"Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language"
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Cultural adulthood, Mahy implies, is a spectator sport: if you claim to care about the world, you dont get to opt out of whatever teenagers are doing with it. The line has a polite, almost librarian calm, but its pressure is moral. "Generally" is doing sly work here, reframing youth culture not as a niche beat (music, fashions, slang) but as a live feed of social change. To be uninterested isnt neutral; its a kind of incuriosity.
Mahy writes from inside the childrens and young adult literary tradition, a space often patronized as training wheels for "real" culture. Her intent is to flip that hierarchy. The inventory of "music, the bands, the books, the fashions" reads like a roll call of ephemera, then she pivots to what matters: "the way... the community develops its own language". Language is power, and youth are constantly testing it, remixing it, weaponizing it, making it tender. She isnt fetishizing slang; she is pointing to a community rehearsing identity in public.
The subtext is also a gentle rebuke to adult nostalgia. Adults like youth culture best when it is safely archived as their own adolescence. Mahy insists on the present tense: young people arent a memory, they are a moving frontier. In the late 20th century, when YA publishing and pop culture were becoming increasingly segmented and commercialized, her claim resists the idea that teen taste is mere market demographic. Its a civic signal. If you want to understand where culture is going, you watch who is inventing the words for it first.
Mahy writes from inside the childrens and young adult literary tradition, a space often patronized as training wheels for "real" culture. Her intent is to flip that hierarchy. The inventory of "music, the bands, the books, the fashions" reads like a roll call of ephemera, then she pivots to what matters: "the way... the community develops its own language". Language is power, and youth are constantly testing it, remixing it, weaponizing it, making it tender. She isnt fetishizing slang; she is pointing to a community rehearsing identity in public.
The subtext is also a gentle rebuke to adult nostalgia. Adults like youth culture best when it is safely archived as their own adolescence. Mahy insists on the present tense: young people arent a memory, they are a moving frontier. In the late 20th century, when YA publishing and pop culture were becoming increasingly segmented and commercialized, her claim resists the idea that teen taste is mere market demographic. Its a civic signal. If you want to understand where culture is going, you watch who is inventing the words for it first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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