Journalists would have us believe it's public-school leavers v the salt of the earth in the battle of the charts. Is that really the case?
Baroness Warsi was right to speak out. Mumford-phobia really has passed the dinner-party test. The unanimous approval which greeted Jon Savage's recent pithy description of Mumford & Sons as "Tory rock-lite" was a measure of the antipathy which currently hangs over these waistcoat-wearing pseudo-troubadours. And that was before they'd inveigled Bob Dylan into their sinister entryist conspiracy at the Grammys.
In a month when anger about the shrinking social catchment area of British rock has found James Blunt's mum writing wounded emails to Radio 4's Today programme, the element of class tension in this debate has become increasingly clearly defined. But the more seemingly straightforward the parallels between the suffocating yoke of "Nu-folk" oppression and the nepotistic elitism of an expensively educated Conservative-led coalition, the easier it is for politics and aesthetics to get in a tangle.
The reason Savage's three-words-and-a-hyphen put-down works so well is because it begins and ends with the music. It's fine to rail against the poshness of the Mumfords (or James Blunt, or the Vaccines) if it incorporates an aspect of their music or political implications that you don't like. But if the link between their respective upbringings and your disapproval is directly causal, then you have to come up with a pretty good reason why that oft-cited litany of more critically favoured scions of the middle and upper classes ? from Joe Strummer and the Strokes to privately educated Biggie Smalls ? should somehow remain exempt.
Versions of just such a point have been made from both ends of the political spectrum in recent weeks. But what has tended to be left out of the impassioned ensuing debate is any analysis of the media and demographic contexts in which the current debate is unfolding. When it was first published ? in The Word, way back in November ? the piece which eventually bump-started the whole too-posh-to-rock bandwagon got no kind of push at all. The Word's editorial high-ups did take the trouble to come up with an elaborate Traffic-related pun for the headline ("The Low Spark of Well-Heeled Boys" clever wording, cheers), but once that job was done they were quite happy to hide away Simon Price's explosive ? and, though subsequently quibbled over, essentially irrefutable ? statistical analysis of the increasingly high proportion of UK chart acts to be either public or stage-school educated, in one of the magazine's many backwaters.
It would be overstating the case (well, slightly) to describe The Word as the house journal of the New Labour media establishment's cultural mid-life crisis. But in the light of the fact Mark Ellen was in a band with Tony Blair at Oxford University, it is easy to see why its editors might feel a little uneasy about giving too much prominence to Simon Price's impassioned call to arms. What was interesting was that the readership was similarly unmoved by talk of a "dispiriting toff takeover", The Word's message board being more exercised by such vital questions of the day as to whether it's OK for posters to mention things they've read in Mojo.
Price, formerly best known as combative south Wales Boswell to the Manic Street Preachers' collective Johnson, has since found a more appreciative audience for his new incarnation as the Andrew Neil of rock's meritocratic fightback. Oxford-educated erstwhile Select editor turned political commentator John Harris may come from the other side of the tracks to Price, but both are of the same journalistic generation. Their visions of popular music's political function were forged in the era of the Specials' Ghost Town and Eton Rifles by the Jam (themselves, lest we forget ? and Jon Savage certainly wouldn't want us to ? reformed Thatcherites), a time when British rock seemed to act as a counterbalance to social inequality, not a celebration of it.
To grasp how much has changed in the intervening three decades, consider NME's attempt to up the class-war ante by putting Strokes-esque posh boys the Vaccines and would-be working-class heroes Brother on alternate covers of their first issue of this year. Without delving as deeply into the actual circumstances of Brother's upbringing as one well-informed online respondent here, it was clear to anyone who saw them on Channel 4's brazen Popworld knock-off Freshly Squeezed that this band's salt-of-the-earth credentials are, at best, open to doubt. In short, Brother make their fellow Slough ambassadors Hard-Fi look like the Cockney Rejects: the whole "new Blur v Oasis" thing was all over the minute one of them used the word "ethos".
The historical trajectory of British pop's bourgeoisification can be traced most clearly in what Karl Marx sadly never got around to calling "the UK power-ballad nexus". Picture yourself in a series of large Glastonbury crowds over the 10 years from 1994 onwards, singing along to a wilfully vague lyric cunningly designed to promote sensations of mass emotional uplift. Now look at the stage and note the incremental increase in poshness from Oasis to Embrace to Travis to Coldplay to Keane. Uncanny, isn't it? And as if the transition from the rude simian vigour of Liam Gallagher to the ramrod-straight reticence of Tim Rice-Oxley didn't already carry a sufficiently inappropriate echo of the process of human evolutionary development, Take That ? the only group you could put at both the beginning and the end of the above list (like those pre-digital pranksters who would run round from one end of old school photos to the other, taking advantage of lengthy exposure times to appear twice) ? only went and made subliminal reference to it on the cover of Progress.
As with Take That's witty and provocative visual commentary, the most interesting responses to this ongoing debate have tended to come from unexpected quarters. I especially enjoyed NME writer James McMahon's well-thought-out change of heart following his initial fury at January 2009's controversial Observer Music Monthly These New Puritans and Foals cover story. And it's not often you'll read the words "The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick made a good point in his blog" in this column, but you just have. For those of you who are too proud to follow that link, the nub of McCormick's gist was that the perceived ? and actual ? edging out of non-middle-class voices only really applies in one quite specific musical area. Outside the narrow spectrum of Q-and-Brits-friendly mainstream pop/rock which stretches from Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons to Razorlight and the Vaccines via Florence Welch and Lily Allen, life goes on pretty much as it always has.
From the pristine shop floor of The X Factor's reality TV dream factory to the grimy mean streets of the music now-much-less-likely-to-be-euphemistically-termed "urban", British pop's promise of escape from the rigid constraints of the UK class system is heard as clearly as ever. Try to convince Leona Lewis or Professor Green or Dizzee Rascal or Cher Lloyd that the download charts are now ? like quince jelly ? the preserve solely of the upper classes and see how well you get on.
There's even good news for those who might otherwise feel themselves excluded from this uplifting narrative of social mobility. This month's two very best pieces of music writing ? Julian Cope's hilarious explosion of rage at the memory of his wife's texted discussion of the football results with environmental agent provocateur Mark Kennedy and Interview magazine's hugely informative and entertaining encounter between Will Oldham (aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy) and R Kelly ? are both the work of musicians from unapologetically haut-bourgeois family backgrounds. If Julian and Will can shrug off the crushing burden of hereditary privilege to construct mythologies with something to offer listeners from every kind of class background, maybe a few of Britain's new breed of faux-indie aristocrats can one day manage to do the same.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/feb/23/maggoty-lamb-rock-class-war
Dianne Feinstein Bill Frist Newt Gingrich Rudolph Giuliani Al Gore
No comments:
Post a Comment