‘This can’t be the scene’: Nostalgia and Representations of Mod in Quadrophenia and Absolute Beginners

This paper examines critical commentary on The Who’s Quadrophenia as well as Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners and other prose writing to locate the nostalgia for youth culture, specifically Mod, that these texts articulate. Additionally, this paper performs a comparative narrative analysis of Absolute Beginners and Quadrophenia which establishes that these texts speak to Mod/pre-Mod superficiality and its ultimate failure as a subculture rather that its potency as a subcultural form. As a result, a comparison of these two texts calls the nostalgia that the album particularly generates into question