With reference to the previous post, just to prove vignettes about modern life using modern sonics are possible, have a listen to this...

I bet it sounds good on the dancefloor! (perhaps – Perspective Ed)Phased%20Deeds.mp3

El Salvadors

I was back in the Surrey heathlands last Saturday, in a crappy middle-aged bloke pub. To show he was down with his kids, some geez strided up to the jukebox and stuck on the first few songs of the Arctic Monkeys’ album. Though we silently admonished him for whacking on the music while we were watching the Bolton-Arsenal rugby league encounter, our group quickly got to thinking about the Monkeys’ meteoric rise from spunky-but-limited spiky pop band to extremely successful spiky pop band. Some of the reasons why the Arctics have the biggest-selling British LP ever follow:

a) like grime artists, they sing about modern things such as “mobile phones” and, are seen in happening joints such as “chippies”. And these days, it’s all about the lyrics man, see John Harris’ commentary on the Late Review (rather than Paul Morley’s, who is fast disappearing up his Paul Smith faux-anorak threads). Unlike grime, they don’t threaten or use harsh sonic timbres (at least not ones we haven’t heard 86,000 times already from a Strat)
b) despite the discrediting of Oasis-style “I’m real” posturing, they are clearly authentic, because Alex Turner has spots
c) as well as being white and northern, they also might be working class, the holy trinity of band characteristics in the eyes of music biz suits
d) they’re actually quite good in the limited remit of what they do
e) they are younger than some children – which obviously turns on the Jonathon King element in the music business
f) the UK mainstream is full of unadventurous music buyers, but they know a bandwagon when they see one
g) the Domino effect (thanks): the “indie” world is merely the first rung and servant of the music business and with such an integrated infrastructure there are no logistical impediments to becoming an overnight success
h) the similarities to the Libertines/’Shambles are useful as a first reference then easily surpassed as Al can actually sing and seems able to go beyond sixth-form poetry of transgression
i) while they stoked inter-yakshire rivalry by saying nothing much good has come out of Leeds, they have avoided partisanship in their hometown by not coming out in favour of the Blades or Owls, football-wise
j) apparently the “internet” has helped, as have “disc burners” on most people’s home PCs in spreading the word
k) in a world where ex-This Life actwhore Andrew Lincoln, originally from Bath, is paid to do ad voiceovers in a generic northern brogue, they gain immediate points for not toning down the south yorks accent and keeping it high in the mix. Southern punter-consumers, fresh from being tuned on to the Bolton accent from Peter Kaye, will be endeared by the similar way they say “reet” in the steel city. The southerners are obviously too stupid to think there are any differences between the two…

Trauma, change and acceptance

“I think after WWII Britain and all of its allies went into denial, a collective denial that there was anything to discuss… I think my generation had a difficulty with that. The Mod thing was definitely a reaction to that…
“Then I’m born, right at the end of the war, May 19, 1945, the week Albert Speer is arrested. It’s just bizarre, the idea that they have to go on and live their lives… To be a child at that time, you’re saying to your parents, I need mummy and daddy, and they’re going ‘Fuck off!’ Because they’re traumatised. So many of my generation experienced that kind of neglect. Do you think for a minute that it’s possible that I could have been so successful with my tiny thesis, if it wasn’t for the fact that everybody had endured the same thing… I’m talking about post-war neglect. Everybody was trying to find some way to survive without accepting that what had actually happened was tragic, and would lead to tragedy
Pete Townshend in Mojo

For successive generations the aftershock of WWII is becoming even more remote. But the idea of post-traumatic stress disorder, of a generation ingrained in silent denial of atrocities they saw or heard or just lived through, not to mention the corroborative economic austerity, is becoming even more relevant, and can perhaps mark the period right up to the late 1970s, when the Pistols and co arrived as perhaps the last expression of generational rebellion. Indeed, Phil Oakey in Steel City documentary Made in Sheffield saw the explosion of punk and the official reaction to it as the “end of World War II”.

With the adult generation in ultra-defensive mode, a necessarily expressive culture was engendered among the war and post-war children. They would soon want to define themselves on their terms, first with the rockers using the explicitly American filter, then the mods. Arriving at the time when we first became a consumer-driven society. It would seem establishmentarian to say now, but the mods asserted themselves in terms of the new burgeoning world of mass consumption, and were proud to do so. We’ve suffered in silence, now we’re showing out. Suits from Soho, mopeds from Italy, records from America, pills nicked from the drug stores.
On the authority side, they slowly began to see that chasing disaffected white kids taking speed or shouting their mouths off was the smaller fish to fry in Thatcher’s atomised Britain. On our side, maybe we saw just how resistant class-obsessed Britain was to substantial change and gave up the idea of a revolution through mass culture. The mere surface ideas of conspicuous consumption, looking good, tracking the trends, took hold. And with the means of production now more available than ever, we’d have too much to indulge ourselves to really mean much ourselves.

We were moving from a lousy, introverted post-war climate, catching up with baby-boom America and high capitalism, which under relatively benign conditions enfranchises ever more stratums of society. All of which also suggests that in some ways it doesn’t matter whether Lennon, or Bowie or Lydon existed because there was dialectical change being worked through that was beyond the realm of a clutch of pop artists to catalyse. Townshend said that the ace faces at the Who dos couldn’t care or less that “Roger Daltrey” or “Keith Moon” were on stage. Sometimes the articulators of a movement are only expressing the bleeding obvious for the initiated.

Indeed, they are not looking that way, but to the authority, the man, who they implicitly want to be accepted by (but on their terms, hopefully). It’s this wider idea that each pop-cultural movement is to do with a generation wanting to be accepted, that if they are going to be mediated then they want to control the perception of themselves. Either as sharp (mod), angry, engaged (punk), occult, lost (goth), out of it, mad for it (rave). Look how many mainstream writers trade on the fact that they have been there/done that/seen the light in their youth – Decca Aitkenhead. [Dom Joly doesn’t, but this is my half-chance to call him a cunt]. Look at grime now, trapped in the impasse between still looking to the underground and selling its interesting ideas and sounds to the mainstream. Not so much revolution as the mere addition of layers. The idea of the thing-in-itself, of a trend having nothing to do with major societal change, is seen in a small way by the fact that the returning Bauhaus manage to sell out Brixton Academy. They return to an even bigger media space ready to assimilate them, offering them to yet more nu-goths.

I’ve moved on in a tangent from WWII, but have hoped to explain why my mum’s generation still think their big bang was the loudest of them all. I hope to return to the idea that each pop-cultural “movement” – it is only classed as such when it has been “accepted” by the paternal elite – essentially hits the stage when it is seeking the approval of the F1 generation and aiming to move in its circle. The tools of revolution, particularly in a UK seemingly immune to substantive change, become the mere text of your trade.