Definitely Maybe

It is, several radio programmes and broadsheet articles inform us, twenty years since the 'Summer of Britpop'. I was there, young and music-loving. Comparisons with earlier golden ages are inexact; it can't have been like the 60s, since I can remember it. It involved, as I recall, inordinate amounts of Guinness combined with indelicate swaying to the dulcit tones of What's The Story Morning Glory. We weren't aware that it was the Summer of Britpop at the time. It was just summer, the school holiday. Nor did we, by which I mean my friends and myself, think there was anything especially epoch-making about the music we were listening to, or rather the music that was played at us, in pubs and clubs and on the radio; my own tastes were slightly more eclectic. It was alright, it was just there. We hadn't known any different. Nostalgia, however can transfigure the most quotidian of times, and so here we are, two decades on, keeping the anniversary of something called the Summer of Britpop.

There is something distinctly unsettling about people feeling nostalgic for periods within one's living memory. Nostalgia is always for people older than oneself. It is more a matter of not being able to get bananas in the war, or the electric tingle as a beehived girl rubbed against your chinos than of the Verve or David Blunkett. The jarring intimation of mortality repressed beneath the surface of this discomfort might go some way towards explaining why I have greeted public celebration of Britpop's birthday with a mixture of incomprehension and blind rage. So, when 6Music announced that they had made Oasis' Knebworth performance available on Iplayer, I tweeted this:

NO I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN TO OASIS AT KNEBWORTH. Like New Labour it deserves to remain two decades away.

— (((Latte Labour))) (@LatteLabour) 15 August 2016

This perhaps demonstrated a temporary inability to think both sides of the question, but then age does funny things to you. A good proportion of my digital fury was entirely justified, but before we get onto the reasons for that the other side of the balance sheet needs addressing. The Britpop phenomenon, either in its musical origins or promotional narration (if it's even possible to disentangle the two), issued from a perfectly correct sense of the American dominance of rock and pop music, and a legitimate resentment of this. Even though there is a good case to be made that the Smashing Pumpkins were better than Suede, and in spite of the awkward fact that, like the mods before them, the Britpoppers could only respond to rock's wrapping itself in the stars-and-stripes by wrapping themselves in the Union Jack, there was something praiseworthy about the urge to kick back at the bigger country. There was too  a sense in which working class identity was cool within Britpop culture. This didn't necessary translate into working class people themselves being cool, nor did the working class identity that was enacted on stages and lauded in the NME commonly bear much resemblance to anything that would have been recognised by many inhabitants of that class. Still, compared to today's hipster scene, where one gets the distinct sense that working class people are regarded not as voguish aliens to be emulated nervously, but as Brexit-voting, commercial music listening, racists who wouldn't know a good craft beer if they tasted one, it wasn't so bad. These things are relative.

Britpop was also capable of voicing discontent in a more or less articulate fashion. Admittedly, it most often came down on the 'less' side, but it remains the case that the raw anger of 'Is it worth the aggravation/ to get yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?' has a lot going for it. Gallagher's devil-may-care drawl voices a nihilism more conditioned than staged. Blur were capable of framing their protest in more explicitly political terms. Mr Robinson in his quango is 'the self-professed saviour of the dim right-wing'. Ernold Same was narrated by the man described in the CD insert as 'the right-on Ken Livingstone'. It turns out that Damon Albarn was the source of the band's occasional leftism. Dave Rowntree was meanwhile an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour and ultimately a cheerleader for invading Iraq. Alex James now divides his time between making artisan cheeses and hanging out with the Chipping Norton set.

Alas, Britpop was not simply well-meaning angst and sticking two fingers up to Uncle Sam. It was in other respects, as we learned to say later, problematic in many respects.  This probably wasn't what Adorno had in mind when he said that every tale of civilisation is also a tale of barbarism, but nor is that line entirely irrelevant here (even if 'civilisation' is an optimistic description of Country House, and 'barbarism' an unkind take on Menswear). Culture is a human product, and as such is tainted from the outset with the conditions of its production, which means amongst other things with politics. This much is evident in the very word 'Britpop', a musical subgenre defined as much as anything by the state from which it issued. In this it bears some resemblance to the earlier Krautrock, although the acts generally classified as part of the latter are universally more interesting than Ocean Colour Scene. In both cases, there is a politics to the identification. Germany at the time of Krautrock was not one, but two, states. Britpop, in spite of its name, was an overwhelmingly English phenomenon. The most obvious exceptions are at best borderline cases: the Manic Street Preachers pre-date the movement slightly, and never really fitted in culturally or politically. Catatonia were of the period, but I never recall thinking of them as being 'part of the same thing' as Blur and Oasis. This was, retrospectively, a compliment. Ash were admittedly Irish, but in the face of eight centuries of national oppression the misdescription of a rock band seems a slight matter.

Claiming English idiosyncracies as uniformly British is a national pastime. A peculiarity of British rock music has been, at least until recently, its celebration of a certain kind of imagined working class identity, coupled with the occasional elevation of working class people themselves to superstar status. Britpop satisfied this fetish enthusiastically. Oasis certainly were from working class backgrounds, and spoke in interviews about being on the dole. Blur were from more monied stock in at the time ill-specified parts of East London but spoke like the love child of Dot Cotton and Dick van Dyke's chimney sweep. This was class as a marketing method; the proletariat were in this season, just as ripped jeans had been a few summers previously. The working class as presented in the posters and at the gigs was a pastiche, packaged for quick consumption. It was a matter of cheeky smiles and the hint of attitude, without taking the latter far enough to be intimidating. You expected Damon Albarn to shout 'oi, get orf me barrow' at any point. What the working class as adapted for Britpop certainly didn't lower itself to doing was work. Whilst The Who, the band Oasis wanted to be when they weren't busy trying to be the Beatles, could make a film in which a young man gets away from the drudgery of London toil, only for the hero of a mod dance floor to be revealed as a bellboy, by the 90s five days of the week were almost entirely absent from British musical output. Oasis, quite reasonably didn't want to work (Eagleton describes this as a good reason to be a socialist), but lyrically it was mostly a matter of falling in love, falling out of love, taking drugs, being a rock and roll star, and - in the case of one Blur song - listening to the shipping forecast. Put like this it sounds not unlike the life of a full time rock singer. Imagination was not a notable feature of the period.

The band often counted as part of Britpop who were better on class, in every sense in which a band could be, were of course Pulp. They are exempt from my criticism,  but were never really part of Britpop. The band predated the phenomenon by a long way, and accidentally hit the big time on the back of it. I've written about them before here. Whether or not 'nobody loves a tourist' was aimed, consciously or otherwise, at what their musical contemporaries were saying or doing, it captures some of the truth of an era. Even more dispiritingly, it speaks also to subsequent eras.

Candida Doyle's role in Pulp also distinguishes them from the run of Britpop star acts, which whiffed of Lynx and testosterone. A blokish, cliched working class masculinity suffused the genre. There were female fronted bands: none of them got the headlines and the best known, Elastica, obtained that status not least because their lead singer was sleeping with Damon Albarn, which doesn't suggest that Britpop represented a feminist high point. The best, and most under-rated, of the bands insufficiently male to be canonised were Kenickie. Notable for having singing in a regional accent that was, on the one hand, neither Cockney or Mancunian, and on the other genuine, they were musically and lyrically excpetionally. Misleadingly naive in content, their songs communicate a reality airbrushed by the comic book capers of Albarn and Gallagher they had this in common with Pulp. Lauren Laverne's wilting voice on 'People We Want' captures a darker side to the Britpop era, boredom and anxiety combine as insecure, in spite of cocaine, a young woman wades through a night out as though it were quicksand. 'This life, it's taking too long', she sings; and you know what she means.

The fear that life might not be worth living is not one that haunts the male Britpop oeuvre. It is fundamentally upbeat, macho even - although not aggressively so: with the possible exception of the Gallagher brothers, Britpop frontmen presented as new men. This did not make them averse to the odd nod and a wink. This was the era of new laddism; young men were busy learning from Loaded magazine that what, to a casual observer, might appear like sexism was in fact both ironic, and empowering for women. The apparently contradictory nature of these claims seems to have passed by for these born again feminists. The masculinity of Cool Britannia was resolutely heterosexual. In this respect it was less diverse than any other significant rock movement for a couple of decades. Brett Anderson performed an ambivalent androgyny: yet Suede were John the Baptist figures for Britpop, teetering uneasily on the brink of the New Covenant, quick to diminish so that Blur, Oasis, and countless derivative acts could take to the stage. When the messiah came, he was butch. On one occasion Alex James wore an Oasis t-shirt on Top of the Pops. He might just have well sported the slogan 'I've got a bigger dick than Noel Gallagher'. The intensity of the gender retrenchment in 90s music was in many respects laughable, even though it reflected, and fed back into  a much more dangerous backlash against feminism in society at large. It would be a cold-hearted person indeed, however, who didn't laugh - and not in the manner intended by the authors - at the ridiculous spectacle of 'Vindaloo' competing with 'Three Lions' for the number one spot, as the cultural icons of the period jockeyed to demonstrate their authentic football-supporting laddishness. It has always been unclear to me which team Alex James supports, but then I don't follow Chipping Norton Swifts closely, so I may be missing something. We should, I suppose, be grateful that Keith Allen allowed his mum and his gran to share in the bucket of vindaloo.

Singing about Goan food might have been de rigeur, but too many English people have always been more comfortable with Asian food than with Asian people. Britpop was white in its makeup and its cultural reference points. This in itself communicated something about how Britishness was understood at the time. The period coincides, for example, with Asian Dub Foundation's first releases - far more enduring and musically interesting than anything sung at Knebworth all those years ago, yet never counted as part of Britpop. This is both an injustice and a liberation.

The simplistic image of a white, male, straight, salt-of-the-earth, urban, sexual but not threatening, impish but never straightforwardly rebellious, working class was tailor made for New Labour. A wave of populism and flagwaving ushered Blair through the Downing Street gates, riding high on the legacy of forgotten protest and ageing hope. Elected, in large part by a class (contrary to much speculation, there are in fact working class people in marginal constituencies, even in the south of England), he wanted to govern a mass. A heady mix of 'progressive' nationalism and condescending ordinariness spewed forth from government onto a society already drenched with the same concoction by its rock stars. This was a Britpop government. And the Blairites imagined that the working class was as contemporary rockstars presented it: monocultural, in many ways reactionary, white, but with a sense of fair play and fun. The result was as politically ambiguous as Britpop itself was culturally: it gave us increased public spending and ASBOs, a minimum wage and asylum detention centres, the Human Rights Act and the invasion of Iraq.

There's a reluctant admission on the part of their sometime supporters that the Blair/ Brown governments did not usher in the New Jerusalem. Yet even this is narrated in terms of the working class as imagined in the Britpop era. We hear a lot about the forgotten people of the period, as indeed we should, the betrayal of core supporters by New Labour in government was real and deep. Quickly, however, this shades into talk of the white working class, the need to understand traditional values, generations of male pride lost to unemployment, concerns about immigration - in every way imaginable real and urgent social and economic crisis is renarrated in terms of a backlash against the gains of the past two decades as regards race and gender politics. In this way we end up with Blue Labour and its lingering influence. Nostalgia for Britpop fits in perfectly with this use of an ideological construction of class to defuse the politics of class. From the perspective of this project the immediate enemy is an out-of-touch metropolitan obsessed with the politically correct agenda of earlier times and unaware of the concerns of ordinary, hard-working, people. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.

Twenty years have passed, then. Were it not for the remarkable elevation of a socialist to the Labour leadership, it would be tempting to say that the most notable change is that privately educated rock aficionados no longer feel the need to adopt working class accents. These are not times in which Etonians lack confidence. That, more than the whimpering of Owen Smith, ought to serve as a cautionary tale for left-wing ebulience.

Danczuk and the 'white working class'

New Left Project are running a series on race and class in Britain. It's deserving of a look. In particular, Jon Lawrence's piece, published today, Why the Working Class was never 'White', is excellent, and speaks to a particularly unhelpful idea that has currency in the labour movement. I quote the final paragraph:

The sooner we recognise that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing, but rather an unhelpful media construction which the left must eschew, the better. Not only does it deflect attention from the virulent racism in other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping what they deserve.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of Simon Danczuk. The voice of Labour's hard right in England, and a serial complainer - sadly against all the evidence - that the leadership don't say very much about immigration, Danczuk is also a self-proclaimed advocate for the working class and/ or 'ordinary people'. He considers himself to be part of the former, 'a working class MP'. It has to be said that, in spite of an impeccably proletarian background, his last job before entering parliament was as director and co-owner of a public affairs consultancy, but working class status is presumably supposed to be something like Catholic baptism, indelible.

The brand of populism Danczuk promotes combines a class rhetoric with a campaigning stance on tabloid-pleasing issues; he has been a prominent voice around the scandal of child sex abuse. A nostalgic, romantic, attachment to the constructed white working class of yesteryear co-exists in Danczuk's mind with an outright rejection of the kind of reformist mitigation of capitalism's worst excesses one might imagine to feature, 'Spirit of '45' style, in the narrative. The Blue Labour constituency, close to the Labour leadership, sell the purer product. For both, however, there is an old working class Labour following, which is understood as both racialised and racist. Until the 'legitimate' concerns of 'ordinary voters' are addressed, Labour will lose out to UKIP or abstention. There's an element of truth in this, as I've said before, but not in the way the purveyors of Hovis kitsch politics suppose.

How did this discourse come into its own? As Lawrence notes, it was the media and academics who constructed the white working class before it was seized on by politicians and entered into the nexus of cultural self-understanding. But an ideology must have some kind of purchase on truth, however perverse and one-sided, to get a grip on the hearts and minds of any significant number of people. Scientology is always likely to remain a niche pursuit. And the truth, of course, is that large numbers of working class people do feel left behind; large numbers of working class people do feel distant from a political elite. In both cases the feeling is entirely veridical: it's just that the 'white working class story' gets things wrong by supposing this estrangement has anything to do with skin colour.

Matters were not helped by the fact that there was a measure of social liberalism in the New Labour years - although not especially around the issue of immigration: increases in immigrant numbers resulted from the global economic and political context rather than the Blair-Brown governments, which were quite happy to leave asylum seekers languishing in detention centres, being a 'soft touch'. To the extent that a certain liberalism - over civil unions, for example - did co-exist, however, with the absence of any serious reformism in the socio-economic sphere, this helped to give rise to the 'Hampstead Heath politics' tale told by Danczuk. The concurrent demonisation of the working class, documented by Owen Jones and others, provided a context where it could be imagined that council estates were full of resentful xenophobes. Chavs were not only idle, they were racist. Think about how the average BNP supporter was imagined in the media - he or she had an Essex accent and probably the odd tatoo. She lived in a council flat, decked out with England flags. Polling data in fact suggests this character was far more likely to live in a relatively affluent suburb.

Danczuk is just taking the whole story full circle. Rather than turn up his nose in disgust at the reactionary proletarian of metropolitan imagining, he has set himself up as their champion. Much the same dynamic was at work around Emily Thornberry's forced resignation. The flag-waving cage fighter at the centre of that particular episode is a living caricature of the working class as projected from Westminster. Until a better class politics becomes articulate, expect to hear more about the white working class.