No description available.

The Eighties were a time in Western popular music that seemed to exist only by virtue of it coming after something else---namely, the 1960s counterculture and the punk rock of the 1970s. Inheriting both the failure of permanent cultural revolution and the intense cynicism that is punk's strongest legacy, youth cultures in the 1980s found it increasingly difficult to live in the present. This thesis labels this historical dilemma postmodern. It will show how SPIN magazine attempted to move past this dilemma in order to assert a unique identity for 1980s popular music and youth cultures. In particular, John Leland, a columnist for SPIN, appropriated a pop aesthetic as an identity marker and, in the process, questioned the supposed ineffectiveness of pop music for a political postmodernism. An analysis of Leland's writing uncovers what accounts of this era tend to ignore: the social function of postmodernism.