koganbot | Rules Of The Game #12: Jocks And Burnouts

I find it difficult to recognise the map from school or university (but then I went to a fee-paying private school) - I recognise it more from ILX I guess!

How did the freaks alter the participates-in-school activities / doesnt-participate-in-school-activities schema? By providing alternative school activities or seeing to bring the outside activities into the school?

seeing = seeming, I think.

Also, how if at all was the jock/burnout map modified by any kind of age based hierarchy? If you were a jock, could you hang out in school with people a year or two above you? Did things change if you were a burnout - did their lack of interest in school activities extend to school hierarchies?

Well, in my school the jock-burnout map didn't hold as much, since the freaks were so strong, but one thing I noticed, and a few studies I've read say that this holds in general, is that the categories get less strong* - play less of a role in whom you choose as friends - in the later years of high school (which'd be around ages 16 to 18 in the U.S.). But interestingly, in my school right away the freaks broke the age boundary. Freaks were hanging around with other freaks no matter what the age group, whereas my impression was that among the others, the friendships tended to be with people in your own grade; though school activities would be one way that people in different grades mixed. But as for the burnouts - called "greasers" in my day - I don't know.

Also, for what it's worth, I was pretty much too intimidated by the freaks my own age to be friends with them, but I was friends with some of the younger freaks, whom I found less threatening. But the freaks I was friends with were in something of a different group from the freaks I was intimidated by (my friend Tina, who identified with the latter, and obviously is an exception to my generalization, disparagingly called my freak friends "teenyboppers," in comparison to her freak friends - even though she was younger than 'most any of the people she was talking about), and in fact a couple of them were my age.

*From what I've read - not a lot, and I haven't done much reading on this subject recently - is that kids from about age 12 on gradually expand away from only being friends with people in their specific clique of friends, but paradoxically their awareness of the broader social groups and tendency to follow those patterns will also increase up through about age 16. So I had more and more varied friends as the years went on but actually drifted away from friendships with people who were too far into the freaks or too straight arrow.

I'd say they were like the burnouts in tending to shun school activities, but they might show up in the drama club (less likely after 1970 because a change in who was advising the drama club made it more mainstream) and they'd show up in political activities somewhat - not student council, but antiwar and other forms of activism. I think more to the point is that to some extent they didn't avoid classroom participation as much (some would discuss/argue with the teacher rather than simply cut class or stay silent or be disruptive) and that they were likely to take a certain amount of intellectualism and artsy-fartsiness into their off-campus lives.

What was your school social map like (Sinker actually wrote up his for Why Music Sucks)? And were there refusal groups; that is, not just people who tended to shy away from school activities - misfits and loners and grinds will do that - but who had active social lives with each other but took those activities either off campus or at least underground, away from adult eyes. Sort of an anti-school-spirit contingent. (Malcolm McClaren and his gang in if.... might be an example; also Stalky and Co. in Kipling's Stalky and Co., though they had a relatively benign relationship with authority.)

I can't promise to write it up today, but I will try and write up my school social map before the next column comes out (i.e. before I go on holiday) - I guess the crucial factor is that there is no sustained 'off-campus' at a boarding school.

malcolm mclaren's appearance in if.... is fleeting at best!

Ha! Well, all them macs look the same to me! (I wonder what Lindsay Anderson would have made of McLaren; or did make of him, come to think of it, since Anderson surely would have been aware of the Sex Pistols, if not of the dance version of Madame Butterfly.)

I was thinking about doing this too -- it would be interesting to see if we came up with the same map. I remember for example that NME-reading indie-ish tastes linked one in to a network of like-minded individuals which included both jocks and burnouts. Physical manifestation of this = trekking across campus to borrow cassettes rather than taping stuff of the guy in the study space next to you. But that some bands crossed rapidly out of this class, and that there were a lot of tribal house tastes. e.g. lots of hip-hop in one house, but not in another.

This has reminded me of the "social map of a greek island in tourist season" thing I wrote last holiday and then totally forgot about and never posted! Must dig up that notebook

I don't recognise this map at all from my own experience but I kept having to remind myself of that because I recognise it from so many US high school movies! (MEAN GIRLS.) There was a social map at my school - I couldn't delineate it very clearly because I've forgotten an alarming amount of the lines and cliques involved; it wasn't a very usual map b/c of the school's specialist music school status.

A lot of the time, these maps exist more in people's psyches than in reality; eg I'd always thought of certain people as located in certain places on it, but talking to them years later they hadn't had that impression at all. Essentially everyone thought they were less popular than they were, and that everyone else was more popular than they were.

Well one thing Eckert says in her book is that almost all the students would state adamently that they were against categorizing people, but then it would be the students themselves who brought up time and again the jock vs. burnout split (which apparently was quite visible to anyone who looked at lunchtime, since the jocks always sat in the school cafeteria and the burnouts always hung out in the courtyard, even in cold weather). What I think is that the students are recognizing that the categories are real enough to have power in the school environment, but that no one necessarily "fits" a category completely (i.e., no one is devoid of characteristics beyond and potentially at odds with their social category).

cis made an interesting point in one of the Department Of Dilettante Research threads, which is that the roles themselves are somewhat expected (maybe owing to their appearance in movies and TV shows, though my experience is that the movies/shows don't match up very well with actual school life; but this doesn't mean they can't influence actual school life).

Strange commas were added after "majority" in this sentence:

A majority, but by no means all of the jocks, were from middle-class families; a majority, but by no means all of the burnouts, were from the working class.

I'm intrigued by the claim that in later life people tend to revert back to high school cultural maps -- I know this is partly true for me, as I started to discuss on Tom's punk question, i.e. The Clash and Pink Floyd fit together for me in what I called there 'classic rock' but which I realise ought to be called 'approved bands amongst the big boys and their younger acolytes'. This might explain why for me 'indie' is associated with the failure of an oppositional position to remain oppositional. But I don't know if it's true for anyone else. I guess there is a strong cultural tendency to project this as a pattern -- all those high school reunion movies (in which the implied audience are those who have moved to the big city -- I know this is less of a class thing in the US than in the UK where moving away to the city is mainly via university and therefore mainly middle class) in which the question of returning is always what categories are we all in now?

obviously I'm partly intrigued by this claim because it is so central to F.Kogan thinking! Somewhere I have a 2000 word unsent email in which I DO start to look at my own school experiences in order to explain where I am now, but I think I'm a bit nervous of looking back too closely, since there are a lot of things I'm ashamed of, and I'm afraid that the black moods which enveloped me from c.13-30 will be resurrected rather than laid to rest by looking back.

Well, I think the reversion is more in people's musical thinking than in their actual lives, but I feel that high-school patterns may play a bigger role in bohemia - and I'm thinking as I'm typing, but I don't believe this was owing to immaturity but rather to bohemians still being oppositional and outsider in some senses, which is a role easier to play in high school and college because it's harder to get kicked out of high school and college than it is to get fired from a job. So in effect the bohemians are trying to keep the roles going even where the roles are not so easy, beyond the teenage bubble. Does that make sense?

Do bohemians attach more social stuff to music than, I don't know, the soccer mum who is listening to her children's choices in the car? That might explain a persistence of musical-class-thinking amongst the bohemians while it has evaporated elsewhere. (Although I guess if you went and actually ask someone about what they like, they would probably fall back on the kinds of patterns of explaining themselves in relation to the world which they had needed to develop at high school, so those patterns could be latent much more broadly.)

My friends fall into two categories: those who still listen to the same music they did at university, and don't really follow any new stuff, and don't really feel bad about this; and those who still keep up with trends, or feel they ought to be, if only to disapprove of or disparage them. The latter are closer to what people would call bohemian... I've always felt caught because I like to keep up, and have always been attracted to bohemia, but have always felt too square or straight to be part of bohemia... also I get bored of some aspects of it too easily.

but isn't being oppositional and outsider intrinsically immature? refusing to conform similar to refusing to grow up?

also, if you get the right sort of job (and i'm thinking UK public sector here) you can get away with a zillion times more stuff than at school without getting kicked out, especially in terms of dress (i suppose this goes back to the majority of uk schools having uniforms to age 16 though)

but isn't being oppositional and outsider intrinsically immature? refusing to conform similar to refusing to grow up?

Not intrinsically. My refusing to let various magazines change my prose without clearing the changes with me wasn't immature. My then making jokes about breaking someone's kneecap when they changed the prose anyway was immature (though the jokes were actually funny). My not changing my style to snarkwod when an anti-intellectual boob bought out the Village Voice wasn't immature. My then - after the Voice cut me loose* - spending seven months in fear and piling up more debt rather than looking for more outlets for my work was immature.

It really depends on what one is trying to oppose or remove oneself from, and how one does it. My friend Nathan - the one who dislikes "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" and whose attitude towards what he calls the "establishment" is oppositional - hosts open mics, promotes shows, is setting up his own label to record local bands with the intention of giving them a fairer shake financially than they'd likely get from the biz.

*Don't mean to imply that I was asked to change my style, which I wasn't. And I don't know for sure why I was cut loose except I'm positive the music editor would have liked to keep me.

i'm kind of just teasing frank, certainly wasn't having a pop.

i guess i was thinking of yr rock & roll cliche "opposition". people "sticking it to The Man" by signing 8 alBUM deals, rage against the machine, and their ilk...

Oh, I didn't think you were taking a pop (since I've been known myself to heap scorn on posturing oppositional fellows) but I did wonder if you were serious so I gave a serious response. And to take that response further (and this is along the lines of what I said to Jack below), being oppositional - or "oppositional" - if you pull it off, does confer status in the eyes of the culture as a whole, including jocks and burnouts, since the culture values Oppositional Behavior if the behavior can be put into a Hero Story. In fact the culture is quick to market Oppositional Behavior. Which doesn't mean that the oppositional behavior can't be genuinely challenging.

taking a position for sake of discussion perhaps. semi-serious at least though. i wonder if it's the quickness to market oppositional behaviour that you point out, that makes me wary of it. that perhaps i've been stung too many times by what appear to be oppositional turning out to be another ad campaign or whatevs that perhaps quiet, non-confrontational (is this even possible?), getting-on-and-doing-it "oppositional" behaviour is the only interesting route left (but then we're back to the DIY Lonely Hearts Club, aren't we!!!)

Oddly, the high school categories are very relevant to music.

um, this doesn't seem odd to me at all, high school is arguably the place where music matters most and also where most pop music is aimed (intentionally or not) (steely dan excluded ;)). also one could argue that the majority of musicians never grew out of being burnouts, maintain adolescent attitudes...

my school map was nothing like that, primarily because there were *no* organised activities (not even a football team) due to long-running teachers' disputes throughout most of the 80s, and that around 85% of the kids were working*-class and desparately, outrageously, manically anti-intelligence/swottiness/cleverness.

*well given this was thatcherite mid 80s, "not working" class would be more appropriate

I could talk at great length about the social structure of my secondary school, but time eludes me right now.

Main point: the 'burnout' group wasn't made up of kids who didn't get involved with school activities, but kids who got in trouble/smoked behind the bikesheds/disrupted classes/had fights in the park on the way home. As if they were actively fighting the system rather than ignoring it (there was plenty of ignoring going on as well - this would be more true of the 'misfit' category).

Your definition of 'getting involved' would make me and my friends among the most jock-like which surprises me! We were picked on by the popular kids for being spoddy teachers pets. However our (comprehensive) school was more academically orientated than sport orientated - sport was treated as a neutral activity by the burnouts and there was a mixture of sporty kids distributed across the social groups.

ARRGH I have too much work on to think about this in depth!

Yeah "who gets to misbehave" is a big question. I was VERY PURITAN about alcohol especially while still at school, which was obviously looking back (since erm I don't seem to have sustained this attitude) a reaction against some kind of group I was outside of, but I can't exactly work out what.

Same here with smoking - militantly anti until I was 18, because I associated it with people who were horrid to me (I was v upset when Kirsty briefly took it up in 6th form for this reason). Not booze though - booze was universal. Everyone drank booze. EVERYONE. Apart from the super religious dudes & diabetics. Booze wasn't seen as 'naughty' in the same way.

Apart from the super religious dudes & diabetics.

In school I had a hard time differentiating myself from the straight-edge diabetics; besides which, drinking a LITTLE as a diabetic is a quick shortcut to burn-out circles since the stakes are higher. (half kidding)

Well, I'd say teachers don't necessarily adore teacher's pets; they have respect for people who engage with them but are willing to contest with them as well. And of course teachers don't all fall in the same place socially either. And interestingly I was friendly with - though obviously not friends with - some of the teachers, and these would also tended towards being liberals and in a couple of instances freaks. Which is interesting given that I wouldn't say I was particularly close to the two teachers I admired the most, a gym teacher and a science teacher; I wasn't unfriendly with them, but we didn't banter in the classroom or run across each other in nonclassroom settings (e.g., in school activities).

A certain amount of misbehaviour = TOP OF SOCIAL TREE in my school; chatback to teachers, affecting disinterest in work, drinking and so on. Not so much as to be a total burnout though - there weren't many of these, in fact I can't remember any. I guess there were a couple who affected to be more fucked up than they were.

The existence of boarders meant that school activities were neither here nor there when it came to coolness.

From Y7 to Y9 all the cool kids did sport. GCSE years were a strange transition into the 6th form, where only a minority did, and where it was irrelevant to your cool status. (6th form is when all the rich local farmers' kids left b/c they were thick, and when loads of musicians on scholarships joined, so the musicians stopped being one weird class out of four who didn't do the same lessons as anyone else, and started being over half the year.)

Er, my reply above about "teachers not necessarily adoring teacher's pets" was actually meant for you.

I mean, in relation to some misbehavior helping you up the social ladder. (Didn't mean to imply you're a teacher's pet, which you're not.)

In my school, interestingly, there was no name equivalent to the "jocks" of the Detroit suburbs. "Prep" wasn't used. The term "jock" did exist, but it really was limited to those involved in sports. And there were two centers of what I'll call "respectable" status c. 1971 or so: Craig and his friends, Craig being the class president and the goalie of the soccer team but also in a rock band and not snooty at all, got along with a lot of the freaks, as I recall. And then there was Ethan and the drama school kids, Ethan also being president of the student council, and tending to have more artsy-fartsy and academically inclined friends; but Ethan was a bit snooty (though very engaging) and didn't cross to the freaks that much, even though in general I'd place his group closer to the freaks than Craig's was. And I was pretty much in Ethan's group - in fact, even helped assemble it somewhat during the Duffey Summer I described in my book [which I don't think you've seen, but Tom and Alex have] - but also made myself a bit estranged from it, which is when I started hanging out to some extent with the younger freaks (except when I was withdrawing altogether). People would sometimes refer - disparagingly - to people like me as "liberals." (Liberal being compromised in comparison to Radical or Freak.) Whereas the greasers would tend to lump liberals and freaks together and refer to all of us as "hippies." (And maybe we were lumping disparate groups together and calling them "greasers." I wouldn't know.)

I pass this on my way to University every year:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/mid/sites/history/pages/elvis_rock_photos.shtml

"But in a contrary motion, the freaks provide a motive for the preps and the burnouts to absorb freak characteristics -- which is how bohemian ideas get pulled into the mainstream, and why freak groups periodically disappear."

This is a central point in Leland's History of Hip book but seems to run into a paradox. If the mainstream is continuously, progressively absorbing the miscegnating, individualistic, detached, experimenting spirit of hipdom (or bohemian freakdom)won't that eventually nullify this kind of opposition altogether? Or, I mean, there will always be haircut social markers like "eating acid" or "synthesizers" but, following this line of thinking, won't bohemia eventually run out of "ideas" to give to the mainstream?

My first thought ab your Elvis comment is how he is an example of a vector between those "deep" and "cultural" class distinctions. But I'm sure I'm only channeling indistinctly Marcus's take in Mystery Train.

Well, to my mind bohemia ran out of ideas in about 1970 (i.e., about the time I started liking the freaks more but being less intimidated by them). But that last sentence is just me being glib. My piece doesn't ask or answer the question "So where does bohemia come from?" My snap answer would be "A combination of two places: (1) from the mainstream of culture itself, with the freaks et al. acting out various ideals and trying to bridge tensions and countertensions that the mainstream itself supplies, (2) the critical insights of various marginals." The thing about bohemians is that at some point after high-school graduation they need funding. So money has to get to the mainstreamers who've stepped sideways and to the bohemianized marginals, which means they've got to be pleasing someone with their ideas and antics, either patrons or a significant audience.

That's entirely off the top of my head, and I'm just talking, but I believe it would be wrong to think of the freaks themselves generating ideas without any input from the culture as a whole.

Sounds sensible enough. Something ab the conlcusion of Leland's book rubs me the wrong way. Or maybe it just makes me sad b/c I think, really, this story of miscegnation in America represents the end of a certain stand of cultural history that has meant a lot to me-- meant a lot to be b/f I had any sense of its history. BTW, the jock and burnout arrangement works for me, when I was going to high school, especially, but also since I've been working in high schools for the last ten years. Only now it's "preps" and "alt-rockers," where I'm currently teaching, and it was "preps" and "gangstas" or, as I preferred to call them, "thugamuffins," where I taught my first six years. Really, I'm not sure ab the labels but the central idea of two polarized status groups with a whole bunch of inbetweeners rings true. And I especially recognize this feature where few openly identify, or perhaps even privately think of themselves, as a jock/prep or burnout/gangsta, but tend to identify others this way based on whether they're "into" school or "opposed," or at least assuming an anti pose, to school. In some ways it's the kids that are there to get good grades versus the kids there to party. When, really, most, the vast majority, want both, of course. Okay, gotta go. School starts next week.

I don't feel it fits with my school experience much. Judging by exam results, I was the smartest kid in the school, and some of my best friends were the only rivals. We were all hugely into punk and would smoke and drink and do drugs and take oppositional stances to the teachers (well, some of us) and the perceived establishment (partly as embodied in this venerable fee-paying boarding school). I was also in the football first team, and was a class clown, and seemed to be very popular particularly for that last reason - but for me the clowning was almost entirely tied in to the oppositional stance, it was about mocking and undermining authority. I think I had more stern talkings-to from the top teachers than anyone else there, and I'd probably have been expelled had I not been a serious Oxbridge candidate (for those who don't know, one of the key criteria for judging posh fee-paying schools is how many students they get into Oxford and Cambridge - I was 50% of the success rate for my year). I know I was the first Oxbridge candidate the school had had in its 300 years who wasn't offered a prefectship, something I take some pride in. (My friend Dave, the only one who has stayed a friend for the 30 years since those days, was apparently the first person ever to turn a prefectship down. He was the other person to get to Cambridge that year, and was very punk-bohemian.)

I mention all this because there didn't seem to be so much of a distinction, and being hard-left and a punk didn't stop me being friends with the rich kids. There were groupings, but they were more based on certain activities - people who'd go down the pub, people who'd play football, people who'd go to gigs. I was in all three of those, though I'm not sure I can think of many more who were. The outsiders, I think, were those uninterested in all of those things, the ones who stayed in and spoke politely and did their homework diligently and never got in trouble. That was a minority, and not one with much impact. They'd be jocks in the scheme you discuss, but they were almost entirely distinct from the sports-jocks (who also tended to be among the cleverest kids).

Rules Of The Game #12: Jocks And Burnouts

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

BINGE DRINK ICKENHAM

Re: BINGE DRINK ICKENHAM

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

what if the "freaks" are all out?

Re: what if the "freaks" are all out?

Re: what if the "freaks" are all out?

no subject