Article 2: Generation Z
BRITT SPENCER
Istopped enjoying festivals on Saturday 4 July 2015, at around four in the afternoon. It was a beautiful day - London was in the throes of a heatwave - and I was on my way to Wireless in London's Finsbury Park. Kendrick Lamar was headlining - an incredible coup for a UK day festival - with Childish Gambino and Stormzy also billing. It was not a line-up I imagined would resonate with children.
And yet, as my friends and I got off the tube, excited and joyous, we were obstructed by what appeared to be the contents of a local crèche. Tiny girls clad in denim nappies and miniature vests, their faces covered in glue, glitter and smeared with paint, their lips suctioned to the funnel of their plastic water (vodka) bottles like a newborn to its teat, tottered around the platform, intermittently screeching. They must have been barely 14 years old. As we followed them to the tube exit, a few of them collapsing along the way, one smashing her glass bottle of Glen's, my smirk curdled. We were all heading the same way.
Inside the park were thousands more. Boys, guffawing like small cubs, were hoisting themselves up and down scattered pull-up bars. Young girls meticulously applied neon paint to each other's cheeks as if preparing for tribal warfare. Children who looked as young as 12 were leading sheepish guardians around the park as if by invisible shackles. You think I'm describing one of Banksy's dystopian playgrounds? An episode of Black Mirror? Wrong: this is what modern childhood looks like through the eyes of a 24-year-old. Yes, you read that correctly - this isn't a sanctimonious thinkpiece penned by a middle-aged malcontent who writes letters to the Telegraph about plastic bags and millennials. I am the millennial, and I am aghast.
Five years ago, I would have shut down clichéd discussion about how the age of innocence has been buckled and cut short by smartphones, internet and social media. But now, I take it back. Now, I want to talk about it. Because now, selfishly, it's affecting me. Society's increasing prematurity is impinging upon the most hallowed event of my social calendar: festivals. (That makes me sound a bit cooler, right?)
Yes, I am white. Yes, I am privileged. And, yes, I believe childhood should be wrapped in cotton wool. I went to my first festival, Reading, at the age of 16. That was in 2010. Now, it seems children attend their first festival at the age of 12 (I have a special age-deducing device lodged in my retina). According to my tediously detailed diaries, which I consulted, excruciatingly, for this piece, at the age of 12 I was still "playing restaurants" with crates of plastic food and my eight-year-old sister, or attending supervised "sleepovers" and swimming parties. (Did I mention I grew up in Wimbledon?)
Yes, I am white. Yes, I am privileged. And, yes, I believe childhood should be wrapped in cotton wool. I went to my first festival, Reading, at the age of 16. That was in 2010. Now, it seems children attend their first festival at the age of 12 (I have a special age-deducing device lodged in my retina). According to my tediously detailed diaries, which I consulted, excruciatingly, for this piece, at the age of 12 I was still "playing restaurants" with crates of plastic food and my eight-year-old sister, or attending supervised "sleepovers" and swimming parties. (Did I mention I grew up in Wimbledon?)
Reading Festival, a post-GCSE rite of passage, was thus a milestone I felt I'd earned with age. I'd gone, blissfully slowly, through all the middle-class motions of adolescence: I got my first phone at 13, along with permission to walk up the road unsupervised. My friend and I went to a café and bought a fizzy drink with our own pocket money and thought it the most symbolic moment of our entire lives (I kept a sugar packet and stuck it in my diary). At 14, I got my first email address (until my parents realised it was cutekitty@hotmail.co.uk and promptly deleted it) then had my first illicit sips of vodka decanted from a friend's parents' drinking cabinet. At 15, I went to the odd house party and got drunk for the first time. Sixteen was the appropriate time for Reading, and Reading only. Every other festival felt too mature.
When I went to my second festival two years later, Creamfields, which was 18-plus, it symbolised my transition into adulthood. My music preferences matured with age, as did my festival choices. I thought that, upon entering my twenties, the events I went to would continue to reflect my ripening taste. Yet the opposite has happened. I've gone beyond full circle - I'm 24 and I'm sharing gigs with kids.
Over the last five years, as regular festivals have got pricier and ticket sales have dipped, the day festival has prospered. More ticket sales bags better headliners. From Wild Life to Wireless and Lovebox to British Summer Time, for lovers of pop, dance and rap, the day festival has become the UK's best sonic event. Unfortunately, for anyone over the age of 21, it's also become a teen and preteen mecca. Affordable, short, within an easy ride on the tube or train, it's every parent's godsend - they can send their children off for eight hours of daylight with a fully charged iPhone and continue forbidding Glastonbury. You don't even need to be 18 to attend. Anyone under the age of 16 can buy a ticket if they cajole a guardian into coming with them. Not that this matters - my sister's been attending 16-plus day festivals since she was 14 (and, at 4ft 9in with the air of a pygmy marmoset, looked about ten). "No one checks," she said. "I even bought alcohol."
Over the last five years, as regular festivals have got pricier and ticket sales have dipped, the day festival has prospered. More ticket sales bags better headliners. From Wild Life to Wireless and Lovebox to British Summer Time, for lovers of pop, dance and rap, the day festival has become the UK's best sonic event. Unfortunately, for anyone over the age of 21, it's also become a teen and preteen mecca. Affordable, short, within an easy ride on the tube or train, it's every parent's godsend - they can send their children off for eight hours of daylight with a fully charged iPhone and continue forbidding Glastonbury. You don't even need to be 18 to attend. Anyone under the age of 16 can buy a ticket if they cajole a guardian into coming with them. Not that this matters - my sister's been attending 16-plus day festivals since she was 14 (and, at 4ft 9in with the air of a pygmy marmoset, looked about ten). "No one checks," she said. "I even bought alcohol."
It might seem that I have lived a sheltered, almost Amish life. But while my friends and I kept the years in which we couldn't handle our drink behind closed doors (so that by the time we got to Reading only one of us ended up in the medical tent), now we must watch 14- year-olds get drunk for the first time right under our noses. While we, aged 12, consumed age-appropriate music via Top Of The Pops and learnt the choreography of Hairspray and Men In Black in dance group, now, children of a similar age publicly twerk, "skank" and figuratively deflower themselves through lyrics they shouldn't understand in the first place. I am shocked and I am appalled (and a little bit naive, maybe). But more than anything I am indignant, because my festival days are numbered (35 and I'm out) and so they are precious. And they are, at present, endangered.
The problem is, give a child some 4G and they lose ten years of innocence in minutes. According to a recent report by Influence Central, the average age for your first smartphone is ten years old (three years before I got my Motorola flip), 70 per cent of children below the age of 12 search the web unsupervised (my attempts were foiled by the dial-up connection when my parents used the land line) and 50 per cent get their first social media account before the age of 12. Through YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, they can mimic any culture, trend or person they like before they've even figured out if they've lost all their baby teeth yet.
That's why last year, at Wild Life and Wireless, where the line-ups reflected rap replacing rock as the most popular musical genre worldwide, every other 12- to 15-year-old seemed to be posturing as a grime MC. Boys were clad in socks, sliders, tracksuits and caps, while their female counterparts were in Adidas caps, oversized Nike hoodies and Air Max trainers. Can't picture it? YouTube "Little T" and observe a well-combed child of 12 with his hood up, roaming a council estate (he really wants you to know he's on a council estate) rapping about "beef" with other kids, snapping spines, "pulling out the blade" and robbing cars. No doubt if I braved this summer's Wireless, I'd see him somewhere in the crowd, fist bumping his peers muttering, "Gang, gang, gang" and captioning pictures "roadman" on Instagram. Roadman (slang for drug dealer, who by nature of their job is always "on road") is generation Z's term du jour. Search the tag on Instagram and more than 30,000 entries come up - none posted by an actual roadman, obviously, but by a group of ten-year-old boys shooting gun fingers in the park, posing with a policewoman, for instance. "Me 'n' the lads got some by the police for fowl language," reads the caption. "Barny Chocolate" has left a comment: "Big up PC Laura." Why, at 24, must I share festival crowds with every little Barny Chocolate in Britain?
"So forget day festivals and go to Bestival with other adults!" you say. (Leeds, Reading and V Fest became unacceptable upon finishing GCSEs, Boomtown is full of syringes and Creamfields may have been symbolic but was a big mistake.) I've been to Bestival annually since 2013, but each year, as it loses more customers to the day festivals, its line-up, activities and food stalls worsen. Last summer, it was rumoured to have only sold half its tickets. Plus, my 19-year-old sister went too, and, let me tell you, I've never felt so uncool in my life. There she was, surrounded by more friends than I could count, and there I was, with two. There she was, roaming freely about the mud, losing her purse, her keys and her tent (she really did lose her tent), staying up till dawn on the Sunday, and there I was, refreshing my email in a Portaloo and checking my Sunday afternoon train ticket that would get me home with eight hours of shuteye before work. When I did get home, swapping my festival burner for my iPhone (something a generation Z would never do lest their friends, no longer tracking their every waking moment on Instagram, thought them dead) I was pained to find she'd shamed me on Snapchat. "Too old for this shit," she'd captioned a picture of me yawning in my yellow poncho.
It's no wonder, then, that millennials are allegedly the dullest generation, that all we do is stay at home sleeping. Last month, I was called a cougar in a nightclub (you see - not sleeping) by what appeared to be a small child. (Did I look that young when I went underage clubbing?) He and his hairless friends made me feel like some strange pervert, roaming London's club circuit.
So perhaps we need a new festival solely for millennials. To protect us. To protect my innocence. To protect my summer. We could call it "Hashtag Millennial". At #Millennial, only those between the ages of 21 and 35 could buy a ticket, providing they enter a valid driving licence number upon payment. The theme each year would be "You Do You, Honey!", allowing millennials to just be themselves. Each ticket would come with a free glass of organic wine or a green matcha latte, a free #BeWoke T-Shirt, and a #GlutenKills wristband. VIP tickets would include free entry to the Yoga Pod, a free go on the #MakeYourOwnMeme stall and a one-year Netflix subscription to be redeemed in the Netflix & Chill area of the site (opposite the #BrexitTherapy tent and between the #VeganLivesMatter camp and #MilkYourOwnAlmonds farm). Finally, tickets would be priced according to individual salaries. Right, I think that covers everything. Though... on second thoughts, that sounds like hell on earth, doesn't it?
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