I was sucking my toes and screaming like all good babies do at the time when Robert Plant was gyrating his navel and screaming like all good rock stars do.
So I wasn’t expecting to re-live anything when Boot Led Zeppelin played in St Albans’ venue the Horn a few weeks back. Yet I did.
It was that high-pitched, emasculated SCREAM of the frustration of the totally walled-in teenager, the teen in his turn standing for the very many totally walled-in persons in a long-term capitalist decline.
Shall we say that the music of the early sixties was the celebration of the ordinary joy and pain of having a girlfriend? – that the late sixties, personified by the Rolling Stones, was the era of teenagers living vicariously through rock star royalty? – and that in the seventies teenagers fell out the other side of that, miserable, alienated from ordinary life, not getting the social life they wanted, still walled in by the nuclear family and busy roads…
And that the permissiveness of the nineties onwards, the entrance of social media, are finally empowering teenagers (and the rest of us) – not only to make mistakes but also to make lives for themselves, and even to parent each other in non nuclear ways….? That emasculated scream has lightened into tweets. Or am I wrong? Whassup?
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