It is impossible to look cool studying youth culture. Researchers can’t help being uncool, whether they’re explaining every little term to their readers, as if to a High Court judge, or shoehorning the ‘in’ lingo into their otherwise conventional academic texts. However advanced their self-awareness strategies or their desire to avoid seeming preachy, nothing can stop them coming off like T-shirted versions of the social surveyors of a century ago. Instead of the slums or Samoa, it’s some kind of sweaty, fertile, animalistic netherworld of tribal signs and tracksuit brand logos.

On top of this, claims made about ‘youth’ – even if the youths in question are participants in clearly defined subcultures or ethnic groups – are hard to maintain and analyse, because youth itself is such an awkward pigeonhole. Naturally, the slipperiness of the cohort doesn’t stop the researchers and analysts from trying to advocate on youth’s behalf in the ongoing (apparently adversarial and antipathetic, actually complex and interdependent) battle between young people and their parents, or the newspapers, or the government.

The lowdown from those who would tell their story is that the ‘kids’ are, well, alright, even if they are having it off in hot cars whilst listening to sexist, violent hip hop, doing E and getting tats on their necks. The claims made on behalf of the young can be risible: the edited collection Indigenous states in its acknowledgments that ‘young people are active, inventive cultural creators and skilled cultural mediators’, as ludicrous a generalisation as ‘young people are lazy, thieving. incoherent’.