sense: Obama *should* know what he's up against ...

this shit

Somehow this seems a grimly appropriate end to the Bush era, for the last eight years in the US have seen a glorification of kneejerk bigotry against the other, of the whole "oh, he looks a bit foreign - he must be suspicious" mindset.  What in any progressive society would have been a worldview to be ashamed of seemed, at times, to be almost the sole guiding principle of the state.  But if the US can make a profound and genuine move away from this sort of attitude over the next four years - in other words, if it can return to its founding principles and to the single biggest reason why it has for so long been so attractive to so many - things could yet fundamentally change for the better for all of us.

the ultimate end-of-empire irony

is here.  Specifically, between 18:12 and 18:17.

What a deep irony it seems now, the idea that rock'n'roll - more specifically the vague, tantalising early hints here at the now all-too-familiar idea that the firepower of rock can be part of a broader campaign against whoever the West's bogeyman is this week - could possibly be seen as somehow allied with, on the side of, the last roar of the British Empire before it very visibly submitted forever to the realities of American dominance.  Now, we're so used to the idea of rock'n'roll as an anti-Suez force, as part of the wave that blew in to overpower the old Britain in tandem with its geopolitical humiliation, that it is genuinely shocking to see that (as I'm guessing, anyway) anyone ever thought (and it would literally have only been for a matter of weeks) that it could be allied to the Suez adventure, could be used as part of a British campaign under its own steam, in defiance of Washington.  Halfway between then and now, the legacy of the Falklands War - Britain's largest-scale military action under its own steam since Suez - did untold (arguably still unfolding) damage to British pop as measured by the singles chart, but it could hardly be seen as any kind of rock'n'roll war, partially because it started when the UK singles chart was at its absolute peak and also in probably its most un-American phase ever, and partially because it was purely a British war when the rock generation had yet to become Britain's military and governmental elite (although it is hard to find fault with the comments of some NME writers after it had ended, criticising the absorption of much of British pop into uncritical support for that adventure - it is as key a starting point for the British context of "The Eighties", as the phrase is most commonly used, as Gaitskell's death and de Gaulle's non for "The Sixties" and Cobain's and - far, far more importantly - John Smith's death for what Britpop became).  Although the Falklands was not a rock'n'roll war, it nevertheless set the stage - in a (classically Thatcherite) manner that many of its greatest cheerleaders would not personally have supported - for Britain's involvement in wars that were.

The most important difference, from the perspective of how popular culture interrelates with military adventures, between the time of Suez and the geopolitical epoch that will hopefully end in seventeen days' time is that, in 1956, rock'n'roll was - in truth - entirely on the side of social progressiveness and anti-imperialism (at least in the context of what Britain was attempting to do), something it has not been for a very long time now.  In truth, whoever wrote the words "Nasser's Rock'n'Roll" was nearly half a century too early as far as Middle Eastern military adventures were concerned.  He or she was wrong in 1956.  But had a supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq approvingly written the words "Saddam's Rock'n'Roll" they would have been entirely correct.

The West Coast Main Line: my final word (hopefully)

I never asserted that everything about the West Coast Main Line corridor and its influence on British culture was evil (I may have said that it has curdled from exciting future to narrow, repressive New Norm, an entirely different assessment).  I did however say that the dominance of the WCML cities' white working class of British pop has greatly declined, for multiple reasons: the middle class having taken on pop as they have absorbed commercialism more generally, the crushing of what was, even in the 1980s, a greater resistance to debt-fuelled consumerism in Yorkshire, south Wales etc. and thus an increasing pop-friendliness in those places, the impact of 60 years of immigration fundamentally altering the fabric of the WCML cities and thus creating an entirely different form of pop (although of course that has been going on for a long time - three decades will very, very soon have passed since 2-Tone).

But the fundamental changes that have weakened a few cities' grip on British pop are as much technological as anything else.  Classic example: everyone knows that the Beatles were hugely influenced by the fact that they had access to R&B records (otherwise almost unobtainable in the UK and receiving zero media exposure) because Liverpool was a port, almost everyone knows that the Stones could obtain similar records in London for the same reasons, it's like knowing that Citizen Kane is A Very Good Film, it's that obvious.  But today the closest equivalent music can be heard wherever you are in the UK by multiple means that quite simply weren't around then - I almost feel like I'm talking to five-year-olds when I say this, but the main point I have always tried to make is that this fact must, by its very nature, make a vast difference to the entire nature of pop in Britain, every single aspect of the way it is produced and consumed. Where pop was once a treat, it is now as mundane as light orchestral music was then - and it is the WCML cities who have lost their dominance as a result of the normalisation of pop.

And hand in hand with the normalisation of pop goes the sheer passing of time.  Listening to "To Know Him Is To Love Him" (charting in the UK half a century ago this week) earlier on, I could hardly believe it was as old as Second World War songs used to be.  The oldest schoolteachers still in work in any great numbers are of the generation that screamed at the Beatles, and even they will be gone before too long.  What does this change?  Nothing, except everything.

alarmingly apt, somehow

The disappearance of Gerry Rafferty

30 years on, "Baker Street" and "Night Owl" seem all the more perfect for their moment, its disillusionment and desperate nerves for the future, a moment uncannily, frighteningly like our own.  It's as if he had to disappear at this moment, his own sense of security within himself somehow destroyed by that brief upsurge of success, his past rendering him unable to take part in Scotland's new assertion of itself. His recent life has undoubtedly been, to say the least, like the protagonist of "Night Owl" at the end.  But I hope he returns, if only because I genuinely believe there is more to him than mere MOR comfort food.

Why I don't miss the pay channels

I thought I'd miss the subscription satellite channels much more than I do.  Having Freeview and keeping the Sky dish up for the free channels (plus copious amounts of radio) provides the best of all worlds - you are saved from the unspeakable Edmonds (the comparatively likeable Deal or No Deal excepted), you are now also saved from Madeley and Finnigan (fuck those first names), you are saved from darts fans pissing all over Planet Funk's shimmering "Chase the Sun", but you still get Channel U, Flava, Flaunt (which had a fantastic New Year's Day retrospective - Stardust, Darude, "Out of Space", all the best aspects of the 1990s, basically) and, eek, Clubland TV.

The above "eek" is a natural reflex reaction on my part - the world it inhabits, in its purest form, is a place I would no more want to be than the world of (the thankfully now lost to me) Kerrang! TV and (the still sadly available) Scuzz.  It's a working class territorially protective of its whiteness (and thus the BNP's natural heartland), and some of it is - even to me - terrifying (I'm not sure whether I want to see "Caramell Dancing" ever again - I'm sort of glad I saw it once, but the thought of it brings on a shudder between my toes that I don't want to repeat).  It is also hard to forgive Clubland TV for its promotion of Scooter's thankfully unsuccessful collaboration with Status Quo (easily the former's worst ever song, because Quo, with all their petty, curtain-twitching rock'n'roll racism - and we all know that is the very worst, because most mealy-mouthed and hypocritical, kind of racism - represent the antithesis of everything that otherwise makes Scooter so great).  Nor do I think Ultrabeat's more recent work is up to the standards of the heartstopping "Pretty Green Eyes" and the joyous mirage of "Feelin' Fine". But I still find myself watching it disarmingly often, because the disconnection of this wholly un-American music from tired old pseudo-rebellion overpowers any associations with the lost tribes of Burnley or Stoke-on-Trent (there is no attempt to pretend that this pop is something it isn't and cannot be) and because it gives songs as good as Gigi D'Agostino's "Bla Bla Bla" (almost a decade after the fact in that case, unbelievably) and Laurent Wolf's much more recent"No Stress" a time and space they have never otherwise been allowed in this septic isle.  Indeed, at its best Clubland TV defies its own English provincialism and evokes a parallel universe of pop where the Channel is as narrow and the Atlantic as wide psychologically as they are geographically.

Yet it is still Channel U I always return to, because of all the music channels this is the one which best reflects why many on the Left supported deregulation of broadcasting in the 1980s - it is, in fact, what deregulated broadcasting ought to have been (and would have been in a Left-libertarian society) as opposed to what it generally actually has been (I will praise the post-1990 order of broadcasting to the extent that it has been an ally of convenience allowing a channel like this to exist, but not in terms of the ideology it was built on and which its most popular manifestations relentlessly promote). Unconnected as it is to any broadcaster which is forced to work under ludicrous expectations by a press which regards itself almost as Britain's true government, it can do what it does without the constant fear of official quasi-censorship being imposed on it.  And of course Chipmunk, Tinchy Stryder et al are a pop in exile, a pop desperate for the place that the elite's retrenchment through pop denies them.

The one thing that unites Channel U and Clubland TV is, intriguingly, N-Dubz (who have a family connection to Mungo Jerry!).  I suspect that might be an analogy for something more. Certainly, anyone who can unite pop's twin tribes, otherwise so divided in almost every aspect of their vision of Britain, cannot be ignored.

Who writes this shit?

According to the current Radio Times:

"Rock'n'roll's remit has always included riling the establishment and shocking older generations."

(from the listing for a programme called, yawn, Lock Up Your Daughters - Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll in the UK, a title which feels, now, rather as The Genius of Eric Coates would have felt in the UK of 1959.)

The very fact that Radio Times - 30, even 20 years ago a sober, essentially pre-pop guide to the BBC's activities - is as it is should, in itself, confirm just how played out and misleading every assumption behind that statement is.  The complete absorption of pop/rock culture into Britain's ruling elite culture is confirmed, among much else, by the mutation of the very magazine that feels the need, for its own dubious reasons, to attempt to keep the old myths going.  This would be comparatively acceptable, if still deeply depressing, were it not part of a deeper, long-term cross-party campaign to dress up profoundly reactionary, anti-progressive politics as vaguely "hip" because At Least We've Given Robert Plant A CBE.  At least with the old Radio Times, as with the establishment in general at that time, when it was conservative it admitted it.  Nobody could think that a magazine that printed a letter moaning that gay people ought to be happy to be called poofs, as it did in 1976, was particularly progressive, and indeed it was not.  But don't let yourself get fooled into thinking that a magazine which prints the above is, inherently and of itself, dramatically better.  The same BBC that held within it the Curran/Trethowan lineage also had space for the Greene/Milne tendency - Birt destroyed both. Listings such as the above are practically made for those who will regard themselves as "rebels" while blaming "immigrants" for the economic crisis.

Ah, the summer of 2003 - how soon we forget

During one of the ILM threads in which the usual suspects relentlessly aimed abuse at me (some of it partially justified, I will concede), someone wondered whether I liked "Pretty Green Eyes" by Ultrabeat. I can now announce to the world, belatedly, that I love it.  I feel moderately better for saying that.