Riots at Newport Jazz Festival, caused by..."Gidget," "A Summer Place," and "Jazz on a Summer's Day"

These would appear to be the most anodyne of pop culture artifacts, the antithesis of what would cause a riot. I mean, Gidget?

A Summer Place?

Jazz on a Summer's Day? (A documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.)

An article in the Wall Street Journal called "Riot in Newport" (July 1, 2010), explains.

As for Jazz on a Summer's Day: 'Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, "Jazz on a Summer's Day" was released in late March 1960. The color documentary glamorized jazz and its hip audience, inadvertently creating the impression that seating was limitless and free.' It does look terminally cool, especially the footage of Anita O'Day (above). To me, that's the most memorable segment of the film.

As for the other two films: 'Also at movie houses that spring was "A Summer Place," starring Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee as teenage lovers rebelling against hypocritical parents. Percy Faith's yearning instrumental, "Theme From a Summer Place," was No. 1 on Billboard's pop-singles chart for a staggering nine weeks.

And then there was "Gidget." Released a year earlier, the film starred Sandra Dee and was the first in a series of popular teens-know-best beach films. While the Beach Boys' first hit song was still nearly two years off, "Gidget" instantly established the beach as a teenage proving ground.'

Moral panic, Japan: 'Teenage Wasteland' from LIFE magazine, 1964

Amazing set of photos shot by LIFE photographer Michael Rougier in 1964, to accompany an article by Robert Morse on Japanese youth in revolt. In the notes he sent along to accompany Rougier's film, Morse wrote:

A large segment of Japanese young people are, deep down, desperately unhappy and lost. And they talk freely about their frustrations. Many have lost respect for their elders, always a keystone of Japanese life, and in some cases denounce the older people for “for having gotten us into a senseless war.”

The article from Time-Life (no date, but contemporary) on this piece, includes the following observation:

this “lost generation” was not even remotely monolithic. While they might, to varying degrees, have shared a genuinely nihilistic outlook toward their own and their country’s future, the runaways, rock and roll fanatics (the “monkey-dance, Beatles set,” Morse calls them), pill-poppers, “motorcycle kids” — all of these groups, along with innumerable other subsets of Japan’s youth-driven subculture, attest to the breadth and depth of teen disaffection found, virtually anywhere one looked, in 1964 Tokyo.

Michael Rougier—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images 

 Caption reads: A fan (right) and a "Tokyo Beatle," 1964

Dick Clark and the integration of 'American Bandstand'

"Most of the obituaries of Clark, who took over Bandstand in 1956, have noted that the show used rock and roll to break down racial barriers, mostly because that is the story Clark told. But that is where his legacy gets complicated. While the nationally televised dance program hosted a number of prominent black performers, the show regularly blocked black teenagers from its studio audience until it moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964. The image of teenagers that American Bandstand popularized bore little resemblance to the racial diversity of American teens."

Matthew F. Delmont, writing in the Washington Post, April 22, 2012. Read the rest of the article here.

"Viewers would have had little idea that African Americans made up nearly 30 percent of Philadelphia's population in this era or that black teens developed many of the dances that American Bandstand popularized nationally."

Cracking Teenagers' Online Codes

Essential reading on teens and social media, all about the work of Danah Boyd. From today's (Jan. 22) New York Times.

Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added.

"What are kids supposed to do when they can't shop?"

"The Role of Youth" -- short video by Jon Savage and Matt Wolf, from the New York Times, Dec. 6, 2011. They trace the history of the emergence of the teenager, and the recent involvement of young people in the Occupy movements, the riots in the UK, the Arab Spring. "These movements share a common goal: to re-imagine the future." Read their brief description here.

Colin MacInnes

Fascinating account of the life of Colin MacInnes, author of Abolute Beginners, from Ed Vulliamy.

"Colin MacInnes was the first writer to pinpoint the birth of the 'teenager' and multicultural London. His books were alive with the city's subcultures. But, half a century later, as Absolute Beginners hits the stage, was his fascination with Notting Hill's emerging black culture radical, or something more disturbing? Ed Vulliamy, who grew up on those very streets, explores the iconclastic author's legacy."

"MacInnes was the decadent chronicler of 1950s Notting Hill, a restless, volatile neighbourhood which was home to one of the UK's biggest West Indian immigrant communities, and the scene of notorious race riots in August 1958. Openly gay when homosexuality was still an illegal taboo, MacInnes revelled in what he saw as the impoverished area's exuberant exoticism. Absolute Beginners was the first novel to capture the city's emerging youth culture, its lustful, teenage adventure dovetailing into MacInnes's sexualised idolisation of black life in Notting Hill and climaxing with the riots that seared the neighbourhood. Nowadays known to many only by way of Julien Temple's almost universally derided film of 1986, Absolute Beginners and MacInnes's preceding book City of Spades, achieved cult status after their publication, and were the first to chronicle, for a white audience at least, the culture of the new immigrants to London."

"Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture," by Jon Savage

Reviewed by Camille Paglia (ugh!) in the New York Times.

Bobby-soxers, the female swing fans with their sporty outfits and dance-ready saddle shoes, screamed en masse for Frank Sinatra and laid the groundwork for gyrating rock ’n’ roll fandom. Swing helped end segregation: not only were swing crowds racially mixed, but large jazz orchestras “integrated a decade before sport or military organizations.”

Savage heralds the arrival, in 1944, of Seventeen, a fashion and pop magazine targeted to high school girls, as a landmark crystalization of teenage identity. Now “teenagers were neither adolescents nor juvenile delinquents,” who had been a social worry for decades. American consumerism, whose expansion Savage disapprovingly follows, had found its perfect partner in the protected, self-absorbed middle-class teenager.

Savage abruptly ends his book in the mid-1940s, alas, with no overview of the teenage fantasia to come...