Page 8 - Decoding Culture

1 The Story So

Far

Some time in 1963, then a sociology undergraduate of strongly
held opinions but little knowledge, I was moved to hurl Richard
Hoggart's The U s es of Literacy across the room and out through my
open bedsit window. So absolute was his condemnation of 'Juke­
Box boys' and the rest of the burgeoning post-war youth culture
that 1 took his book as a gross calumny visited upon what appeared
to me to be the most exciting set of cultural changes since the
emergence of the cinema. My anger was made all the more self­
righteous by the nostalgia that cloaked his account of the
working-class culture of his youth (I fancied myself a hard-headed
Leninist at the time, and had little truck with such romanticism)
and his evident belief in the superiority of that older culture over
the new. By a nice irony I could just about see from my window the
area of Leeds of which he had written, and as I sheepishly res­
cued the book from the dirty puddle into which it had fallen, the
sight of those rows of decaying back-to-backs should have been
more than enough to teach me a lesson about the perils of youth­
ful arrogance and the many forms that understanding can take.
Needless to say it did no such thing, and 1 returned to my read­
ing of Hoggart in a mood of determined dissent combined with

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