Mod (subculture)
Mod, from the word modernist, is a subculture that began in late 1950s London and spread throughout Great Britain, eventually influencing fashions and trends in other countries. It continues today on a smaller scale. Focused on music and fashion, the subculture has its roots in a small group of stylish London-based young men and women in the late 1950s who were termed modernists because they listened to modern jazz.
Elements of the mod subculture include fashion and music. They rode motor scooters, usually Lambrettas or Vespas. In the mid-1960s, members of the subculture listened to pop groups with rhythm and blues influences, such as the Who and Small Faces. The original mod scene was associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night jazz dancing at clubs.
During the early to mid-1960s, as the mod movement grew and spread throughout Britain, certain elements of the mod scene became engaged in well-publicised clashes with members of a rival subculture, the rockers. The conflict between mods and rockers led sociologist Stanley Cohen to use the term "moral panic" in his study about the two youth subcultures, in which he examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s.
By 1965, conflicts between mods and rockers began to subside and mods began to fade out with the dandy subculture taking over with increasingly gravitating towards pop art and psychedelia. London became synonymous with fashion, music, and pop culture in those years, a period often referred to as "Swinging London". During that time, mod influenced fashions spread to other countries. Mod was then viewed less as an isolated subculture, but as emblematic of the larger youth culture of the era. As mod became more cosmopolitan during the "Swinging London" period, some working-class "street mods" splintered off, forming other groups such as the skinheads.
By the early 1970s, mod had long faded out, as did psychedelia of the dandy culture with popularity, with hard rock and glam rock styles taking over. In the late 1970s, there was a mod revival in Britain, which attempted to replicate the "scooter" period look and styles of the early to mid-1960s. It was followed by a similar mod revival in North America in the early 1980s, particularly in southern California.
Etymology and usage
The term mod derives from modernist, a term used in the 1950s to describe modern jazz musicians and fans. That usage contrasted with the term trad, which described traditional jazz players and fans. The 1959 novel Absolute Beginners describes modernists as young modern jazz fans who dress in sharp modern Italian clothes. The novel may be one of the earliest examples of the term being written to describe young British style-conscious modern jazz fans. That use of the word modernist should not be confused with modernism in the context of literature, art, design and architecture. From the mid-to-late 1960s onwards, the mass media often used the term mod in a wider sense, to describe anything that was believed to be popular, fashionable or modern.Paul Jobling and David Crowley argued that the definition of mod could be difficult to pin down because, throughout the subculture's original era, it was "prone to continuous reinvention". They claim that, since the mod scene was so pluralist, the word mod was an umbrella term that covered several distinct sub-scenes. Terry Rawlings argued that mods were difficult to define because the subculture started out as a "mysterious semi-secret world", which the Who's manager Peter Meaden summarised as "clean living under difficult circumstances".
1958–1970: Original movement
wrote that mods were initially a small group of clothes-focused young English working class men, insisting on clothes and shoes tailored to their style, who emerged during the modern jazz boom of the late 1950s. Early mods watched French and Italian art films and read Italian magazines to look for style ideas. They usually held semi-skilled manual jobs or low grade white-collar positions such as a clerk, messenger or office boy. According to Dick Hebdige, mods created a parody of the consumer society that they lived in.Early 1960s
According to Hebdige, by around 1963, the mod subculture had gradually accumulated the identifying symbols that later came to be associated with the scene, such as scooters, amphetamine pills and R&B music. While clothes were still important at that time, they could be ready-made. Dick Hebdige wrote the term mod covered a number of styles including the emergence of Swinging London, though to him it defined Melly's working class clothes-conscious teenagers living in London and south England in the early to mid-1960s.Mary Anne Long argued that "first hand accounts and contemporary theorists point to the Jewish upper-working or middle-class of London's East End and suburbs." Simon Frith asserted that the mod subculture had its roots in the 1950s beatnik coffee bar culture, which catered to art school students in the radical Bohemian scene in London. Steve Sparks, whose claim is to be one of the original mods, agrees that before mod became commercialised, it was essentially an extension of the beatnik culture: "It comes from 'modernist', it was to do with modern jazz and to do with Sartre" and existentialism. Sparks argued that "Mod has been much misunderstood... as this working-class, scooter-riding precursor of skinheads."
Coffee bars were attractive to British youth because, in contrast to typical pubs, which closed at about 11 pm, they were open until the early hours of the morning. Coffee bars had jukeboxes which, in some cases, reserved space in the machines for the customers' own records. In the late 1950s, coffee bars were associated with jazz and rock 'n' roll, but in the early 1960s, they began playing more R&B music alongside. Frith noted that although coffee bars were originally aimed at middle-class art school students, they began to facilitate an intermixing of youth from different backgrounds and classes. At those venues, which Frith called the "first sign of the youth movement", young people met collectors of R&B and blues records.
As the mod subculture grew in London during the early-to-mid-1960s, tensions arose between the mods, often riding highly decorated motor scooters, and their main rivals, the rockers, a British subculture who favoured rockabilly, early rock'n'roll, motorcycles and leather jackets, and considered the mods effeminate because of their interest in fashion. There were some violent clashes between the two groups. This period was later immortalised by songwriter Pete Townshend, in the Who's 1973 concept album, Quadrophenia. After 1964, clashes between the two groups largely subsided, as mod expanded and came to be accepted by the youth generation throughout the UK as a symbol of all that was new. During that time, London became a mecca for pop music, with popular bands such as The Who and Small Faces appealing to a largely mod audience, as well as the preponderance of hip fashions, in a period often referred to as Swinging London.
Mid-late 1960s
Swinging London
As numerous British pop bands of the mid-1960s began to adopt a mod look and following, this was due to members of some of these bands originally being mods, the scope of the subculture grew beyond its original confines, and the focus began to change. By 1966, mod had begun to fade out and the dandy subculture increased in popularity. Proletarian aspects of the dandy scene in London had waned as fashion and pop-culture elements continued to grow, not only in England, but elsewhere.This period, portrayed by Alberto Sordi's film in Thank you very much, and in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blowup, was typified by pop art, Carnaby Street boutiques, live music, and discothèques. Many associate this era with fashion model Twiggy, miniskirts, and bold geometrical patterns on brightly coloured clothes. During these years, it exerted a considerable influence on the worldwide spread of mod.
United States and elsewhere
As the mod lifestyle was going through decline in England, its influence became all the rage in the United States and around the world, as many young people adopted its look. However, the worldwide experience differed from that of the early scene in London in that it was based mainly on pop culture and influenced by British modern jazz and pop musicians. By then, mod was thought of more as a general youth-culture style with its term meaning modern, rather than as a separate subgroup to do with modern jazz among different contending factions.American musicians, in the aftermath of the British Invasion, adopted the look of the dandy which was currently popular in London, with the clothes, longer hairstyles, and Beatle boots. The exploitation documentary Mondo Mod provides a glimpse of mod and dandy influence on the Sunset Strip and West Hollywood scene of late 1966. "Mod" in the American term and dandy increasingly became associated with psychedelic rock and the early hippie movement and, by 1967, more exotic looks had come into vogue, such as Nehru jackets and love beads. Its trappings were reflected on popular American TV shows such as Laugh-In and The Mod Squad.