Blog
You ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
I was as enthralled as everybody else to see the Murdoch Empire devouring itself, witnessing a grizzly old tyrant being thrown to the very pack of dogs that he created, while his cabal of self-appointed moralists squirmed in their own hypocrisy, that tired old smokescreen of national-worthiness – aka the News of the World - came crumbling down, irreversibly exposing its true face to the entire world, albeit something most people had probably just assumed and taken for granted anyway – but to quite the extent that has now become apparent is even a shock to the most ardent Murdoch hating leftwing conspiracy-theorist.
Ok, so what’s an upstart and bit player in the world of music such as myself got to do with any of this anyway? Shouldn’t I just be towing the usual insipid inoffensive line of how Morton Valence are currently working on our difficult 3rd album? How we’ve been wowing audiences across the country? How many great bands there are around at the moment? How Mumford and Sons rule the world and how amazing Beyonce was Glasto?
Errr… no, not this band.
Once upon a time, popular culture could unnerve the sacred, threaten the established order, shake up royalty, kick off bible-belt mass album-burnings, ignite the wrath of the bourgeois, spark the flames of revolution, unleash rebellions, beguile the uninitiated, awaken the unconscious, empower the disenfranchised etc etc etc…
… so what happened?
… and what’s any of that got to do with Rupert Murdoch?
… besides, the 60s pushed on a long time ago, right?
But that’s not my point… my point is, popular culture once had an authentic resonance that could define a person, it wasn’t just sounds on a piece of plastic or colours on a wall, it was the backdrop of an era that reverberated politically and said “this is us!” But at some point between who knows when and now this has been diluted and finally swept aside to make way for something other.
Personally, I would describe this other as a meaningless antiseptic world of anodyne sound bites, blandness and conformity, presided over by an industry and media that relentlessly dole it out dressed up and sell it as something clearly “other” than what it quite patently is if you actually bother to have a look.
Still… we lap it up in our droves.
It’s easy to see through the hypocrisy of a “newspaper” that moralises about paedophiles on one page and publishes pictures of teenage girls flashing their titties on the next. It’s the crudest form of what I was talking about in the previous paragraph, the embodiment of the idea that simply because someone with power over you says it’s true, it therefore becomes “true” by default on their say so, unfortunately this isn’t just confined to the emperor’s new clothes, paranoid dictators, your boss, the council and a few gutter-tabloids, it’s everywhere, not least in the world of music.
As I am writing this I’ve just heard the tragic news of Amy Winehouse’s untimely death, a lonesome voice of her generation, although she was an English girl who unapologetically adopted an American idiom, she was a quintillion times more authentic than that stable of UK singers who ham up that preposterous caricature pretend chavney accent - most of them are toffs - that's about as authentic as a Bangkok Rolex and sound more like Arthur Askey singing through a helium balloon than anything you’d hear on the mean streets of London in 2011.
People complain about English singers singing in fake American accents, it doesn’t bother me nearly half as much as English singers singing in fake English accents, yet it’s touted as something credible by people who are either deaf, stupid or just completely cynical.
And this cynicism goes from the bottom right to the top of the media, and who’s the man at the top? Where does the buck stop? Yes of course, Mr. Murdoch no less.
Could his demise usher in a new era? Post Murdoch? Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as post punk or post modernism, but I think what has happened recently is a good thing, not just as far as Murdoch is concerned, but right across the board, too many people have spent far too long sat on their fat arses taking it all for granted becoming vile complacent corrupt human carbuncles in the process, I say we stick the boot in while the going’s good and get rid of them.
I’m not quite sure what post modernism is, but I’ve been told such a statement is very post modernist. I guess it’s the knowing raised eyebrow, the politically incorrect, the price superseding the value, the tat cloaked in irony, the inauthentic, the overrated and the out and out bullshit. Things that in the modernist era would have been considered uncool and fake became acceptable in the boom post modern years, idealism morphed either into cynicism, fundamentalism or simply died a death, and at some point in the 90s if you didn’t like the Spice Girls and found the spectre of Noel Gallagher sipping bubbly with Tony Blair distasteful you were dissed as some sort of worthy beard stroking dinosaur that just didn’t get it, patted on the head and told to run along check out the new Green Day album.
Well, as always, with the passage of time the tables always turn.
So here’s to the death of the post modern.
Robert Hacker Jessett 23/07/11