chav--explain to a confused expatriate please

tox

Factory Girl
bassnation said:
apparently its evolved from tv programmes like jackass and dirty sanchez - although they are beating the crap out of each other in a consensual fashion rather than running up and bopping some old granny on the head at the bus stop. i dunno, kids of today. i mean, i've done some pretty anti-social things as a teenager but it was mostly petty vandalism and shop lifting, rather than assaulting people!

There was a bit of a discussion about Happy Slapping in a thread in the music folder linked here. There's some very interesting reading in there.
 
bassnation said:
apparently its evolved from tv programmes like jackass and dirty sanchez - although they are beating the crap out of each other in a consensual fashion rather than running up and bopping some old granny on the head at the bus stop. i dunno, kids of today. i mean, i've done some pretty anti-social things as a teenager but it was mostly petty vandalism and shop lifting, rather than assaulting people!

What about your daily assaults on common sense over on UKD?
 

mms

sometimes
tox said:
There was a bit of a discussion about Happy Slapping in a thread in the music folder linked here. There's some very interesting reading in there.

the phenomenon of narrative becoming action action becoming narrative is called
ostension, ie the phenomenon of people who begin to action urban legends
http://www.ostension.org/whats_ostension.html

happy slapping seems to be an extention of societies habit of capturing and recording absolutley everything.
it's just casual violence plus the abilty to see it again, it might also be taking back a bit of control over what and who is recorded, considering we are a society under huge amounts of survellance.
 
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Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
what do you think came first though, the idea/scare/publicity, or the incidents focussed and named, i'd love to know
in Ballard's Super-Cannes (2000) you have the bored professionals (doctors, bankers etc)
going out on violent sprees filming themselves raping, beating the shit out of innocent people etc
- for both immediate satisfaction and later enjoyment/reliving on the screen.

Ballard got the class (?) and age-group wrong - but I think it's pretty much the same phenomenon.
And it's not only happy slapping, by extension it's also Pammy/Paris Hilton's "home-videos",
footballers involved in "roasting" etc.

Filming just the victim goes back even longer - "Peeping Tom" (and some Film Noir move I can't
remember the title of).
 
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Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
I've heard the term Chav is a police acronym for "council housed and violent" -- but that story could just be anti-police prejiudice.
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
Randy Watson said:
Is there a term for the gloomy looking children in ridiculously wide bottomed trousers and home-died hair? They look like descendents of goths, but you couldn't really call them that.

.

We usually refer to them as "emo kids", although this is probably a misnomer. Those who really listen to emo are probably more short hair, piercings and plugs, and tighter clothes.

in Ballard's Super-Cannes (2000) you have the bored professionals (doctors, bankers etc)
going out on violent sprees filming themselves raping, beating the shit out of innocent people etc
- for both immediate satisfaction and later enjoyment/reliving on the screen.

Ballard got the class (?) and age-group wrong - but I think it's pretty much the same phenomenon.
And it's not only happy slapping, by extension it's also Pammy/Paris Hilton's "home-videos",
footballers involved in "roasting" etc.

Filming just the victim goes back even longer - "Peeping Tom" (and some Film Noir move I can't
remember the title of).

Following on from this, I read something in the Guardian a few weeks back that rather disturbed me - young kids engaging in group sex whilst their parents were out after school, apparently influenced by the footballers roasting incidents. "Daisy-chaining" is the term... http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1471856,00.html

Nothing about filming it... yet...
 

mms

sometimes
'daisy chaining' cor that sounds brilliant, absolute total destruction of all innocence wrapped up in the name of an innocent childs game of the past, only an adult could make that up, and i don't believe a word of it.


aren't those kids with big trousers and miserable faces, and sometimes fairly unused skateboards called grebos?
 

mms

sometimes
jack_yggdrasil said:
they are. as were big greasy rockers in the 60s.
load of bollocks really.

my sister when she lived in ipswich had very specific names for all these (sub) urban tribes, grebos were these kind of children, then there were townies, raggas, goths and rockers, skaters, ravers, very confusing and quite odd.
 
mms said:
my sister when she lived in ipswich had very specific names for all these (sub) urban tribes, grebos were these kind of children, then there were townies, raggas, goths and rockers, skaters, ravers, very confusing and quite odd.

heh. i wonder if any of those 'tribespeople' saw themselves as such....
 

owen

Well-known member
so let me get this straight, 'happy slapping' is a term for people being beaten up and filmed on mobiles? didn't know this had its own word, but it happened to two close friends (one female) a year ago on the street where i live. deptford isn't very 'super-cannes' but i can totally see where ness is coming from here

i don't know what that has to do with 'chavs' mind you. my suspicion with that term is that its used to denote what was otherwise denoted by 'townie' or 'ned' by bourgeois types, but is an ambiguous enough term for it not to sound like class disdain- unlike the above two phrases where it is blindingly obvious....

but though i find the term (and that awful, awful website) repellent, i do recall the joy i had when i was 14 or so and i found out i had a generic insult i could throw at people who were throwing generic insults at me me and my friends were called 'hippies' at school (southern england mid 90s, incidentally), for not having cropped hairdos...these things are TOTALLY based on class though. 'we' were mostly middle class (i wasn't, but joined the group in school where i didn't have to pretend to be stupid) 'they' were overwhelmingly working class.

anyway it's best not to get me started on this one...
 

Randy Watson

Well-known member
I'm not buying grebos, I associate Grebos with being a bit more fun loving and with more of a sense of humour. These kids are fucking miserable. I'm picking up on Bizkits.

Chavs were just casuals in my day (84-89).
 

mms

sometimes
jack_yggdrasil said:
heh. i wonder if any of those 'tribespeople' saw themselves as such....


some of them did and some others defined them i guess.
skaters definitley define themselves, they are held together by their love of the old wooden toy.
goths as welll i imagine, i doubt townies do or raggas, grebos maybe.

incidentally i keep on seeing this girl around whos about 16 or so with two mates, they all dress in slightly ripped and fucked school uniforms and this one girl has 'death loves us all ' written in chalk on her back, quite an odd look.
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
i find the laughing at it absolutely vile, and whilst i wouldnt want to claim some kind of solidarity - i come from the same background! these kids used to live on the same street as me! what differentiates me walking around in a group and them walking around in a group bar dress?

when i was 15-16 used to get angry that these guys gave people my age a bad name, now at 19 i totally understand it's a minority and just kids doing what kids do, no matter where they come from (in my failing state school spectrum that is, i've not a clue how different the kids who went to posh schools are)

oh and i dunno how kids hanging around on the streets now is any different to how it was in the past.

it's just the old having an age old dig at the young again? the notion of getting an asbo sounds ace though.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
don_quixote said:
it's just the old having an age old dig at the young again? the notion of getting an asbo sounds ace though.

There's loads of pensioners getting ASBOs now, mostly for being cantankerous and shouting at people. I've always wanted to turn out like that when I'm old anyway - pretend to be deaf, scare kiddies by being the 'weird old man' up the street, that sort of thing - so I'm looking forward to getting an ASBO at 70 and wearing it like a badge of pride.
 

Noah Baby Food

Well-known member
Kids are not allowed out on the streets or out in public generally if they have no money. It's highly suspicious that they would want to be outside, socialising in groups and getting up to mischief, when they could be indoors playing computer or watching SKY. That's how it's going down nowadays.

All I know is, if I was a pissed-off fourteen year old, I'd be rocking the hoody and cap 24-7...especially now our PM is declaring vote-friendly civil war on kids in sportswear by demonising them. When I was a yoot, it was all nicking VW signs, there was a fair media kick-off about that too...

Tony Blair is going to amend his proposed idea of banning hoodies and caps....hoodies with "Nirvana", "Slipknot", "Marilyn Manson" etc on 'em, they're allowed as they signify a generally middle-class mild mannered youth, with good behaviour. Brands such as Nickelson, Hackett and Berghaus on the other hand - the wearing of these will be banned for anyone under the age of 16, unless they have a signed document stating the profession of their father, to prove their class status. If youths are caught wearing banned clothing three times, they will be forced into workfare.
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
bun-u said:
I think it often depends on who is doing the name calling

I don't think the idea of a "hostile and parasitic" youth culture is anything new, so I too think this is the central feature of the debate. I would be more interested in trying to define the different types of speakers on this thread and elsewhere who tend to offer either sympathy, solidarity, or scorn. (You could add to that a fourth "S"—suspicion, if you like.) What are these voices all about and how can they be organised?

As a Canadian who spent some time in the sprawl of London a few years back, I found the "hegemonic" (to quote someone upthread) aspect of chav to be its defining character. Sure, we have fashion trends and idle, destructive packs of teenagers (like anywhere), but I can assure you there is nothing, absolutely nothing in Canada as mystifyingly (almost admirably) uniform as the chav.

With this thread on my mind recently, I walked by a group of Canadian high school kids who were spending their lunch hour outside 7-11. Sure enough, I found myself offended by them—the angle at which baseball caps are worn, the quantity and gaudiness of the jewellry, the "classic"-ness of the trainers have all increased dramatically in the last few years. Or have they?

I was going to write some stuff about how "the discourse producer" (if we can apply a "chav"-like label to him or her too) has now entered that phase of life where teenagers are a constant threat and irritation, but then I decided to scrap it: that hardened "authentic" chav exterior I encountered in Britain—seen lounging outside the offie or from the window of a train—is about where it stops. The chavs I made friends with (ie. those who would probably identify themselves as such, if asked) are bright, resourceful, unfailingly loyal, and hypermodern. There is a relentless push towards newness among these guys at all times (no irony or recontextualisation here) that makes me feel like a bit of a fucking dinosaur. (And genuinely embarrassed for trying to figure out whether they're the noughties equivalent of mod.)
 
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