Culture of Violence
The gangster or thug culture is becoming the norm for the mass of young British men. Greg Williams finds its roots in films, gangster rap, hip-hop and a colossal failure of educational system
- By Greg Williams - The Guardian - Saturday November 11, 2000
If one is to believe gloomy news reports regarding exam results, literacy, absentee teenage fathers and (most of all) casual violence then there exists a generation of young men who wilfully fail every educational and behavioural standard set for them.
Whether you believe that schools are failing our boys or that our boys are failing the schools, one thing is as clear as the serial Fs on their report cards: boys are becoming increasingly marginalised from the education system. Denied or rejecting traditional roles of parenthood or breadwinning, young men are increasingly looking to the street and to what can only be described as "attitude" to define themselves.
The influences that wash over them are many and varied - ranging from acquisitive trainer culture and combative video games, to the corporate sponsored financial free-for-all that masquerades as the Premiership. But one thing is increasingly clear, these days, being perceived as a geezer, or its more alarming cousin, a thug, is a more commonly travelled avenue for young white working-class men in search of identity and purpose than we would like to think.
Even the posh boys, the providers of culture, want a slice of the action. The movies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch - the makers of which were, unsurprisingly, not educated at the state's expense - have had huge success amongst the key cinema-going demographic of young men in their late teens and early 20s.
Lock, Stock … and Snatch, of course, offer no real insight into thug culture, preferring to reference superior American movies, dress them up in Arfur Daley's camel Crombie and package them in skilfully edited chunks accompanied by an MTV-friendly sound track. What they do well is to trade on the stereotypical bish, bash, bosh culture of wideboys and the various hilarious racial archetypes that they encounter on their crazy adventures in the land of mockney. So acute was the nerve that the Lock, Stock … movie tapped into, that the Channel Four TV series was rewarded with a marketing tie-in to its very antithesis, The Sun.
These movies are the Robbie Williams of film-making: cheeky, ironic, knowing, crass and central to a culture that the writers Steven Daly and Mark Jordan have dubbed Thick Plus. "Thick Plus is the sum of the moronically ironic, the cluelessly camp, the oafishly sexy, the methodically soulful and the gamely ersatz," they wrote recently. Thick Plus consciously pilfers black and gay culture and reappropriates it within the mainstream. It is possible that white youth, robbed of meaningful ways of representation, is finding itself further marginalised by the upper-middle-class programme makers/editors/film-makers who co opt the lives of traditional outsiders for mass consumption.
The brutish and reductive nature of cultural totems such as Lock, Stock … and Robbie Williams goes some way to explaining why there is a "crisis" of sorts amongst young British men. It wasn't always so. Young men, from teds to punks to skinheads have always rebelled, and always actively and wilfully used clothes, music and attitude to distance themselves from the mainstream, to declare themselves outsiders. And in Britain, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, reacting against the mainstream can take the form of dressing smartly and conservatively - from the mod to casual to today's Polo geezer - in order to prove that you are worthy, that you've arrived.
The semiotics of apparel are such that dressing up has also been the mode of choice for gangsters from Capone onwards. One of the most memorable images of recent times was that of the young white men accused of murdering black teenager Stephen Lawrence leaving a public inquiry into police handling of the case. Dressed in natty suits and shirts, eyes masked by sunglasses, they behaved with a brazenly studied bullishness that marked them out as more like a football firm than witnesses summoned by the official fiat.
The look was derivative, culled from one of the opening sequences of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, which itself came from classic iconography of that most masculine and exclusive of male clubs, the Rat Pack.
The attitude, of course, was calculatedly disrespectful. They also wanted to demonstrate something else: they wanted to show us that they were game, that they could look after themselves. In contemporary Britain it seems that the culture amongst many young men is exactly that - they're a bit tasty, can take care of themselves when it comes to the pavement. Sadly, few would wish to doubt them. • Greg Williams is the author of the novel Diamond Geezer, and a former editor of Arena magazine
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4087521-106548,00.html
