
A few years ago Ireland had one of the strongest anti-globalisation movements in Europe. The Reclaim the Streets march had thousands of long hairs out in central Dublin partying away. Then they seemingly evaporated, they went away and haven’t been seen again since. It’s difficult to work out why. Some will have got jobs, cut their hair and got on making money. Some left Ireland, to bigger canvas’s. Some turned away from the movement to concentrate on the war in Iraq.
The surprise, I suppose, has been that they haven’t been replaced.It could be that Ireland is too damn small, Dublin even, to support more than a few youth movements. And ‘movements’ itself is the wrong word they’re more like groups, loose affiliations and groups of friends, who dress the same a bit and hang out in front of the Central Bank and Starbucks. At the moment there are hipsters, emo kids and nu-ravers. Nothing else has arisen in large enough numbers to make a cultural impact. The hip hop kids are dismissed as scobes, the longhairs are mostly privilege hippies, and everyone else is English. None of the tribes that are currently thriving in the capital have anything political about them.
The hipsters are the most conscious of the political, but are the worst of the three. They wryly observe, self-consciously sit apon the sidelines witnessing the world, aware of the problems and the need to do something, but prefer to cock a snook, or to blog humorlessly about clothes and bad Italian cinema. The music is varied and some, mostly folk, is explicitly policital but the scene itself is about iconoclastic apathy. They wear Make Poverty History wrist bands and Arabic scarves, but when asked about them they spew nonchalant irony and sarcasm.
What’s going on with the emo kids? What are they thinking in there? Is it the same as goth, the introspection and the bad poetry? Are you trying to work out whats going on in your own heads never mind everyone elses, never mind the worlds? Whatever, the trend seems too commercial and self-reguarding for there to be much going on, and even if the lyrics are wild klaxon calls to the red flag, they haven’t had any goddamn effect. The only march I ever saw them on was an unpaid publicity march up Grafton Street for the launch of the Black Parade album.
There is something nihilistic about the total anti-politics and euphoria of the nu-ravers. The music is mindlessly fun, lyrics meaningless refrains, some even advertising slogans, existing solely to be shouted deliriously. Intentionally there is no depth, nothing else there, allowing you to utterly escape. It is quite political in its own negative way, but it hardly promotes anything like the rage and activism that the similarly apolitical Nirvana did.
And so here we are, in a time of strong tribal youth cultures but little politics. Perhaps it’s something to do with the success of the tiger. We don’t have much to complain about and maybe the capitalists are right, so what the hell’s there to protest against? Maybe the movements were defeated. Maybe we’ll all be back on the streets soon when the jobs we presumed were waiting for us by rights aren’t there when we get out of college. At a time where there is more inequality and injustice, when there is so much that ought to merit protest, when our police service and government act like the criminals and cheats they condemn, it is disappointing to look around and see so much energy wasted. You’re young for godsake. Shout about something.