The end-of-the-century party : youth and pop towards 2000

Proclamations were frequently made early in the 1980s about the end of the youth culture and the new conformism. Adulthood was in as were postmodernism, flaunting material success and the enterprise culture and the music became safe along with the culture. This book offers an alternative perspective on popular music and youth culture in the 1980s and beyond. Based on interviews with disc jockeys, record magnates, musicians, producers and fans, it describes and analyzes the shift for New Pop in the early 1980s to what it calls Political Pop in the mid-late 1980s. This movement involved a change in pop thinking, a move from an obsession with style, packaging and synthetic sounds to content, socially conscious lyrics and a new rock-oriented authenticity. However spurious and uneven this move, pop and rock definitions and their use changed dramatically during the decade as the rightward surge in social fields gathered pace. The book shows how the pop media formation of Political Pop in turn produced its own deviant offspring, Post-Political Pop. Steve Redhead's analysis is completed by a representative discography and bibliography.