-ridden law and order crackdowns on youth as ‘folk devils’. ‘Youth’, which in the 1980s was becoming a marketing/advertising fiction for anyone between 5 and 5 5 years old, is now more of a ‘life course’—albeit fragmented—in itself as permanent entry into the ‘adult’ labour market is widely denied. The response by biological youth (i.e. those born since the early/mid-1970s) is, as always, dazed and confused, but there are cultural manifestations which, in the context of sporting/soccer culture, this book outlines. One further instance is the supposed popular cultural production and cultural politics of a ‘twentysomething’ ‘slacker/generation X’ which is said to comprise the emergence of ‘post-yuppie’ youth culture—the first for decades to have to deal with being materially ‘poorer’ than its predecessor (Redhead, 1998).

The theme of ‘disappearance’ is central to the present book. In fact, much of what has been taken as useful from Baudrillard’s work is paralleled—and frequently, as Baudrillard explicitly acknowledges, originates—in the work of the much less known French theorist, Paul Virilio. Virilio was born in 1932 and is the former director of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• POST-FANDOM AND THE MILLENNIAL BLUES
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Post-Youth
• 2. Post(Realist)-Realism
• 3. Post-Fandom and Hyperlegality
• 4. Hyperreality Bytes
• 5. (Channel) Surfin’ USA
• 6. The Sound of the Stadium
• 7. These Charming Fans
• 8. Post-Culture
• Appendix 1. A–Z of Soccer Fanzines
• Appendix 2. Goal! Goal! Goal! Diary of USA ’94
• Appendix 3. Soccer Players’ Pop Songs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index