Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture

The topics included in this collection of essays springing from a Princeton University conference range from black nationalism in the hip-hop community to the disco scene's vision of gay identity to hard-core rock and its evolving relationship to feminism. Among the many perceptive arguments advanced is Sarah Thornton's contention that youth subcultures enjoy negative media attention and provoke public ``moral panic'' as a marketing strategy. In assessing the role of culture in catalyzing social change, most of these writers see styles and rituals as means by which economically and socially marginalized youths claim public territory for themselves. Some suggest that the revolutionary rock of the '60s was more fantasy than reality; Robert Christgau notes the political ambivalence behind anthems such as the Beatles' ``Revolution'' and Buffalo Springfield's ``For What It's Worth.'' With its inclusion of club priestess Lady Kier Kirby's incantatory appreciation of the disc jockey, and co-editor Tricia Rose's probing interviews with vogue artist Willi Ninja and rap music industry executive Carmen Ashhurst-Watson, Microphone Fiends extends its appeal well beyond the academic. Moreover, the scholarly contributors, ``some of them stretching into middle age'' (as Andrew Ross notes in his introduction), strike a welcome balance between self-aware and self-conscious pronouncements on the next generation. (June)