Taking Sides in Music

[jmrunning3]

I just read this article in the UK's Telegraph. Can anyone in the UK indicate whether this article is accurate insofar as music being a problem in this fashion?

 

We have gang issues at our schools here also, but I've never heard of musical tastes being singled out. The way kids are allowed to treat each other is disturbing and sickening these days. I don't remember things being anywhere near as bad as they seem to be today in our the schools.

[The Bear Jew]

When I was about 15 I was into wearing combat boots and studded wristbands... I was listening to a whole mess of stuff, including The Clash, The Sugar Hill Gang, The Sex Pistols, Devo and Minor Threat...

 

I definitely remember being chased by kids who decided I was a Nazi because of my boots.... so they threw rocks at me.

 

Kids can be pretty messed up.

[fingertalkin]

Thats nuts man. I fear for my girls. I don't want to hinder them, but I sure as hell don't want them getting attacked because of music. From talking to my niece, things haven't changed that much from when I went. She goes to the same schools that I did. As will my kids.

 

Do they allow basses in the pen? Thats what will happen to me if somebody ever messes with them like that.

[Brocko777]

It's pathetic how children act. My 20th year HS reunion is this year and I told the commitee people just that. "why would I want to go back and see people that I didn't like then....now?" No bad feelings or remorse, I just really would have nothing to say to them. I keep in touch with the people that I care about and that works out pretty good.

And I thought digging Duran Duran in HS was bad.

No kid should have to deal with crap like that.

Like Frank Zappa said.

 

Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder. (and getting stabbed in the eye)

-- Frank Zappa

[josh a]

I would say that's an extreme version of how bad it can get, it depends where you live.

Eg. if there are lots of townies, then you'd get singled out, and vice versa.

People usually get along, more or less.

[jeremy c]

Kids seem to band together in groups and can be quite cruel.

 

When I was in high school it was greasers vs. preppies.

 

Than it was hippies vs. straights.

 

And in most school it's jocks and cheerleaders against everyone else.

 

And after Columbine, goths get blamed for everything, although it was probably the constant harassment that one kid got from the jocks that led him to flip out.

 

When my son was in high school, there seemed to be little groups of kids scattered all over the schoolyard....and no one ever seemed to cross from group to another.

 

And of course around here, all gang colors and indentifying symbols have been banned in an effort to protect kids from getting killed.

 

Lord of the Flies.

A Clockwork Orange.

A Message To You Rudy

etc.

 

The arts saw this all coming many, many years ago. And of course we have gangsta rap nowadays which glorifies violence. Why is anyone surprised?

[RHINO_ROB]

The highschool I went to was "integrated". They would bus kids from all over town. In the end they had 6-10 different street gangs plus the jocks, the rednecks, the geeks(they actually banded together for protection), the stoners, the preppies, etc...

If you were not with someone you were a really big target.

 

We had a giant fight my senior year between a street gang and the stoners. It was some scary times. I had almost gotten jumped because I looked like a stoner. They were actually going into classes and jumping kids while they were in class.

 

There was several dozen arrests and numerous weapons and a few firearms seized when the cops finally gained control.

[Whacked]

That is just sooooo wrong on so many levels.

A friends 16yr old son was attacked in a similar fashion last year. He was attacked because he had long hair, came from a fairly well-to-do family, and is one hellova bassist. He was also jumped right in front of his house by a wannabe carrying a gun. Thankfully he wasnt shot.

And this did not happen in a city, were talking a small foothill town

[punkndisorderly]

In middle school (went to a rough one with all army brats) it was the rockers vs the soulers. Wasn't so bad when I was there but a couple of years before me they had MP's on the roof with walkie talkes because of several huge brawls.

 

In high school, I was a punker. The blacks decided they didn't like us. I never quite figured out why, I guess because we were a small enough group that we could be picked on easily. We got literally chased off campus 5 or 6 times while being pelted with rocks. A buddy got her skull cracked with a brick and had to spend a few days in the hospital.

 

In college, we had some (7 or 8) gangstas show up at a show at the local armory. I got surrounded by them in the parking lot and got pummelled in the face for a bit. After taking a bunch of hits to the face without going down (I was pretty drunk) I backed up, said "man you guys are A**holes and walked off. They didn't mess with me anymore. : )

 

I almost got jumped in a subway parking lot by some rednecks becausee 5 years before I went to a different high school.

 

In short, there's a lot of really stupid and/or crazy people out there and they all start out as really supid and/or crazy kids.

[jmrunning3]

Your stories are really scary. I graduated from a HS with a senior class of just over 500, so it was a really large school. I know there were problems, but I just don't remember it being that bad. Maybe I've blocked it out or was just lucky enough to never experience it myself. I moved in all the social circles (from stoners-to-jocks) so maybe I just had enough friends throughout to not have to suffer that.

 

I've always believed myself to be an open- and liberal-minded individual so I've never been able to understand the mentality required to isolate and attack someone for something as insignificant as clothing, music, color, or...the list goes on and on. How does one focus so much intense hate on something so insignificant?

 

I'm glad you all survived your tormentors and I'd bet you're all better people because of it.

[soretro80s]

Im sure its a lot worse now a days. Its always been bad. especially the school i went to..bunch of rich kids. huge school there were like 4 thousand plus kids in my high school..Honestly. i had more problems in middle school and elementry school. school is tough..its something we all go through. I think its mostly to do with poor parenting.

[punkndisorderly]

In HS there were 4 basic groups: Punkers/Skaters, Rednecks/Preppies (in Alabama they were the same thing), the Blacks/Rappers, and the nerds (drama, band, etc). I graduated in 91 so it's been 15 years, but I'll bet it's the same groups still (maybe with different names).

 

Looking back, it was all really stupid. It's bad enough to lable someone else, what's worse is people resort to labeling themselves.

[Mr. Knowitall]

In my high school, no one really cares about musical tastes, as far as gangs are concerned. I've heard of goth kids being beaten up for just being goth, but I've never heard of anyone being shunned because they like a certain kind of music. My school has the usual gangs:the Mexicans, a small gang of black kids, the geeks, and the stoners. But, unless you're in a "gang" (which there aren't really that many of at my school, which is pretty cool considering attendance will be about 2600 students this year), you won't be singled out. There are several bands at my school who play different kinds of music, but everyone gets along. Maybe I'm just lucky?

[King Kamehameha]

Woah, I'm freaked out now.

[Whacked]

My cliche' HS groups was the jocks/preppies, rednecks and smoker/stoners/hippies. Fortunatly I had friends in all the groups. I mostly hung out with the smokers/druggies 'cause, unfortunatly, I was one.

Ahh the controversy, a smoker/stoner/jazz band bassist/Dungeons & Dragons playing geek hanging with a cheerleader rofl!

my graduating class was 85 students.

Thats the same HS where my friends kid had all the trouble, and the grad class was just under 200.

[The Bear Jew]

My closest friend is a lot younger than I am... she graduated from HS in 2000.

 

She's a black woman, and she went to a school that was approximately 98% populated with black students.

 

She likes to listen to industrial music/metal/hardcore/rock and had about seven or eight friends who had similar tastes in music. She and her friends tended to wear mostly black clothes and dye their hair various colors.

 

Believe me when I tell you that she caught a lot of crap from the rest of her schoolmates--including all-out brawls and death threats.

 

The funny thing is, she had her head on straight even back then... when the hardcore thug types would break her stones about looking different, she'd say, "Yeah, well, let's see how this all pans out in a few years, ok? Betcha you'll be the one sweeping the floor of my office after I leave for the day."

[davebrownbass]

Seems like this topic was what "Quadrophenia" was all about.

[jcadmus]

My high school was pretty small and we didn't have enough kids for all the cliques.

 

So we had to double up -- like, you had to be a stoner, and a jock, and a mathlete.

 

It could get pretty confusing -- one time I was supposed to beat myself up behind the cafeteria after gym class.

 

[Phil W]

The story is only a more extreme version of common teenage 'tribal' conflicts in the UK. It started in the 1950s (or earlier?) with the Mods against Rockers fights at the seafronts. With youth culture so subdidvided into micro-genres right now, it must get pretty complicated. We have, or used to, musch less of the normal US MS/HS categories over here, things don't really operate the same partly as our 'Secondary' schooling runs from 11-16ish.

[picker]

Teenage kids have always been like red ants who find a black ant in their anthill when someone different from them has the misfortune to cross their path. They are almost always clicquey, cruel, and usually about 10 seconds from handing out grief, ranging from taunts and insults all the way up to physical injury, especially when they are in their little group of cronies. They can be, and often are, vicious.

Anyone who says different was either a cheerleader or on the football team.

[Nicklab]

Can't say that I'm surprised by this at all. I'm sure we've all seen the film about the social experiment that was conducted in an elementary school in the 50's or the 60's about discrimination. The teacher wanted to give the students some idea of what discrimination felt like, so she told them that brown eyed children were better than blue eyed children. The kids wound up getting very upset with each other and polarized against one another based on that criteria.

 

I think this particular instance just goes further to prove that kids can be just as rotten and awful as adults. Probably since they're much more susceptible to succumb to a group psychology state. I don't think the criteria that divides them is all that important, rather it's probably easier for kids to agree to discriminate somehow because of something that an individual adult would find completely ludicrous.

[davio]

Originally posted by jeremy c:

And of course we have gangsta rap nowadays which glorifies violence. Why is anyone surprised?

While I can't really defend rap because this is definitely true...this comment can't be limited to strictly to rap. Listen to the popular rock and pop stations: drugs, violence and promescuity.

 

Maybe I was lucky. Maybe I just live in a pretty good town (never thought I'd say that). I never had these problems in highschool. I went to a magnet school for the arts but half of it was a regular school for the neighborhood kids in the middle of the projects so you'd expect it to have more problems. We had a suprisingly low number of fights, virtually no gang-related problems and minimal issues with persecution. I was one of many people that commonly hung out with those that would normally be classified as nerds, jocks, goths, neo-hippies, white trash, black trash, hispanic trash, 'other' trash, artists, musicians, actors, hair stylists, homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, thugs, preps and even near-militant religious groups. There were hardly ever problems as the lines between these groups were so blurred that segregation was nearly impossible. This isn't saying that it was a utopian school -- far from it -- or even that there were no problems with drugs and violence but it seemed to be much better than what all of you have been describing.

[TimR]

I think Picker has it right. This wasn't one group against another it was a gang of bullies picking on one girl. There could have been a hundred reasons. The music line is just a side issue. The newspapers (even the broadsheets like The Telegraph) like to try to get an angle on everything.

[Phil W]

Wise words Tim

[Afro_Man]

Exactly what i was thinking Tim, Newspapers want interesting stories and they are renowned for causing moral panics, i'd say take it with a pinch of salt and remember its almost always going to be a minority of people that do this sort of thing.

N x

[jmrunning3]

Tim makes a very good point. The media are masters at causing a panic and making a single incident into a world-crisis. While what happened is totally deplorable, we'll never really know what precipitated it, nor will we learn of the consequences or outcome. I've looked around the web some since I posted this originally and I certainly can't say it's an epidemic.

 

There was a TV show I saw years ago called "Are We Scaring Ourselves To Death?". Surprisingly, it was a US major-network-produced show. That show skewered several things the media frequently touts as epidemic or world-wide.

[Big Red 67]

Reminds me of "SLC Punk". It is scary when the weapons come out.

[cblinkdude182]

Hi,I am currently in high school and i just want to say that this case (although i could be wrong), sounds like the girls that attacked her had other motives. I dont think that a difference in musical is enough to anger someone in to attacking you. There are people in my school, the "goths"(who are pretty much posers) who wear black and listen to heavy metal and are always trying to be funny, personally i dont like them , but i am not going to stab one of them. But if one of them pushed me in the hallway and another did something else, i might have a motive to hate, but (at least not in my school of 3000) there has never been any serious fights over muscial taste.

 

P.S. What that girl did was messed up, I am proud to be an American.

[Eric VB]

Originally posted by Brocko777:

My 20th year HS reunion is this year and I told the commitee people just that. "why would I want to go back and see people that I didn't like then....now?" No bad feelings or remorse, I just really would have nothing to say to them. I keep in touch with the people that I care about and that works out pretty good.

I went to my 20th after forgoing previous reunions, partly for the reasons you give and partly for the 700+ miles to go back. However, after being dragged to my wife's 5th, 10th and 20th reunions, I felt turnabout was fair play.

 

The neat thing about the 20th is that pretty much everyone has grown up and gotten over all the crap that made high school such a nightmare. People change (especially after having kids).

 

For my wife's 20th, her strategy was to go with her friends that she kept in touch with and treat it as a party for them. Of course she ended up talking with a bunch of other former classmates and ended up having a great time.

 

For mine, I got to see a bunch of people (that I liked in HS) that I hadn't seen in forever (700+ miles tends to do that). I didn't go out of my way to talk to the jerks, but they really weren't jerks anymore anyway. In fact, one guy was extremely embarrassed when he was brought up to receive the class clown award and asked to say something funny like he used to; he's a dentist or something now and he left his former self behind.

 

I used to jam with one former classmate and lost touch. Found out later he moved to Nashville and has been touring with a bunch of big acts, running sound.

 

Anyway, unless you were tick away from "going Columbine" at your HS, the 20th really isn't all that bad. In fact it's kind of nice to reconnect and network with people that (in many cases) suffered through the same crap you did in high school. (My wife was on her committee and was shocked to hear that one of the popular kids didn't want to come back because even she didn't feel like she fit in back then!)

 

Of course, YMMV, as we both had class sizes around 500. I imagine things could be different for small classes/towns.

 

Back to subject ...

 

Kids are mean because they can be. We segregate them away from society at large to protect and nurture them, but in doing so create a subculture where they can be cruel to each other. The only parallel I've heard about in the "adult" world is a friend (female) who worked at an all-male company and was routinely sexually harassed. It wasn't physical but they really messed with her head.

 

The schools pretty much phased out corporal punishment (along with the pledge) when I was going through them. It's kind of like taking weapons away from the jailors; there's nothing left to deter the inmates. Still, even with it most incidents went unreported because the only thing worse than being a victim was being a tattle-tale.

 

[i realize that the schools I went to were always pretty safe in general and didn't have metal detectors or gangs or rumbles or turf wars.]

 

I don't have an answer. I thought the programs some schools started with kids providing their own (adult-advised) justice systems, complete with court proceedings, had some merit. Don't know if they ever worked or not.

 

It seems girls are cliquier than guys in school. At least that's what I've been lead to believe.

 

Lastly, I'll just point to the teenage brain. There's a reason car insurance is higher for teens; it's been shown that they aren't always capable of making sound decisions, even when they know better. (Ask any parent of a teenager for comfirmation. ) Kids in general aren't aware of consequences to their actions. (I'm reminded of the movie "The Butterfly Effect", where the lead character keeps going back in time to try to fix the future but ends up screwing things up more and more instead.) Even a simple impulse prank like putting a thumb tack on a chair can change the lives of both the prankster and victim. (Use your imagination: dirty tack leads to fatal infection, etc.)

 

So, in the end, even drilling into kids' heads that attacking someone with scissors is wrong would not prevent an episode like the one linked to above, IMO.