In college, a young woman, Christine, who lived across from me sophomore year (she was four years older than I, had dropped out of high school, then gotten her high-school equivalency), told me that back in high school in the ’60s you’d know who the cool kids were: They were the people who’d done acid. But then the uncool people started doing acid too, and you no longer could tell. So here’s a tribe, The Cool People, that was being eliminated from the planet, not through the death of its members but through its inability to distinguish itself from its near neighbors -- its attributes, its social markers, its social capital, seized by others.
In these columns I’ve been calling such conflicts “class conflicts” and calling such social groups “social classes,” even though in this instance the class only existed for a few years. Other groups I’ve given the word “class” to are “skaters” and “preps” and “heavy metal kids” and “mainstream girls” and “people who read the music section of alternative weeklies.” And I’ve been known to use it for “teenager” and “support staff” and “technical editor.” I once classed punks into two categories: “office-temp punks” and “bike-messenger punks.”
There is an obvious objection to this usage, which is that “class” is best reserved for the deep structure of society: an upper class that owns or controls resources and corporations and information and that accumulates the profits; a middle class of technocrats and salaried professionals and job managers; a working class that punches time clocks and does the drudge work, and gets paid poorly.
I have several rationales for my overbroad use of “class.” First, I simply want the word. It’s got teeth. It implies antagonistic interests. And crucial to the idea of social class is that there be an inequality: of power, wealth, prestige, competence, jurisdiction, beauty, coolness, something. Second, these other classes -- I’ll call them “cultural classes” for want of a better term -- tend to be where people live emotionally. When such cultural classes are in play, they, and not the “deeper” classes, are what immediately structure someone’s social life. Which isn’t to say that there’s no link between them and the upper-middle-working type of class. In fact, that’s a reason to use “social class” for cultural classes, to suggest that economic classes are probably in on the deal somewhere. Third, sometimes a similar style of cultural class keeps popping up. I’m thinking of those cool people whom Christine talked about; in their time they were called “freaks” or “hippies.” They didn’t last long as a group -- at least their coolness didn’t -- but before them there were bohemians and hipsters and beats and beatniks and afterwards there were punks and goths and emos, with the term “freak” recurring. Such groups wax and wane, and tend to center on the youth, but they show up with enough frequency that they must represent some hot spot in the social crust.
In the ’80s a linguist named Penelope Eckert published Jocks and Burnouts, an ethnographic analysis of student social categories in several high schools in the Detroit suburbs. She found two major antagonistic groups, the jocks and the burnouts, with those two category names encompassing much more than people in sports on the one hand and druggies on the other. (E.g., a girl in the debate society and on the student council but not involved in any sport would nonetheless get called a jock. I recall another study from that period where a kid from a trailer park said that, as far as he was concerned, anyone not from the trailer park was a jock. He didn’t mean the term “jock” as a compliment.) Most students were neither jocks nor burnouts, but tellingly some of these would refer to themselves as “in-betweens,” and subgroups would clearly be in the orbit of either the jocks or the burnouts. (So “brains” were in the orbit of the jocks.) And the social delineation was this: Jocks took part in school activities, often gaining roles of authority as they progressed through high school; whereas burnouts shunned school activities, took their extracurricular lives elsewhere. Another social fact: 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.
And it’s this last point I want to emphasize, the phrase “by no means all.” Although economic classes play a major role in generating the cultural classes “jock” and “burnout,” the economic and cultural classes are not identical. The social structure of the school isn’t middle class vs. working class, it’s jocks vs. burnouts. To illustrate this difference, think of an adult loner or misfit who punches a time clock and works on the factory line: He is classed as blue collar or working class. But a loner or misfit in a high school is not a burnout; he’s a loner or a misfit. To be a burnout he has to have burnout friends. One can say that the preps in a high school are high-status and at the top of the social heap, but you can’t say the burnouts are at the bottom: The burnouts will have a lot of friends and much esteem in comparison to nerds and misfits and many of the in-betweens. And think of the relative status of a leader of the burnouts as opposed to that of a marginal jock. (But then, status can be very much in the eyes of the beholder. Note the difference in the words “loner” and “misfit.”)
We have to take seriously the names that are given or taken by these groups, and the fact that some of these names change over time. Depending on the year and place one group will be called socs (SO-shes, for socialites), debs (for debutantes), jocks, preppies, preps; while the other will be rocks, hoods, greasers, grits, rednecks, farmers, burnouts, stoners, jells, dirts, dirtbags, skaters. A long line of expressive derogatory poetry. But “hood” does not mean “working class.” The terms have different emotional overtones, express a different mindset. As do “hood” and “burnout” and “skater,” for that matter. The names are getting more bohemian over time. Note the family resemblance between the terms “beats” and “burnouts.”
A point that Eckert emphasizes is that, while the burnouts are often called deviants and delinquents, they don’t deviate from the jock-and-burnout social structure, in fact tend to preserve it -- because they get status and friendship from other burnouts.
But in some schools there’s a wild card, a group that temporarily unsettles the structure. These are people like my college friend Christine: the artsy fartsies, the bohemians, the freaks. Eckert doesn’t discuss them much, since there were too few of them at the time of her study to make a difference, though she noted that punks were on the ascendant. Back in my high school in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the freaks had been strong enough to make everything go kerblooey, so the social map kept changing every two months. The freaks weren’t rebelling against the social structure so much as they were finding a new route to social esteem; they were confident and obnoxious enough to challenge the status of preps and jocks as top dogs (ha! we’re better) but also to challenge the status of the burnouts as the main refusal group. Freaks can be as closed-minded and exclusive as anyone else, but their attacks on the preps and the burnouts oddly enough open the doors for misfits and nerds and marginal preps and burnouts to jump to the freak category, since the freaks are modeling a new kind of status that people can emulate. 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.
Oddly, the high school categories are very relevant to music. There are a couple of reasons. First, such cultural categories exist among adults too but aren’t given names as often, so whether accurately or inaccurately we go back to the high school names to look for analogies. But also, when it comes to discussion of music, people’s minds seem to revert to the high school social map, and they identify with the music of their adolescence. That map may not match adult circumstances, but it seems to evoke fears and dreams.
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My editor recently asked me if I thought Elvis still mattered. I immediately said “Yes, very much so,” but then couldn’t figure out why. I actually don’t know much about the guy -- haven’t read the bios. What I’m about to say has to do with a feeling I have towards the music, even though I’m using social not musical terms. Elvis started as a rock, a hood, a greaser, but he was also an artist and innovator who recombined elements into his own style. He took himself out of his original social category but seems to have created a territory for himself that doesn’t exist on any social map, a garish assertiveness that’s neither upmarket nor bohemian, but isn’t just flaunting itself. He’s not doing proletarian art, he’s not just exuberant pop culture à la American Idol -- or he is exuberant pop culture but with a sense of cool, a skepticism, mockery, but this critical detachment doesn’t take him anywhere near the freaks or the intelligentsia. It’s a cool that never got institutionalized. So I still find him potent. The freaks, the punks, the indie kids always end up as a mere cultural niche, as sub-sub-sub-preps, basically. Whereas Elvis was somewhere else, and I don’t know where I am in relation to him.