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You survey the wimps and the morons that surround us today and you wonder, where are the stylish nihilists? Where are the bona fide British badboys, with their alien slang, ratty posturing, casual violence and wanton promiscuity? Sure, Dappy possesses some of those traits, but he appears at the tail end of this lineage as a kind of bastard child of the bastard children. I suppose the big thing that's missing here is charm, and if we're honest, Dappy and his Mail Online badboy crew possess all the charm of a third-hand bukkake VHS.Finding reasons for this gradual decline is more difficult than pointing at it and saying that it exists. Perhaps it's just that the generation gap that all those old British badboys exploited to make the parents of teenagers fear them isn't there any more, and hasn't really been there since grime (if you're an optimist), rave (if you're a realist) or punk (if you're a pessimist). If the generation gap exists at all now, it's likely to reside in technological advances; your mum probably finds iPads more terrifying and confusing than she does the Harry Styles or Spencer Matthews she sees on telly and in the Mail every week. Or by Dappy, who she might be vaguely aware of because his mate is a judge on The X Factor.
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