Table of Contents
Praise for Jon Savage and Teenage
Savages evocative, exuberant chronicle overflows with ideas it will probably take a dozen writers a decade to work out in more rigorous books. Its safe to say that none of them are likely to be as marvelous or maddening as this one.
Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
"Savage, author of Englands Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, arguably the definitive study of 1970s youth culture, shows in this well-researched, readable new book the symbiotic relationship between mass media and youth.
Mark Coleman, Los Angeles Times
A writer on music and popular culture for British and American publications, Savage emphasizes the struggle to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence between 1875 and 1950. The ideal of youth as a separate class, with its own institutions and values, he suggests, clashed often with economic and social realities and brute political and military force. Eventually, young people got a hearing, though not wholly on their own terms.... Savage has a keen instinct for the apt anecdote and the encapsulating quotation.Glenn C. Altschuler, The Boston Globe
"Rather than either celebrating the season of youth or lambasting it as simply a conspiracy among marketers, [Savage] wants to show us both what it felt like to be a teenager and how adults strove to use those feelings for both good and ill.... This enormous, stimulating book usefully educates the reader in the endless complexities of the world we all have inherited ever since.Jesse Berrett, San Francisco Chronicle
Among his many talents as an author, Savage writes most memorably about music and pop idols. He perfectly captures the intensity of teen devotion to Rudolph Valentino, swing king Benny Goodman and crooner Frank Sinatra. His description of thousands of teens dancing in the aisles and crowding the bandstand, while the ushers frantically tried to regain control at a 1937 Goodman concert predates Beatlemania by thirty years but feels just as electric. Much of the history Savage recounts has been told before, but it takes a writer of special gifts to provide such a brilliant and entertaining synthesis of the varied parts.David Takami, The Seattle Times
Teenage bounces along with... [a] bubbling mashup of high-culture pontification and low-culture speed-freakery.... What makes Savage such a powerful writer is his refusal to dumb down.Philadelphia Weekly
Teenage is an entertaining account of youth culture from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of World War II.... Savages decision to focus on earlier decades makes an over-familiar phenomenon less familiar, and we can see its fundamental dynamics more clearly by watching them play out in other times and places. The book is jammed with fascinating details, drawn from a wide variety of sources.... Teenage recalls the thinking of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno.... It is a cultural-studies narrative that belongs to a postwar generation of thinkers who grew up listening to rock and tried to account for their own experience. Savages innovation lies in projecting this narrative of youth culture backward onto the first half of the twentieth century.Austin American-Statesman
Remarkable... [A] capacious history of youth movements.The Village Voice
Teenage is the definitive history of youth in revolt, from the gaslight age to the dawn of rock. Jon Savage captures the hell and adventure of adolescence with stunning detail and the thrilling force of the first Ramones album.David Fricke, Rolling Stone
Teenage reads as a love letter to those heady, troublesome but hopelessly seductive years when everything is on the point of becoming but has yet to make its rude and disappointing entry into life.... To those of us for whom adolescence already seems like another country, this impressive history serves as map and reminder.
Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph (London)
Jon Savage cunningly tracks the Tortured Teen from Young Werther, Dorian Gray and Peter Pan to Rupert Brooke, Dada and jitterbugs, handily proving there were many, many rebels before James Dean. He also imparts a deep sense of horror and outrage at how over a century a complacent establishment routinely sent and sends the young out to die.Mark ODonnell, Tony Award-winning author of Hairspray: The Musical
Savage writes with great lyrical exuberance and passionmuch like the youthful subjects he describes. The young lives presented in Teenage blast through reified postwar mythologies to reveal youth as an ongoing potent, volatile, dynamic social force. By shining a neon light on the secret histories of young people, Savage joins with cultural historians Natalie Davis and John Gillis, restoring the integrity and dignity of all young people, past and present.
Donna Gaines, sociologist and author of Teenage Wasteland: Suburbias Dead End Kids
This carefully researched and beautifully written book reveals that the cultural and psychological phenomenon in which adolescent rebellion helps reinvent societies predated Elvis by at least a hundred years. Synthesized over the course of numerous generations, Savages observations put into perspective todays adolescent issues and how the rest of us respond and should respond to them.
Danny Goldberg, author of How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, and former CEO, Air America Radio, Mercury Records, Warner Brother Records, and Atlantic Records
Teenage is a funny, moving and startling book. Jon Savage has an artists way with unexpected detail and chronological coincidence, and a historians sense of accident and inevitability. Jon Savage turns a story I thought I already knew into something altogether stranger and more inspiring.
Simon Frith, author of Sound Effects and Performing Rites
PENGUIN BOOKS TEENAGE
Jon Savage is a writer and broadcaster. After graduating from Cambridge, he published a fanzine called Londons Outrage and worked for Sounds, Melody Maker, and The Face. His book Englands Dreaming, a history of the Sex Pistols and Britain in the late seventies, won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award presented by Rolling Stone. He has also published a collection of journalism, Time Travel, and The Faber Book of Pop, coedited with Hanif Kureishi. He regularly writes for The Observer and Mojo, and his television credits include the BAFTA-winning documentary The Brian Epstein Story. He lives in North Wales.
TO JOSEPH LESLIE SAGE MC
AND
MARGARET DOROTHY SAGE
COMMERCIAL POSTCARD, EARLY 1900S
INTRODUCTION
America used to be the big youth place in everybodys imagination. America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.
John Lennon, born 1940, interviewed 1966
THIS BOOK ENDS
