YOUTHS!

You know how sometimes you take pleasure in bad television? Well I took pleasure in this very good, very dense, very long and academic paper. Rebecca Raby's A Tangle of Discourses was definitely an interesting scholarly article, and the research method used was pretty interesting to say the least. 

This week, I'm going to do the ~hyper link~ post, and it could also be an extended comment since Mary touched up on it in her blog post, but I think hyper linking works because it's awesome. 

In any case, when I was in high school, I was kind of a wallflower. And it was an awful time, etc etc etc. Until I found some people who ~~~got me~~~. That's about the time I started listening to darker stuff, in terms of music. And thus I discovered My Chemical Romance (lol i started listening to them because I really liked this girl who LOVED them and it was all very comical). In 2007, the band released a song titled "Teenagers" (as mentioned by Mary in her blog): 

Y'all, you cannot imagine how empowered this song made me feel. I was like, alright, I can deal with this -- this song explains my life, people should be scared of me because I'm a teenager (even though I was super "harmless", whatever that means) and I will tear stuff up! 

And now, having read Raby's article, this songs speaks to so many of the things that she brought up in her writings. Now that I've seen the video after not having watched it for years, I feel almost like this is a commentary on the teenagers are viewed. But to those teens who do watch it, it's not clear. Lord knows that it wasn't clear to me when I first watched it. To tie it in with some of the discourses that Raby wrote about, I'd like to start with the At Risk discourse. One of the things that Raby focuses on with this discourse is the idea of teens being at risk of being the things that people warn them about. In a way, this song kind of alludes to that in the following lyrics: 

They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

I feel like this sets up this idea that teenagers should be feared because you just never know what's going on through that head of theirs. This song sets up a picture in my head about an old man standing in his porch with a shotgun, telling the kids to get off the lawn. 

Another discourse that I noticed, but it wasn't in the video as much as the people watching was teenagers as a social problem. The constant regulations placed on teenagers, and the many stereotypes attached to them forces teens to separate from each other. That's when """cliques""" are formed in high school, and it's all downhill from there. The following screencapture was from the video I previously linked: 

I think that's all I have to say on this right now. It was a really big paper and I feel like if I keep going I'll just end up writing a post that's five thousand words. 

SIDENOTE: there's this strange trend going on in television right now that kind of addresses this song and the stereotypes attached to teenagers (those in The Storm discourse).... and not in a positive way. In the television show New Girl on FOX, Schmidt's car's tires get stolen, and the car placed on blocks. And his reaction? "Youths!"

Similarly, 30 Rock on NBC did the same thing, only it was done previous to this episode airing. I couldn't find the video where Liz (the main character) says it, but here's a gif. To set it up, Liz is walking down the streets of New York when she sees a group of teens walking on the other side of the street. She sees them, exclaims "Oh god, youths" and runs the other way. 

Discussions for class:

I know she touched on it at some point in the article, but if you exclude race (and maybe social class too), I don't think you would yield the same results? Like I said, she touched on it before, but from the beginning, there was a part of me that discredited some of the data because of this (or these) two exclusions. But what do I know, I'm just a student~