Boy Racers - Nietzsche's Restless Children - By Andrew Wallace

If the generation gap is a permanent ingrained feature of human relationships as suggested by ancient apocryphal quotes, the idea of youth cultures does indeed suggest something stridently modern, manufactured and set apart from previous history. Sociologists have delineated the rise of distinctive and often challenging youth cultures over the course of the 20th century, particularly during the affluence of the post war boom. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972)1 being the seminal work demonstrating how media outlets typically framed understandings of high visibility skirmishes and public disorder. Tabloid reportage was critical in providing the terms of reference and conceptual baggage in which readers would come to understand the travails of the respective groupings of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’. However the sociologists who provided the seminal criminological theory on the back of 1960s radicalism and counter culture often betrayed a rather quirky and romantic attachment to the idea of miscreant youth as a pedigree of non-conformist banditry, pregnant with possibilities for anti-capitalist challenges to the Establishment. Today’s 21st century Boy Racers have been apprehended by analysists deploying much of Cohen’s work and the engagement with labelling theory and symbolic interactionism, a nuanced and dynamic appraisal of the different social actors and the contested meanings at the heart of ongoing struggles. Although there is a long lineage of car culture from America (hot rodding and drag racing), the conspicuous boy racer phenomena we are accustomed to today seems to have surfaced in the 1990s with the new permissive capitalism of easy credit, financial deregulation and the great turbo charged car economy. Campbell’s2 work on social unrest at the time of the 1991 riots remains prescient also for the riots of 2011 and to the malaise of today. With sleek high performance vehicles available on lease to those of moderate income the environment was conducive to the carnivalesque of performative exhibitionism. The confluence of new technologies such as the camcorder, the potency and repurposing of the car and the lure and accessibility of large urban spaces and an audience receptive to the spectacle were all well-established ingredients back then. The transgressive inclinations of the ‘tarmac cowboys’, drawn to the urban retail parks like moths to a flame, speaks to the voracious appetite for adrenal stimulation. The lure of wild abandon and Dionysian frenzy has typically been ceded to psychologists and been difficult to understand within the limited horizons of traditionalist criminology. This deficit has now been challenged by the pioneering ideas of Edgework3 whereby criminal acts are conceptualised anew as sensation seeking activity on the edge or periphery of acceptable behaviours. The high octane activities are engaged precisely because of the existential thrills provided against the mundane, stultifying and banal confinements of the regular habitat. Since the post-modern society is constantly in flux and negotiating its fragile domestic settlement, the rules of living are daily contested and feeding into the sense of sociological anomie and general urban malaise. Whereas traditional bourgeois capitalism had aligned itself within a conservative moral universe, the new right individualism of the 1970s onwards introduced a radical antinomy into the mix. Thatcherism’s Calvinist restraints were soon consigned to the margins as the more uncompromising buccaneers of the unfettered free market came to the fore. Deferred gratification gave way to the orgy of instant gratification courtesy of deregulated credit and wild financialisation. The new capitalism increasingly vanquished cultural conservativism in favour of an open celebration of the permissive, even seeking to appropriate much of the bohemian and counter-cultural ‘hippy’ ethos of ‘do your own thing’. Social attitudes to sexuality had been liberalised, homosexuality decriminalised, censorship of arts and cinema relaxed and non-marital relationships and children born out of wedlock now no longer subject to moral sanction. It seems there is ample evidence that commercialism and market forces will inevitably find an outlet for the decadent and even subversive in the absence of restraint. Markets cater to our needs and cravings so long as the material basis for their realisation exists. If there are moral prescriptions that trump the economics, then canny market forces prove more than capable in providing the necessary furtive adjustments. Niche markets establish themselves alongside the mainstream. If there are serious fortunes to be made by catering for an increasingly unconservative appetite for mayhem and debauchery, then capitalism naturally pushes at an open door (or Overton Window4) with regards to what is morally and culturally permissible. If the bad boy antics of a few anti-heroes had been tacitly indulged in 1960s television and cinema, then the next few decades would push the envelope ever further from the chaste guidelines of the Hays Code.5 If the staple Hollywood action film had celebrated masculinity and high octane car chases for many years, then this had evolved apace to celebrate criminality and gangsters for gaming platforms. Carmaggedon and Grand Theft Auto remain controversial because of their open celebration of violence and cruelty whilst the Fast and the Furious film franchise have exulted in the world of boy racers and illegal street racing. And if capitalism is doing its best to shuffle off the inconvenient ballast of social conservativism, the Conservative Party’s relationship to one of their traditionally favourite planks of law and order has been chafing away of late, given the extensive cuts to police numbers.6 Hence the increasing conspicuous presence of antisocial driving and occasional conveys of Mad Max style off road vehicles taking to our main roads in a narcissistic exhibition of dangerous pyrotechnics. Indeed I defy anyone in the vicinity to take an hour’s walk across the inner township wards of Rochdale or an equivalent town and not experience for themselves various spectacles of antisocial driving or other troublesome manifestations of what we might quaintly term urban malaise. 7,8,9,10 If Rochdale is a template for such dysfunctionality it is not an exceptional one. Indeed on a recent holiday that took us as far as Southampton and Jersey I was witness to the same kinds of antisocial crudities that blight us back here. Perhaps Rochdale and other Northern towns have the dubious distinction of being in the vanguard of this post-industrial malaise, since they were amongst the first regions of the country to feel the impact of Thatcherite deindustrialisation and then a horrific descent of a segment of its populace into maladaptive substance abuse. The malaise has now spread much further afield as former affluent regions of the country have grimly discovered. Indeed the problems of Nietzsche’s restless children decked out in their transgressive apparel is something of an international quandary, with Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and North America highlighting the same maladies. 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_devil 2 Beatrix Campbell – Goliath – Britain’s Dangerous Places (1993) 3 https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/edgework-taking-risks-for-the-fun-of-it/ 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#:~:text=The%20Overton%20window%20is%20the,as%20the%20window%20of%20discourse. 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code 6 https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/shock-figures-reveal-23500-police-staff-cut-under-tories 7 http://rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/8828/police-target-boy-racers 8 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1189167/Judge-blasts-hopelessly-inadequate-sentence-Fast-And-The-Furious-boy-racers-left-woman-brain-damaged.html 9 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3101081/Pictured-Driver-18-boasting-hits-142mph-night-killed-innocent-motorist-drove-high-powered-Audi-red-light.html 10 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/06/boy-racers-blamed-as-manchester-road-deaths-rise-during-lockdown