Back to the Future

Simon, via his own bloggige, bringing this article to attention, re '80s revivalisms as demo-trageting marketing trend. Which reminds me of why this is the one "decades blog" that I was always hard-pressed to ever contribute to.

 According to the marketing logic cited in the NYer article,  I should be winsomely nostalgic for the 1980s. It's the decade in which I went to high school, entered adulthood, finally got out of the shithole town I'd grown up in by eventually going off to college, & etc etc. Yet it's probably the one decade I feel the least the nostalgic about. Why? Because it was a totally shit decade. Because of the politics; because of the economics; because of all the shit music and shit fashion, all of which was inescapably hegemonic at the time due to the way media and culture worked in those days.

 All of which is why, quite frankly, I'm quite fine with seeing the decade being associated -- by way of the cited marketing campaigns -- the last place that most people would ever go to shop for electronics, a lowest-tier fast food chain, and a video game that is unanimously considered the worst in history. Seems only fitting.

Anger Is An Energy

Return of the Cockney

Although the smart consensus now is that 'the Sixties' in Britain was really 'Swinging London', outside of the art/fashion/music scene it was really a northern decade. Starting with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning then the Beatles, The Making of the English Working Class, Coronation Street, Z Cars, Manchester United, the New Universities (none of them in London), Harold Wilson (Huddersfield) vs George Brown (Lambeth) it was the north that made the running. The stereotype of 'the northern scientist' - ex-grammar school, then onto British Steel - was much more representative than, say, Michael Caine.

In many ways, as The London that Nobody Knows suggests, much of London's popular culture, architecture etc was looking rather archaic by the '60s. Blow Up is a strangely silent and empty film, as a small group of hipsters run round a Victorian playground. And for good reason: London was already in its then alarming decline, in which it would lose a million of its population. Get Carter is a great cinematic revenge on Londoners, in which Caine has to head to where the real money and power is. And never returns.

The real London decade was the 1980s. There's no need on here it rehearse the economics and politics of why that was so. But it’s worth noting that it was the decade when working class Londoners (including the Essex/Kent/Surrey diasporas) finally decided to take themselves seriously and catch up with modernity. No more Steptoe and Son.

Most striking was the big invasion of cockney voices, writing and faces into the media. Obviously Only Fools and Horses, Eastenders, Minder, The Bill, Grange Hill. Cockney was down-on-the-street 'real'. Maybe more importantly cockney accents were finally allowed on factual television, the medium's great test of authority:

Always going to be too pronounced for some those accents, but they properly reflect the desire to force yourself onto the medium without apology and without fluffing your lines. Also note there's no censoriousness or 'anthropology of the workers' in those films, but no cheap exploitation either. Instead it’s relaxed, democratic, in-the-moment. It has a 'this is what my friends do at the weekend: why shouldn't it have 15 mins of airtime?' feel.

The Robert Elms/Spandau Ballet/Paul Weller wing of this minor movement began to take themselves rather too seriously, of course ('From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet'.) The northern suspicion of 'cockney wankers' grew in this period: either they were too brash or too slick. Definitely too materialistic.

Billy Bragg, Paul Weller or Ken Livingstone might feel rather aggrieved at being labelled this way. They were after all rather more explicitly anti-Thatcher than New Order or Tony Wilson ever were. The Style Council were incredibly earnest, and their clumsiness in crafting a modernist-socialist-soul sound stands in contrast to the cool post-modernism of Factory.

The brief hegemony of cockney was its undoing. The tabloids and commercial TV embraced it and distorted it for their own ends. The path to London Fields and Parklife began here. 'Cockney' was also very male, always with a hint of aggression to it, and apolitical. Red Ken is very rarely called 'a cockney' although he is one. Admitting that 'the most successful working class socialist politician' really was a man of the people would have been too much for The Sun.

The likes of Class War did attempt to give the 'Loadsamoney' style a leftish twist:

It doesn't quite convince, mainly because Ian Bone is actually from Bristol. But the clip nicely brings out some of the contradictions of the 80s cockney. Ross, whilst hinting he agrees with some of the politics, isn't going to drop the American-style slickness he's hard won, even as his brother is denounced as a class traitor.

It was the actors, where voice matters most, who really suffered in the 90s fall out. Kathy Burke has now effectively given up acting, Ray Winstone reduced to betting ads. Nil By Mouth showed what they really could give to British culture. But we've ended up with Nick Love and Notting Hill instead.

"After Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, complained that for all her advantages and beauty directors would not hire her because she was not "trendily working class", an exasperated Kathy Burke found the effort of keeping a civil tongue in her head too much to bear. "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes," she told Time Out, "I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt."

Bridge Is Over

According to one's prejudices, current occupations in New York could be the inspiring harbinger of further insurrections, or little more than the last gasp of hipster indulgence; before further lockdowns are consolidated. Although some have pointed to the lack of a coherent agenda, a common consensus is now becoming apparent; with specific demands. One things for certain: It's not just those traditionally designated as 'the poor' being hit hard - and enraged - by the abuses and crimes perpetrated by Wall St. The current crisis - or perhaps the global swindle presenting itself as a crisis - is reaching a much wider range of victims than any other recession in living memory. The net is being cast ever wider, and it may not be so much a case of a 'squeezed' middle as an endangered middle. In western nations at least, more and more of the middle class are being proletarianised. Their presence as a stabilising force in society is diminishing rapidly, as the social ladder is kicked away from beneath their feet. Last year, student protests in the UK taught a similar lesson: privileges that many once took for granted are far from guaranteed. They may not be feeling the force of impoverishment, enclosure and crackdown as severely as the 'underclass' has; but the middle classes can easily be brutalised and criminalized if it suits the interests of the powers-that-be. Many a respectable, affluent parent is learning the hard way that police are willing to treat their children in a similar manner to the way they have kids from the 'wrong side of the tracks'. It remains to be seen how this rupture in the social contract plays out.

Watching footage of the above protests, it was (at least initially) striking how very white and middle class the protesters appeared; especially since they take place in one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. One huge reason for this may be gentrification. A particularly notorious example of this is Brooklyn, site of the bridge face-off. Mayor Gulliani's 'clean-up' of New York was marketed as a brave new world of opportunity, order and cohesion, but for a silent (or rather, marginalised and ignored) majority it was a social nightmare. 'Zero tolerance' didn't just mean cleaner pavements and renovated crack houses. It was also a gloves-off clampdown, enacted by a militarised police force in the name of property and plunder. The cultural vibrancy that attracts the wealthy to once-affordable urban areas became a casualty of asymmetrical class/race warfare as much as civil liberties and public services. Many a major city in western Europe has experienced a similar process, with discord being sown long before the credit crunch. The issues raised by recent riots in London made this discord unavoidable. Despite the speeches of politicians, it will become harder to explain away social unrest with the usual cheap rhetoric of law'n'order and moral decline. Even for those supporting their solutions, at least some antagonisms at the heart of this unrest are apparent.

Until the 90s, Brooklyn was experiencing something of a renaissance, with many of the nation's leading black and hispanic intellectuals, film-makers, artists, musicians and novelists emerging from there. In 1991, Brooklyn's Bed Stuy was billed by Essence magazine as "the happenin' hood". This is no longer the case, as the affordability attracting creative people to an area can be easily transformed into cynical property opportunism, and what amounts to ethnic cleansing in all but name. Corporations and peddlers of luxuries  inevitably followed the money; bringing in plastic surgeons, expensive accountants, estate agents, exclusive restaurants and the familiar shop-front brands that have turned so many cities into shadows of their once-exciting selves. Homogeneity is rarely a fertile ground for innovation. The hated figure of the hipster - a paradoxically monocultural subculture, that convenient whipping post of cultural decline - may now be finding that life isn't all about the LULZ, and their days as apathetic servants of accumulation are numbered. Brooklyn's hipster set may not be inheriting the Earth after all. I expect the generation following them will be less defined (or stereotyped) by privilege, smugness and resignation, and rather more by anger and desperation. With neoliberalism's collapse, the social conflicts it (vainly) tried to brush under the carpet are returning with a vengeance.

So, this being an 80s blog, we'll return to the earlier days of the neoliberal 'experiment', to a time when Brooklyn was a site of cultural vibrancy; the kind of innovation that can emerge from social tension, community identity, and alienation from the mainstream. To a time when popular culture had a bit more moxie, and Reagan's victims found ways to express themselves on a popular platform; for all kinds of purposes. Like early rock'n'roll, country or soul, hiphop made its mark with the 'answer record': where a performer takes umbrage to the statements of another performer; then upping the ante in anticipation of another answer in return. It's a handy way to establish an emerging genre, as it creates a sense of immediacy and anticipation. Their public rows keep the music in the present tense, with listeners positioned as witnesses to a lively argument. It's an extension of the live sporting challenges that are still a key aspect of the genre. As with sport, it has its fair share of regional loyalty.

Of course, as in real life, if dragged on too long it can become tedious and overstated; if not downright unpleasant and violent, but at least in the initial stages it can be fun and entertaining. The below records represent a far less brutal kind of hiphop rivalry than the far more publicised/mythologised ones of the 90s. They were part of 'The Bridge Wars', a feud where two regions laid claim to the creation of hiphop itself. There was some class tension to this, as the Bronx experienced harsher social devastation than Brooklyn since the 'drop dead' 70s. This is reflected in the lyrics, where Brooklyn rappers are dissed as somewhat effete and pampered, in comparison with the more authentically 'hardcore' Bronx. On that count, the Bronx won the feud. However in light of the decades that followed, within the context of future struggles, these tracks gain an unexpectedly mournful tone. Their regional differences melt into air when we take the bigger picture into account. The gentrification that followed - and the Wall St. protests - are but different theatres of attack, enclosure and resistance. There's always the wider war, ready to incorporate and exploit our everyday battles.