SPIEGEL SPEZIAL (2/1994): Pop & Politik. Photo: Spiegel.
Campino, singer of Die Toten Hosen, interviewed the then youth minister Angela Merkel for a special issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel with the title “Pop & Politics” in 1994. The cover featured a collage which comprised of people like Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bill Clinton playing a saxophone. Among them, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols glared at the possible buyers in neighbourhood kiosks. In this issue the journalist and pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen formulated ten theses for contemporary pop culture. Tony Parsons, one of the first journalists to write about British punk from 1976 onwards in the New Musical Express, pondered about the popularity of punk and its relation to mass culture in the 1990s. Punk as a media phenomenon and a lifestyle became part of mass culture and was a topic taken seriously by cultural critics. Continue reading
« En interrogeant, au fil de l’Histoire, l’élaboration de médias destinés spécifiquement aux jeunes, Le Temps des médias se propose de réinterroger l’histoire des représentations de la jeunesse dans les sociétés. L’histoire des médias pour la jeunesse est indissociable de celle de l’enfant et de la place accordée à celui- ci. Dans un premier temps, ce sont bien sûr les imprimés : pour la fin du XVIIIe et le XIXe siècles, on peut se demander quelle est l’ampleur des images destinées aux enfants au sein des maisons de production de l’imagerie populaire. Au XXe siècle, les médias pour la jeunesse prennent à nouveau une part active à l’innovation dans le paysage de la presse écrite : ils permettent, dans l’entre-deux-guerres, l’acculturation de la bande dessinée. 
Initially, delinquency and crime provided the lens through which academics discussed youth culture. Studying deviant behaviour ensured that criminologists focused on questions of re-education and the relationship between the newly-branded ‘teenager’, delinquency and youth culture.With the emergence of Cultural Studies in Britain, ‘youth’ was interpreted in generational terms, through which a critical understanding of the changing nature of British society could be inferred. Across the academic landscape of historical studies, however, youth cultures tend to play but a minor role in general overviews and historical narratives of the history of European societies after 1945.