…by Sarah Thornton. An examination specifically about the late 80s/early 90s electronic dance scene. Thornton conceptualises several aspects of late 80s UK youth culture which may have seemed obvious to those ‘in’ the culture at the time but which now seem a little quaint, particularly the idea of Subcultural Capital, which was probably understood perfectly by industries who catered to young people for decades but the exploitation of which now reeks of sledgehammer desperation when executed by the puzzled souls of the advertising industry trying to come to terms with the net’s consequences on a generation or two of young and youngish people.
Another immediate criticism would be her failure to take into account the consequences of the 60s generation gaining middle age and what it means for their children when it comes to establishing a distinctive identity of their own.
Thornton does, eventually, touch on the direct political aspects of club culture, but dismisses the anti-Criminal Justice Bill movement as ‘poorly attended peripheral activities’, when, the Hyde Park demo, for instance was huge and national demonstrations and activities amounted to the strongest political movement since the actions against the Poll Tax. By failing to mention the Exodus Movement in Luton, for instance, she misses a chance to bring together and examine several other strands very apparent in ‘club culture: the legacy of a decade of political activity; the collision of different generations and skin colours; the lifestyle mash-ups of anarchist minded punks and hedonistic ravers.
Which brings me to travelers, although that description doesn’t do justice to the activities of the hugely influential groups of multi-generational people still (just about)on the road at the turn of the decade. Their influence on raves helped turn a moment in a field on an E into a genuine life-changing experience for some, particularly the marginalised.
Overall, the book has a metropolitan bias, tending to ignore the rest of the UK and concentrate on London when talking about the rave scene, doesn’t follow up with what the experience really meant for a large group of people (for some it was a true epiphany, a religious experience) and tends to emphasise club culture’s essential hedonism over any real political meaning.
The explanation of ‘enculturation’ though, is excellent and her critiques of past sociological tomes are sharp and well researched. If Sarah Thornton has bent a situation to her argument (against the idea of youth cultures as ‘resistant’ to a ‘mainstream’) then she won’t have been the first. The result is a great book only a nitpicker like me would nitpick.
On the outskirts of New Pitsligo in a quarry in the hills is the bizarre & beautiful Last Bus Company, home of a vegan cafe, recording studio and two double decker buses.
Buckey, a depressed & depressing town on the Moray Firth – here’s the tea dance man at the Royal British Legion, preparing to play electronic waltzes & foxtrots at deafening treble for the enthusiastic dancers.
John O’Groats – the end of the island. Startling to find this amazing house, looking like a Berlin squat sitting yards from the harbour.
At the most northerly tip of Britain is the Engine Room, part of an unmanned lighthouse complex. The Engine Room has been sold to a local musician who holds illegal raves there, from time to time.
Similar to the town I grew up in, similar to all new towns in the UK (and, according to John Clancy who I’m on tour with right now, also St Louis and any number of other towns & cities in the USA).
Deep in the Kingdom shopping centre, a strange experiment as these colourful, cheery hippos (above) are mutated from these sinister looking zombie hippos (below) by two artsy looking guys who, I’m guessing, are on loan from the Glasgow art mafia.
There’s something eerily thrilling about the centre. They’re not afraid of shadow (perhaps because they’re saving electricity) which creates contrast in what would otherwise be a permanent, solid daylight of tubes and bulbs.
And the sculptures in the entrance to the Rothes Halls, where the venues and theaters reside (all in the same complex as the shops) have a disturbing, gleeful immediacy, a sense of humour (the couple, above, obviously in the middle of an argument and the miners, below, who look like they’re happily guiding their enemies to Hades).
Nearly finished Dick Hebdige’s dense academic crystalisation of the phenomenon of UK punk, first published in 1979 but slightly updated in subsequent years.
Why would anyone want to examine punk in this way? In some ways, it can feel like a vindication, a decoration from an Intelligent Person, for someone of my age – yes, it really was important, this book is saying, so you should feel proud to have been a part of such a significant cultural and social happening. There will be others who will feel it’s a bit of a waste of time, even that the point of punk, if it had one, was to make this kind of thinking redundant, or, at least, to confine it to a world of middle management and Whitehall departments.
To be honest, the book has caused me a few sniggers. Dick is obviously a bit of a fan of the chaos and fun which swirled around punk, but his readings of punk’s effects and causes and, particularly, what it all meant to the kids who were ‘in’ it can come off like the classic eager vicar at the church hall disco.
There are ‘mood’ mistakes, too, which, probably, at the time, didn’t seem as important as getting his source references accurately placed, but, in the context of taking the most minute details of style and examining them from an academic point of view now seem to be sloppy: if you’re going to highlight the relationship between punk & reggae, for instance, you need to put it alongside the relationship between punk & disco or punk and psychedelia or punk and mod – not as interesting, perhaps, but just as relevant as including the often lipservice nods punks gave to reggae (in fact, there was a strand of punks who hated all kinds of ‘black’ music – not because they were nazis but just because it wasn’t ‘there’s’).
Perhaps it’s the need to make a sense of a mess, for whatever reasons, which inevitably leads this kind of examination into dead ends of supposition. When confronted with an explosion of creativity and chaotic ideas it might be an idea to introduce a taste of some of that energy to make your descriptions accurate. But then it wouldn’t be ‘academic’, would it?
Dick has introduced me to some new words, which sum up bits and pieces of my own beliefs and interests nicely. I now realise I am an enthusiastic bricoleur and that I have a deep interest in semiotics.
In response to a piece Dave Allen wrote on his Pampelmoose blog which was, in turn, a response to a piece by Neal Gabler in the NY Times, the latter lamenting the end of the ‘big idea’.
This small idea proposed by Gabler that there was a time when great thinkers regularly sat on the talk show sofas of national TV must be bollocks. If they did, they were tarts, just like the rest of the showbizzers and I can’t imagine their bite-sized segments would have been any deeper than your average Twitter post. Their intelectual ‘reach’ would have remained to an exclusive group of fellow travellers, rather than the apparently more enlightened general population. Did more people read Arthur Miller because he married Norma Jean? Is that what he was after (or was it love)?
Equally, I can’t see a real difference between the music biz of today and that of yesteryear apart from in the technology. The relationships haven’t changed fundamentally between the ‘business’ side & the artists, the one still royally shafting the other, be it Apple, Sony or Google doing the shafting or Mumford & Sons bending over.
If there is a difference it’s in the kids who listen to the music. Pop has, rightly, lost its place in the informational chain. Let’s be honest: pop groups affected the mood, they occasionally mentioned names and places you might look up later (Ohio/South Africa) but beyond that we pretty much added to the essential Soma ingredients and helped keep the people happy with their lot. Whilst the Weathermen scouted for targets the Laurel Canyon set drifted away on premium bud… of course there’s a chance the Weathermen were listening to The Fugs as they criss-crossed the States looking for buildings to bomb up but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t The Fugs who lit the fuses.
Since the student demonstrations last year in the UK I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that the latest generation have a much healthier view of pop culture; I don’t think they need someone else to soundtrack their dissent, when they’re perfectly able to knock up something themselves, if they feel the need. But I’m not sure they always feel the need, which makes me glad – it’s very distracting in a campaign to take time out to work on a new tune. This lot might actually get something done. Fifty years after pop screamed its arrival the House of Lords still sit not far from one of the queen’s bigger gaffs in the UK and big business and bigots still determine which war and for how long the USA get into. We messed up, our generation. Too busy oiling quiffs and shining Doc Martens, probably.
There was a time when pop was essential – how else to find out what kids the other side of the Atlantic or even south of Sheffield were thinking? Now it sits in the same place as the dance orchestras of pre to post WW2. It’s shrunk and expanded simultaneously. There are loads of secret little clubs that play idiosyncratic sounds to a select few. Then there are Hollywood spectacular audio/visual trinkets that spare no expense and are clever rather than intelligent and appeal to millions, crossing over neatly into Saturday evening light entertainment TV, which, incidentally, is stronger than ever.
Meanwhile, people get on with their lives as pop music transforms from a vital, pulsing teen beat to a curated art form, with dedicated critics and historians who can determine its place and influence in and on society. And on the other hand, one of the best live bands on telly is the karaoke specialists who cover tunes on the loathsome Strictly Come Dancing.
The current situation seems more appropriate than middle-aged men trying desperately to keep the equally middle-aged or older pop performer pumped with rebel steroids and plastic revolutionary surgery in a desperate bid to keep him or her recognisable, or, even more embarrassing, trying to urge young artists into becoming a facsimile of an older generation’s heroes.
Let pop get old with dignity. Separate the business from the art form and start to appreciate the former whilst trying to knock some sense into the latter.
And appreciate this new cultural rank which pop occupies. You can’t re-run the past and who would want to? There’s space created for lots of little ideas to run around and occasionally coagulate, now that pop is on the top shelf, with the big books about the industrial revolution and the romantics. We don’t have to squint and pretend that Strummer didn’t come from a diplomat’s family, that there’s really an ideology in Lydon’s lyrics, that Rastafarians aren’t members of an hysterical, bigoted religious sect, that Brian Wilson isn’t properly strange as well as a genius pop maestro, that Jagger was singing on the revolution, that Cobain was anything more than just another junkie rock star.
We can be clear eyed and truthful about the idiocies and dumb nature and the glorious, soul affirming nature of pop music. And not expect anything more of it than, say, we would of Phil Spector (keep your gun in your pocket) or Chris Brown (keep your fists to yourself) or Florence (please leave churchified house classics well alone and stick to your jolly hockeysticks stadium pop).
Without a Rolling Stones to make a pretend revolution and take the sting and motivation from a national youth movement there’s a chance Nixon won’t get re-elected; without a Sex Pistols pointing teenage rage and alienation at their latest incendiary release that Thatcher won’t make her first term, that Perry will encounter an intelligent, motivated opposition, that Cameron’s coalition will be his last. Then some kid can write a pop song about it that we can all dance to.
A peculiar and marvelous exhibition of David Mach’s musings on the King James bible. Some huge examples of photocopied collage depicting heavens and hells and other notable excerpts from the book, all featuring a range of figures sliced from old books and magazines.
It’s weirdly modern, especially considering so many of the thousands of cut out figures seem to have come from publications from previous decades. Perhaps appropriately, considering the way the bible has been used over the centuries, there aren’t many black or brown faces in the heaven scenes, but it’s properly multi-national when it comes to the hells and the several scenes of the ark.
There are also three large, amazing sculptures, made from bent wire, as well as some smaller versions.
For such heavy subject matter it made me feel suprisingly cheerful, uplifted, even. Especially when I noticed a severely mutated page from Guy Peelhart’ & Nick Cohen’s Rock Dreams slotted into a ‘room’ in one of the outstretched arms of the two-torso-ed christ figure (you need to see it!).
I remember being puzzled, as a kid, when I read old accounts of German and Italian nazis during the second world war which described them as ‘gangsters’ but it partly explains how it must have seemed a brilliant idea to our current home-grown crop to set up something specifically targeting football hooligan firms who are custom built to fight as a gang.
Such old fashioned tactics of trying to take the streets need to be countered in traditional ways, hence the march and rally in Edinburgh yesterday. But there was a definite air of bemused indifference from those not taking part and I could see the power of ignoring the goons until they went away. Trouble is, they don’t seem to go away. As much as the world moves on and the majority of people get more sussed there’s always this rump of provocative, self-hating psychos who encourage others who maybe aren’t too smart or confident, (without several pints in them) and, if they are left to their own devices, cause misery to people who are ‘different’ from them.
How tired must those old campaigners who remember Mosley, Hitler & Mussolini feel, when, decades on, it looks like there’s no end to the same old hatred-filled people
as if there’s some kind of hot-house breeding ground that keeps on producing them, against all the laws of nature. I wonder if George Grosz would recognise their ugly faces? I wonder if they’re related with some ancient gene to bygone nazis? The fascist gene. The nazi gene.
“Justice for me is someone being punished for what they’ve done. The person who killed Mark needs to take the blame for it. Someone needs to be made accountable for what happened. We’ve heard everyone talking about gangs but the police are the biggest gang of all, an institutionalised gang. And like any other shooter in any other gang the person who killed Mark should be punished. Someone needs to be made accountable for this and we’re not going to stop until we get justice.”
