Home  New Features Two thousand and h8
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Written by M Double U
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Wednesday, 30 July 2008 |
White straight-A grade Ben Kinsella's killing generated more moral outrage and celebrity opprobrium but no substance to the debate. Bloggers and columnists have been notably silent on the rush of stabbings and shootings that are mainly inflicting the under-20s, and mainly in London, dovetailing with the clear lack of political direction on the subject. Too scared to speak out? Too entranced by the sensationalist headlines? Or just too shocked to offer the usual lessons by rote? Perhaps the media's rack ‘em up approach - now with handy maps of all the postcode beefs - is a suitable response to a nihilistic development.
This is a development in youth relations that - as presented the media - is very difficult for the oldaz to get a handle on. The lack of noise betrays and portrays a generational gap, and a chasm of socio-cultural difference. Yes, we liked hip-hop G-talk and some played around with knives, had fights with rival schools and all the rest but there was no desire to take things to a grim conclusion - death and killing simply weren't in the worldview. But then there was no way of bigging a ‘soldier' up across the internet and the mobiles straightaway (or filming it), no ‘just-for-fun' stab your rival hames syndicated via Facemask, no way of mythologising what are essentially petty scraps between hormonal boys. What could be called turf wars if fighting for a shitty end of town you have no stake in wasn't such a pathetic proposition. Whatever, the stakes, even in pure notoriety terms among your mates, are much higher.
US rap, computer games, on-pitch football violence - activities played out in a virtual reality but ones where we happily suspend our disbelief have had an influence not necessarily in there direct wield but in their complete submersion in society. People double their age have known a time where all these elements were not a permanent part of life, the youngaz haven't, It's too easy, glib and simplistic to ‘blame' all or any of these for the problem; as always we have to look at the wider societal factors. One-parent families will also prove convenient scapegoats (and Jacqui and co now promise to invest in them) but clearly the phase we're going through is attracting a wide cross-section of youth, and they're not all going to be thug-life, no-father-figure stereotypes people would have us believe.
London it seems is like New York in the 70s or Rio forever - a metropolis that, but for the old pockets of conspicuous wealth (generated by gambling in a suit), is on the slide, where the drugs game is rife, districts feed off neglect and people look to monetise any opportunity, the disconnect with areas even a few miles away is acute and where kids cultivate a rebellion that is more than just posture, or just a pose. But much of this doesn't directly affect a 14-year-old and a lot of the incidents are not caused by little big men doing deals or running poverty-induced numbers, but people caught up in normal situations.
It's not clear how popular grime is (especially with the danceable garage
genres claiming a lot of the space), but it's clear that the music's
current realist mode isn't helping. Bloggers big it up and doubtless
there are still real quantas of innovation out there, but generally the
soundtrack is bleak, the rhythms monotonous (often devoid of funk at
all), the outlook non-escapist and the overall quality lacking (not
helped by the ‘numm seeming to stall). There was a time
when you paid your dues not by simply holding a mirror up to your
milieu, but by refracting it, bending it out of shape, taking the
experience and running. Now all we have is the glass darkly.
We come back to the media in one respect because the flux of spectacle
has an effect where a 14-year-old may not be able to tell the
difference between image and reality, between gesture and intent,
between settling a score and starting off another deadly round.
Transmit enough images of weapons, in whatever context, and in some
people's minds it's going to stick and be fetishised. Sycophantic
Saddam dramas, anyone?
As Young Dot/Dot Rotten says on his mixtape, what we now have is a "ghetto
mentality" that's going to be very hard to correct, especially from
governments - local and national - whose only connection comes from
photo opportunities and who still prefer the more hands-off approach of
esoteric regeneration projects than direct engagement. Hood rats are
now all too experienced by the time they're 16, where do they go from
there? What left to learn of the ebb and flow of life, when there is
already too much to reasonably process, and where mundane normal life
seems like an abrogation of one's inalienable duty for the buzz.
Changing your life involves changing your environment and the mental
and practical implications of that are much tougher than you might
imagine. Besides, that would only be a get-out on an individual basis,
not an overall solution to the wider problem.
Politicians clearly have no idea to deal with such a problem, other
than ratchet up stop and search (sometimes with ridiculous
consequences) and look to the optimistic long view that calling a
school an academy will raise kids out of these destructive cycle.
We have the Big Brother, free paper, T4 type of world to blame too - a
world where people seem completely obsessed by matters of surface (the
right look, the right words, the right gesture) but when problems arise
like to deal with them with deadly seriousness, deadly depth, maybe to
offset all that frippery and bullshit. The link to the cosier,
much-photographed celebreality mainstream is explicit and symbiotic.
I live in SE4, someone marked SE8/SE14 on our street some time ago.
When you have a bunch of bluds caught on a bus coming from Deptford to
Catford packing tools - just a normal bus journey, you realise that the
new spirit is pervasive. Clearly there are issues but we should not
drop our heads in the sand or, indeed, fuck off back beyond the orbital
from the pernicious influence.
Just as kids who go out with a knife will likely use it even though it
is seen as a protection, we should expect society writers with a
keyboard to type and produce thoughtful comment. We obviously expect
the news desks to be chasing this sort of story much more than they
ever did, to counterpoint overall crime going down, but that doesn't
mean we should get nothing as a counterpoint.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 July 2008 )
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