Golden Years

An unremarked phenomenon unique to the year 1982 was the seemingly accidental preoccupation, among many of the surviving groups that had emerged out of punk, with that most precious of precious metals, gold. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but although I don't believe in coincidences I'm struggling to explain the phenomenon. Perhaps, as the alchemical process views the auric metal as a symbol of completion, it was a subconscious acknowledgement that the punk vector had reached its denouement, that all its possibilities had been fulfilled. Certainly, it was downhill all the way for (almost) all of its protagonists.



When you think about it, gold is a fairly rare subject for pop music, despite its deep metaphysical significance, and its emergence seems particularly odd in the context of the Britain of the early '80's, which was experiencing another of its regular post-war step-changes into deeper decline, with unemployment rocketing and urban youth expressing its disquiet in regular rioting. And yet, this music, and the Klimt-esque artwork that encased it, evoked a halcyon feeling.



Actually the paintings of Gustav Klimt may give us a clue. After all, he produced his work during the decline of another empire, that of Austria-Hungary. The products of decline are not only poverty and misery, but a corresponding decadence, an aimless luxe. Punk always wavered ambivalently between them both, transmuting supposed street urchins into little princes and princesses.



Gold, with its imperviousness to adulteration, is also the tradtional nemesis of the financiers, who were at this very moment waiting in the wings to give Britain its final false boom, a thirty-year odyssey of delusion and waste. It would perhaps be a stretch to suggest that these evocations of gold, far from being celebrations of consumption, were attempts to project "wealth" as having a psycho-spiritual component. But in lieu of any better explanations, I'm tempted to go with it....

The Black Book of Fleet Street

Chapter 14. The Thoughts of Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper the Sun, 1981-1994.

What Kelvin wanted
“... He rushed off, leaving one of the newsdesk minions to explain the new rules of the game patiently to other startled hacks who were standing around. ‘When will you lot get it through your heads that Kelvin’s not interested in whether things are true or not,’ he told them. ‘What you’ve got to do is give him what he wants.’”

On his readers
“... Mackenzie rapped out his picture of the Sun’s older reader. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdoes and drug dealers..."

On violence
"'I’ve got a story about someone who’s confessed to seventeen rapes,' MacKenzie had said on 13 June. ‘Is that a record? If it’s a record I want it on the front page.’ ... His management style was revealed in his offering a knife to an elderly worker on the art desk and advising him: ‘Do us all a favour, you useless c***- cut your throat.’"

On race
"... ‘Well, Botha has said the days of white power are over in South Africa. What he doesn’t say is what’s going to happen when the darkies come down from the trees,’ was one of MacKenzie’s choice remarks. ‘No, I’m not having pictures of darkies on the front page,’ said deputy editor David Shapland ... the night an Asian man won Sun Bingo, ‘That’s the last things our readers want – pictures of blacks raking it in.’"

On AIDS and homosexuality
"A report in the paper in February quoted an anonymous ‘psychologist’ at an AIDS conference in Washington DC as advocating mass killings of gays. ‘All homosexuals should be exterminated to stop the spread of AIDS. It’s time we stopped pussyfooting around,’ he supposedly said.
MacKenzie responded to hacks expressing mild concern about the paper’s approach to the subjects with jeers like ‘Come out, have we eh? One of them, are we, eh?’ followed by a shout across the editorial floor: ‘Watch out, folks! There’s a botty burglar about!’"

All quotes from Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper (Simon & Schuster, 1999. Revised edition.)

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.

New Dawn Fades

One of the most important, though relatively obscure, books published in the 1980’s was the American archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s academic treatise The Collapse Of Complex Societies. The book was published by Cambridge University as part of their "New Studies In Archaeology" series, which included such page-turners as Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process and Prehistoric Farming In Europe.

In this book Tainter looked at various previous world civilisations that had collapsed, from the relatively small Easter Island colony, through the more sophisticated Mayans, to the great Roman Empire. Tainter believed that the trends that destroyed these societies, despite their variations in scale, had a common pattern, and this formed the crux of his theory, which he called the declining marginal returns of complexity. In essence, every human society, as it expands within its ecosystem, is forced to confront and solve the problems that the ecosystem presents as barriers to that expansion. These solutions, which are initially often ad hoc and provisional, eventually concatenate and require ever-greater levels of socio-political complexity and increases in energy and cost per capita in order to operate and maintain. Eventually the effort required to maintain these systems begins to outweigh the benefits of maintaining them, and the society then abandons them and returns to a lower level of complexity. In societies where the declining rate of return has become particularly pernicious, this abandonment is experienced as a collapse.

What was troubling about Tainter’s theory was his formulation that once the process of collapse has begun, it is almost impossible to reverse. Even more disturbingly, the collapse process can proceed so slowly that it is almost imperceptible to the members of that society until the final days. Tainter demonstrated that the Roman Empire’s collapse unraveled over a period of 400 years, with its undulations being demarcated by the progressive adulteration of the standard Roman coin, the silver denarius. It was possible to live a long and full life in Rome during this period, and not even notice that anything was amiss, let alone comprehend that your society was irretrievably doomed. The most that could be perceived, over periods of decades, would perhaps be slow but steady declines in available employment, wages and living standards. Public life would also steadily degrade, as the unity that was forged in the project of empire fractured into narrow sectional interests.

At the end of the book Tainter took a measured view on the decline of our own civilisation, seeing the oncoming challenges of resource depletion and environmental degradation as not setting the scene for a catastrophic collapse, but for long periods of mediocre stasis, punctuated by the occasional sharp step down for individual nations. In many ways this is the one scenario that Western societies are least willing to entertain. Our deep Faustian psychological investment in growth, expansion, and the myth of progress tends to divide future possibilities into a false binary - either infinite expansion into a techno-grandiose future of wonder, or, on the other hand, the Apocalypse, as we over-extend our Promethean powers and are punished for our wickedness. The idea that our future may be one of mediocre making-do is anathema.



The crises of the 1970’s that originally prompted Tainter to write the book were temporarily assuaged by the oil glut of the 1980’s, and the rise of China in the 1990’s. By the late Nineties, even the most cornucopian techno-optimists could sense that the West had had its day, so the rise of China supplied a tantalising possibility: that the baton of humanity’s bright future could be passed from West to East, the neoliberal dream of the end of history finding its destination in Beijing.

China, far from representing a genuinely alternative economic system, simply grafted neoliberalism onto its centralised state apparatus. The extent of its envelopment into the existing global system was its investment in the chimera of Gross Domestic Product, that phantasmagorical statistic that measures economic activity regardless of its utility. The result has been that China has become a kind of Potemkin state, in which entire uninhabited cities have been built in order to maintain the illusion of growth. Those who believe that the "project" of mankind will be carried on under Asian management are likely to find themselves deeply disappointed.

The real lesson of The Collapse Of Complex Societies was that we are blind to the wheel of history, as it slowly grinds away behind the curtain of events (elections, revolutions, economic crashes) that we mistakenly perceive as the dynamic forces that shape reality. Contrary to popular belief, civilisational collapse is generally a rather boring, imperceptible process. The future that we are likely to experience is the one we are temperamentally least willing to accept - a long, grim, drift into mediocrity.