Kneejerkery, reason, empires and pop culture

"Kneejerk anti-Americanism", Alex? In the past, I must admit I have been guilty, before I realised how complex and - arguably - unsolvable these questions are. But it was only ever an act of sheer desperation at the myopia and ignorance around me - the mentality whereby words like "Paki" and "sponger" are freely thrown about, and Britain's island status is regarded as something to be defended with our lives, but Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney (and, if anything much more disturbingly, their equivalents among younger people raised in Mail/Sun homes) are treated as though they were fucking Linden Lea, the double standards implicit in almost all English use of the term "bloody foreigners" - rather than a rational and thought-out political argument. As a much more mature and balanced person than I was when I posted on ILM, I think I would be able to make such arguments in a more controlled and thought-out way, now.

A large part of me (especially that part whose interpretation of socialism is closer to that of north-east England than north-west England, though rest assured that my view is always far more internationalist and left-libertarian than that of David Lindsay, who appears to think the landed aristocracy is more quasi-socialist than Sly and the Family Stone were) does think that socialism and pop culture in the form it has come to take today and which Lex loves the most are irreconcilable, and if this leads me to say things that people who do not want to recognise the inherently political nature of every aspect of life in a capitalist society do not want to hear, then I really can't help that. I willingly admit that the actual sonic impact of the music I've written about hasn't been my strongest area - I realised that with a start several years back when I noticed that my LiveJournal piece about the Kinks' 1973/4 Preservation albums literally didn't mention how they sounded once. I don't defend that. But the serious study of mass culture needs specialists in each specific field, and my own expertise in the socio-political impact of a music can fit perfectly with the expertise of others in sheer sound.

Let us not forget, at this point, that I also got into trouble on ILM because of my po-mo, relativist streak, and for suggesting that the authenticist line that grime and similar styles do not "belong" in places such as the one in which I lived (and live) is profoundly problematic, to say the least. I can reassure Lex and anyone else of his ilk that I do not want a quasi-feudal or Communist Britain, or indeed the Clark/Lindsay nativist hybrid of the two. I just wish that, say, Martin Solveig's "Hello" was higher in the charts than played-out Rihanna songs (great as she usually is) or BRIT School pseudo-pop, and I notice the fact that in Scotland (and even more so in the wholly separate Irish chart) it is higher than many of those things, and I wonder whether Scotland and Ireland's specific histories may be a factor in this - whether political or cultural alignments deep in history, and long-standing battles against a former empire's attempts to bury them, may affect 2011 audiences' conceptions of pop, and where they want their countries to be in the world, which will itself be a key factor in which kind of pop they feel an affinity to. And I wonder whether someone like Alex Macpherson may come from a family where the idea of being part of a great power was historically central, and whether he may align himself to the present great power more out of a basic, elemental thrust to feel important, part of something the world supposedly aspires to as it once supposedly aspired to the values of the British Empire, than out of any genuinely progressive thoughts or aspirations. I also wonder whether he may be in hock to the things he is in hock to more out of a desire to distance himself from the values of learning and aspiration which he was probably raised for (as I was) than because he really does love them unequivocally and instinctively. This does not equate to puritanism, conservatism, Communism or a desire to censor and suppress. It simply equates to a desire to ask questions about the nature of the economic system we live under, and whether what we are being sold at the moment is as fulfilling or challenging as it should be. I really don't see what can be wrong with that.

ILM, Mumford and Sons and politics

I still read ILM. I often enjoy it. I've made my peace, to some extent. I've recognised how good and important a space it can be by not pretending that I can be part of it. Because the truth is that, even ten years ago, I never really could. Quite apart from the effects of my condition (far more profound and total and overpowering then than now, not that things are at all easy now, they never really will be) preventing me from existing socially in a casual, informal fashion, there is also the fact that I'm never going to be part of the forum culturally. I simply have never lived in the same way, or really lived at all in the most commonly-understood sense of living. This is why I have, in the past, identified with old conservative types far more than I now realise I should have done. This is why I have come over as infinitely more fogeyish than I actually am in my tastes and feelings about art and culture (and what can be defined with those inherently loaded words), and this is why I have misrepresented myself almost every time I have stepped outside the world this blog has, almost accidentally, created for itself - a world where the principles of the Third Programme are applied to a range of creativity and flux that those who created that station could never have imagined. There is nothing, now, that can be done about the times I gave those who've never met me in the flesh the wrong idea. All I can do now is try my hardest to give the right idea for as long as I've got left.

So I think it is time - and ignoring the goading from someone who seems curiously interested in politics in that thread, yet cannot normally see that even the most theoretically trivial aspects of pop culture are in themselves deeply political - to say how much I've enjoyed and how much I agree with the essential thrust of the ILM thread on Mumford & Sons. Of course Mumford & Sons are important, and signify a certain drift towards vaguely Ruritanian and certainly largely imagined ideas of "community" (their imagery harking back to a time when benevolent "volunteers" supposedly provided all the public services from which the nasty monolithic state should back off, and the proles were just grateful) as a part of mainstream debate, even dressed up as "progressive" because of its mastery of mass communication techniques. Of course Mumford & Sons play the same sociopolitical role as Oasis did in the Britain of 15 years ago, in terms of identifying and defining the rising trends (rehabilitated prole culture as bourgeois commodity then, rehabilitated Tory rewrite of British history as mass commodity now). Whether or not that is their aim, or whether they want to be seen as such, is sheer pedantry, just as it was when the precise loyalty of Oasis to the destruction of the Labour Party as a meaningful ideological force was debated in tedious detail; the nature of the market economy does not afford us time for such indulgence. While G.K. Chesterton is deeply politically ambiguous in the same way that Powell & Pressburger and Selling England by the Pound (which album is one of the very few other things that can also truthfully be described as "Conservative by nature, Labour by experience", an experience that Mumford are, crucially, extremely unlikely ever to have, because Gabriel's experience was still very much defined by the social realignments of the Second World War) are, and is certainly not simply a figure of the crude racist Right (he did, of course, have a relative who was), we can safely assume that Mumford's vague interest in some of his ideas is a simple, barely-understood romanticisation of the quasi-feudal aspects, as ill-informed and potentially as dangerous as my own young fogey phase of 1994/5 (which included a grotesque misreading of Powell & Pressburger) - and also utterly meaningless and irrelevant in terms of the world the band exist in and are defined by, because a Chestertonian society would be as hostile to the monoliths of the 2011 market as to Leviathan 1970s trade unions, and no band of Mumford's ilk are likely to support any kind of serious restructure of the system which gave them their ubiquity when they seriously consider what it would actually entail.

An apposite question at this point: who were the Mumford of pre-Thatcherite times, in terms of combination of socially conservative rhetoric and image-making and appeal to a similar section of the audience, for all that a now unimaginably high percentage of Mumford's core demographic would have ignored pop and rock music altogether at that time? Not ISB, obviously, they were several times too far out there. Not Fairport, they were far too good and never sufficiently popular with the middle mass (though it's interesting that Mumford, like almost all British people in that cultural lineage since the Industrial Revolution, come from a very specific sort of outer London middle-class background from which most FC members also came - this is not any other kind of comparison, and in fact I feel physically sick mentioning them in the same sentence, but at least some of Mumford & Sons went to a day private school in Wimbledon, the same area Sandy Denny came from - meanwhile, most of the rural working class were perfectly happy with Black Sabbath and, with multiple ironies, Free).

On balance, Jethro Tull are probably the best fit - the same backward-thinking lyrics dressed up as something profound, the same essentially bombastic stadium-rock sound with folk as a mere optional extra, the later dabbling in the rural side of big business in the way you instinctively know the Mumfords were born for, the same popularity in the US (where you feel Mumford may, like Ian Anderson's mob, be taken much more seriously in the long term, and in fact probably even now - what to all reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable British people seems like a laughable myth of their country can, even now, seem genuinely believable and credible to even fairly educated and knowledgeable Americans). Pentangle were far too good to deserve the comparison, but they may fit to some extent - Basket of Light was the biggest-selling folk-rock album of the first big wave, they were never off a certain sort of TV show (many of them spin-offs from Late Night Line-Up, I pretend to dimly recall) which appealed to the more pseudo-bohemian part of the dawn-of-the-'70s middle mass, and then of course there is the Liza Goddard in Take Three Girls connection. Steeleye Span fit the comparison pretty well at the time of "All Around My Hat" - with the usual proviso about their being too good for it - but otherwise didn't have sufficient middle-mass appeal.

In terms of broader socio-cultural appeal (i.e. pseudo-intellectuals / the Oxbridge types Phil Redmond called "brains on sticks" / dabblers who didn't want to go any further), if not active pseudo-folkiness and pseudohistory, the Moody Blues probably resonated with a fairly similar crowd as well - and they also had that appeal to social order and certainty (the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down" is as desperate to get out of the Butskellite norms as Keith Joseph ever was, Days of Future Passed is an unabashed celebration of those very certainties, and by then it was long enough since 1945 that moderate socialism was conservatism). And I suppose Yes and ELP - the latter especially - covered similar bases in terms of appealing to people who thought they were socially above the rest of pop, and the latter managed to lose all signs of the subtlety and elegance of their original classical sources amid the very worst kind of stadium rock (the former blew hot and cold; I'm with Bill Bruford - easily the most likeable member they ever had, because even if he is the poshest he doesn't seem it - that "Siberian Khatru" has a bite and a drive that pushes it far above many of their fan favourites).

But any direct comparison becomes much harder when we look at the very specific sociopolitics of Mumford and Sons' role in the glossing up of Tebbit-level neoliberal fundamentalism as though it were some kind of cuddly quasi-feudal dreamworld rather than the crude, harsh Social Darwinism it actually is; in the days when it still mattered to some how many music teachers were impressed by Thick as a Brick or Close to the Edge, Tory government ministers were rather pathetic figures trying desperately to impose some kind of cohesion on a country whose entire social structure, from Bloody Sunday to the Poulson trial which at a stroke wiped out public faith both in centre-ground Toryism and the utopian socialism whose exponents it revealed as mere capitalists on the make, was falling apart, and making it clear at every turn that they couldn't. They were in no way in control; if they had been, the unions would never have been able to humiliate them so completely, and British socialism, or at least social democracy, would - however perverse it may seem to some - be infinitely healthier today. The politics of pop - the question of whether it should assert some kind of prole identity against an unrepresentative elite, how it should deal with questions of racism and exclusion, how its supposed allegiance to socialism fitted with Old Labour's opposition to any form of media which actually understood pop on its own, essentially consumerist/individualist terms - existed in their own, separate universe, and while they were nowhere near as widely discussed as they should have been during the great early 1970s ideological lull, at least where they were discussed, it was without Reginald Maudling or Anthony Barber setting the terms for desperately limited imitations of "aspiration" or "challenge". Now, these terms within the middle mass - the territory Mumford and Sons now define like no other band, maybe even no other cultural phenomenon - are defined wholly by the Cameronite idea of control (and, in utter contrast to the early 1970s government, it is very real control; they have learnt from the Blairites a whole new set of ideas on media management and ideological full spectrum dominance - with no lingering idea of principle on who to use and how and where to use them - which will make it harder to defeat them than any previous Tory movement, because no other Tory movement has had so many fingers in so many pies; the use of pop culture - through Mumford, Welch and the rest - is as crucial in the Cameronite plans not to end up where the last Tory government did as a confrontational approach to the unions, and the use of rhetoric on immigration designed to appeal to NF defectors, was in the Thatcherite plans not to share the Heath government's fate).

The challenge, in this context, is to take what is currently mere internal lumpen self-aggrandisement - the potential reborn pride of Trilla's "0121" (real regeneration, not the official version of that much-abused word, even Lawrence could get it), Ghetts if only he could turn that venom on those who really deserve it rather than the mere gatekeepers of what kind of grime is allowed to be pop, the whole Nottingham and Bradford scenes - and somehow radicalise it, turn it outwards, turn it into a genuine political statement on the nature of elite power and control (and without the tint of nationalism, sexism, and internal class nostalgia that blighted the only recent 1Xtra show I've heard where political issues were raised). This may seem a hopeless ambition, and perhaps it is. But I can't think of any other kind of pop which has more such potential - even in its poppier forms, it is (as was mentioned early in the ILM thread) a necessary counterpart to Mumford & Sons within Britain's internal cultural wars, a reminder that the vast majority of the British population simply cannot afford to hold Mumford's vaguely indulgent, cynically ill-informed views on the management of power and privilege. All that being said, though I haven't yet heard the new album, I don't think the part of England in which I live, and all its equivalents caught between Mumfordesque faux-romanticism and the reality of Tesco (itself the epitome of the economic system for which Mumford & Sons are mere carriers), has ever needed PJ Harvey so much. I haven't been a fan, but if what I'm hearing is true, Let England Shake may offer some kind of way out.

How do we read the 70s and what followed?: two different worlds

I know I've always lived in one.

This - with a few isolated exceptions which are reflected directly in the foundations of this blog - is the other.

Let me begin by stating that I'm well aware I'm not a prog fan as such, I'm just someone who likes some music that could be considered part of it, just as I like large swathes of other music. I know entirely that this poll comes from a world other than mine, and that I'm not the man most qualified to comment on it. I know that my ideal poll would take a few cornerstones from this, redefine its criteria around art rock and genuine experimentation and Anglo-weirdness rather than prog (art rock inherently a more flexible genre because it's based around its own criteria of art, which anything can theoretically be, rather than someone else's idea of "progression"). But all the same, fuck it, and concentrating on British music alone so only touching the tip of the iceberg: the three most redundant and overexposed Floyd albums all in the Top 10 and no mention whatsoever of any of their 60s work or even Animals, the absolute heart of the 70s - cynicism over the machinations of business and the exhaustion of a crumbling elite tempered by genuine hope that an upsurge to overpower them is possible, the same bitter ennui we're living through today only now without that hope - and far and away their most satisfying, because most direct and least absorbed in the dead end of "hanging on in quiet desperation", post-weird work? More appearances for innumerable revivalists and pasticheurs than for Peter Hammill in any incarnation? No appearances whatsoever by Soft Machine or Matching Mole? A Genesis album from as late as 1980? Truly, even in an age when - as is commented on that thread - many of the old divisions (which were undoubtedly once necessary but in the end had become the death knell of ambition and an unintentionally conservative force) are no longer communicating themselves in the same way to the young, there are still two different worlds (one way of putting it - and certainly another way of expressing m the g's post in that thread - is that musically it's a little too Alan Freeman and not sufficiently John Peel, or in US radio terms too much what AOR radio became, with too few hints of its roots in freeform).

If Geir Hongro has served no other purpose, he provides a useful anti-me in terms of my assessment of almost any music - whatever he thinks was the peak I am likely to find desperately overplayed, canonical, pseudo-classical and drunk on notions of someone else's respectability rather than creating your own (in the case of prog), or pathetically deluded in dreams of mythical summers before you were born and justifying a certain leader's pseudo-politics rather than keeping an independent voice and capturing the tensions of your own time (in the case of 1990s British music), whatever I think is genuinely innovative, powerful, the epitome of all that is best about pop and that only pop can do, an expression of the actual Britain rather than his own heritage fantasy world he will consider to be "tuneless", degenerate, overtly "experimental", just plain worthless or, most worryingly, not even British at all. To say that he should simply not comment on hip-hop or latterday pop, and stick to the music he knows, would still be legitimising endless tedious anti-thoughts - he is the man who thinks King Crimson's best work was under Lake/Sinfield, that the "psych sound experiments" on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn should have been replaced with "more nursery rhymes", that Ummagumma is worse than A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and that the 1970s' greatest achievement - rather than, say, Red or Rock Bottom or anything from Germany (a country unsurprisingly wholly unrepresented) - was the entire territory of "symphonic rock", something that for all its occasional high points (the concert-hall hush of the second half of "The Cinema Show" does have something very special about it, the fields and farms of the shires huddling together and wishing the unions away, bonfires blazing in fear of coming socialist revolution) is ultimately a dead end, and could not have been anything else, because it was playing by someone else's rules.

The key albums in that poll undoubtedly are The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Rock Bottom and Red (gratifying that that is so high, not so gratifying that its two predecessors and USA aren't there). They have more in common than all being from 1974 and all being invoked here: all, in their wildly opposing ways, capture the feeling of a moment when everything seemed up for grabs, and thus have something to tell us about our own time, when everything should be but seems dispiritingly as though it isn't, and that a discredited elite will merely retake power through the most cynical and dishonest of means. They all show us, as little else before or since, that something else could have happened (something like Station to Station, which is at least as good as all of them and may be better than any of them, doesn't work in quite the same way, so internalised beyond the rest of the world is its very construct). The first of those albums is to me the most complete answer to the post-imperial dilemma of a certain class, and perversely weaves a wholly personalised art out of a state of desperate confusion so well that I'm not sure whether any of those involved, or the vast majority of their caste, should have tried again (unfortunately they would, on all fronts), the second - amid its many other dissolvings of sound, its unashamed loss of self (all you can do when half your self is gone, something which - I know from bitter experience - may equally apply when that loss is mental rather than physical) contains my favourite song of all time. But I think, if I wanted to take any part (I know now why I must not) I might well vote for the third. Because it rages within and without itself like precious little rock music before or since, because it desperately fights its own impotence and somehow manages to create its own fraught self-justification (which was all I could have in my own life, before edging tentatively closer to what Wyatt somehow managed to find for himself), because it's a band, and a world, on the brink of imploding for good. And because of Wimborne Minster, and the private armies, and the plots that lurked behind the Hallowe'en wall. All prog comes back to that in the end, maybe, even the bad stuff. But this, without question, was the good.

(and - I must now add - the poll went pretty well, and thankfully anti-Hongro)

The most easy-to-carmodise band in the world?

It took me a long time to overcome the circumstances in which I departed ILM. Certainly my brief return was possibly the worst of many idiotic decisions I have made on the internet (which are still not quite as unjustifiable as some I have made off it, or before it). But after a long absence I now read it regularly again, and from that position of isolation I can appreciate it for what it is, and understand that it will never be the natural place for someone with my own aesthetics and worldview.

I'm never tempted even to join in the many recent threads about Genesis, precisely because of the fact that they are surely the band who fit most perfectly into my own much-mocked vision of recent British history. Consider:

mid-1960s - Otis Redding amid shafts of light on dormitory walls from a world you are locked outside; national hopes of classless-utopian future; everything has its roots here

late 1960s - Jonathan King attempts to apply old boy network to pop; gets nowhere (at first)

1970 - tentative folkiness amid decade's ruins

1971 - imagined past and mutant science can still just about work together, it seems, and they mostly do

1972 - unresolved tensions coming to a head; New Towns turned from dream to nightmare; entire genre reaches its apotheosis and epitome from which there is no etc etc; final peak sets out "New Jerusalem", but is that the post-war state, whose achievements are being so profoundly neglected and underestimated by those who are their direct beneficiaries, or some mythical, never-come world which may exist beyond it, or even some pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal old-elite utopia? crucially, nothing is ever explained, and all we are left with is a memory of movements. No apocalypse yet, but the intensity is such that you know it is coming.

1973 - nation at war with itself; conflicts of capitalism and the emotional glue of history become unbearable; mood is caught brilliantly with succession of storms interspersed with barely-fooling brief moments of calm. Class war for ownership of future; past now is a desperate burden rather than Carnaby Street commodity; everything culminates in final confession to the supermarkets who are quietly growing and growing as everyone else organises their safe tribal war. You've got to turn out, somewhere ...

1974 - apocalypse, final reckoning, last internal conflict after which anyone must crack, etc. Hermetic universe finally blown open, power and internal insanity of Britain's owners finally confronted; opening songs are a vicious stream of consciousness in which Gabriel's every conflict is thrown in; elsewhere it merges with the old world - "a harvest feast (is) lit by candlelight" in NYC? - but this merely confirms that the whole thing is, at heart, a survey of a nation's riven loyalties. It cannot sustain its own ambition, of course, and by the end it is flailing, but it remains a lacerating experience. But this is precisely what Rutherford and Banks don't want; they only really feel comfortable with received notions of Quality ('The Little Prince', for heaven's sake), not the Hammill-level fuckedupness of, ahem, "In the Cage" or "Back in NYC", and the centre cannot hold. As Jagger is impotently mocked to the fade, you know you won't hear this again.

1975 - the future is almost rewritten

1976 - conscious assertion of normality, albeit in lavishly elegant form which a 15-year-old aristocrat poised for the entrapment of a gilded cage from which the only escape is death will instinctively connect to; Rutherford/Banks vision of High Art clearly in control, all internal turmoil and unease over their nation's post-war position pushed aside; "if we can help you, we will"; uneasy calm of post-referendum, pre-IMF stasis perfectly captured, precisely because it is such a blank canvas; on opening track, Collins insistently repeats (though he did not yet write) the line "better start doing it right", surely not only a statement of determination to push aside Gabriel's mutations of language and sound but also a call to think the unthinkable, to question every certainty of the post-war settlement as Charterhouse has so long wished

1977 - much the same vein: aristocrats gone to seed; "daddy, you promised, you promised"; their class's balance of desperate panic and blind internal fantasy intensifies

1978 - all pretence at ambition finally dissipates; panic over apparent prole assertion takes form of retreat into the already-encroaching cosiness; Labour lead in polls and despite where Rutherford and Banks came from it almost fits; "just one single tear through each passing year" marks their passing on into the world which it appears may still just follow, where detente may reach its logical conclusion; in doing so elite power would of course be seriously weakened, but for a moment it seems as though none of that matters and everything can work; David Morton comes of age to it, although his spirit is already almost dead

1980 - world hinted at in those final echoes-to-the-woods has been cancelled; they become arch-exponents of "creative destruction", the sort of capitalism which relies on the abolition of everything before it for its very existence; "all I need is a TV show - that, and a radio"; they are now wholly owned by, and a lucrative plaything of, the forces working to destroy both socialism and Tory paternalism

1981-83 - consolidation of same

1986 - total immersion in the drained Atlantic; survey of entire international situation which postulates that everything is horrible now because the leaders are Too Old and everything will be OK when the Blair Generation takes control, and is charting as Macmillan leaves the earth; early songs still performed, but in medleys where they are no longer any kind of art-Englishness but commodified heritage, exactly like the newish English Heritage itself; album becomes a surrogate Elgar to the Bullingdon Club, the next generation of the same official vision, merely repackaged and (more importantly) far nastier and less tolerant

1991 - much the same as above, only now with ostentatious sheen of "care" and hideous epic about the construction (at the height of Britain's industrial bucaneering) of the very same railway system for whose final carve-up and removal from the public sphere - back to what it originally was, naked capitalism as it was before Wiener said It All Went Wrong - the ideology for which they have been messengers is now setting the stage

1995/6 - deafening silence. "everyone" thinks they've been defeated forever just as "everyone" thinks NuLab is a force for the equality of opportunity. "everyone" is proved bitterly wrong.

1997 - two Tim Henmans recruit an Andy Murray to desperately revive the formula at height of ostentatiously pseudo-classless Blairmania; needless to say, it fails and falls apart amid rumours of class-based hostility

2007 - Blair's final curtain; 1980s trio reunites and milks the triumph of Rutherford and Banks' caste in all circles as return to power in politics to match new-found pop dominance (for which their later work - though only their later work - can now be seen as having laid the groundwork)

None of this, of course, necessarily makes them great (at their best, they are, but only on comparatively limited and insular terms, and I cannot stop myself thinking this is by accident rather than design, and then I put Tago Mago on so ... well, you know ...) but it does make them fascinating, though in the later years obviously only in the sense that you are gruesomely compelled by the cultural detritus. Can anyone - on this front alone - beat them?