the by now traditional glasto rant1
“What really drives student entrepreneurs into a premature commercial detachment is their audiences. Every new ents officer learns from first-term results; black music has no student draw; known bands are preferred to unknown bands; no one in the student union cares who the latest critical cult figures are. Students are the great, middle-class, middle-brow bastion of British rock and, after twenty years, their tastes aren’t about to be shaken.”
— Simon Frith, “Afterthoughts”2
So wrote Simon Frith in 1985. Well, after twenty further years, I see no reason to revise Frith’s judgement.
These reflections have been prompted by Glastonbury, naturally, which is now nearly officially the end-of-college-year prom for Britain’s student (and graduate) population.
I should preface my remarks here by referring to Ian Penman’s3 comments of more or less this time last year — and if anyone doubts what a LOSS Ian Penman is, and I’m sure no one does, just read his Glastonburial 03 posts.4 Like Penman, I feel annoyed at myself for letting it get to me. The Pawboy put it perfectly: “I still get agitated, perplexed — I wouldn’t actually say ‘depressed’, that’s not true — but something like Glastonbury irks and niggles me, still, in a way I wish it didn’t. I really do wish it didn’t. Could you P-L-E-A-S-E knock me off my feet, for a while? P-L-E-A-S-E knock me off my feet for a while… ‘Cos there’s a GAAXY OF EMPTINESS tonight.”
All that said, and obviously I didn’t GO — Christ, you didn’t imagine that IN A MILLION YEARS I would, did you? — and obviously the telly coverage is as nothing compared to the real experience: cos there’s like MUD there (and weren’t Jo Wiley’s mud anecdotes abso-fucking-lutely, screamingly hilarious?), and FIRE-EATERs and JUGGLERS… (Has any cultural event of any significance ever happened whenever a juggler is within a hundred mile radius?) Penman again: “I mean, music in a field — in the daytime? Wtf? It’s almost deliberately delibidinising…”
But that’s the agenda, really, the secret purpose of this now unopposed embourgeoisement of rock culture UK. What’s positively sinister about Glastonbury now is that it’s not just accidentally crap, it’s systematically crap — the hidden message screams out: it’s all finished, roll up, roll up, for the necrophiliac spectacle, it’s all over.
ABANDON ALL CULTURAL VITALITY ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Those who only remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Forever.
The bill was almost parodically LCD MOR, so safe and organic and wholesome and unimpeachable and uncontroversial: Macca! Oasis! Franz Ferdinand!
No black folks of course unless they’re well into their sixties (James Brown; Toots and the Maytals), but no whiteys EITHER unless they’re into their sixties (Macca) or sound like they could be in their sixties (Franz Ferdinand, Scissor Sisters)…
Go along with Mum and Dad, read the Guardian, smoke some dope — the whole of rock history fugged out into some blandly beneficent museum of dead forms, all breaks, discontinuities, ruptures edited out or incorporated back in (the “Dance” stage), their force and novelty subdued and airbrushed into a joyless carnival of secondhand history for the stupefied delectation of the Last Men… (And didn’t they look so BORED? Well, wouldn’t you?)
The significance of generation gaps wasn’t the tired Oedipal merry-go-round so much as that they pointed to a culture of constant renewal — how long is a generation? In any vital culture, it’s a matter of weeks or months, here? Well, the fact that the generation gap doesn’t make any sense any more at Glastonbury — balding accountants getting down to Basement Jaxx, Jemima studying Fine Arts at Sussex being “blown away” by Macca (“he was so gid!”) — is a sure sign that this is a “culture” as energetic as the contents of one of Hirst’s tanks.
RESPECT, respect for everyone… (when culture demands respect, when respect is the appropriate response to culture, you know it’s either died in its sleep or been killed). Respect is how they killed Shakespeare, make it all a part of the National Heritage…
A tactical nuclear strike would have taken out virtually everything that’s debilitating, deadening and reactive about the Brit culture industry (the whole NME staff: bargain!), much of the current ruling class and a significant portion of our future masters too (all those aspiring Tony Blairs).
Once the bombers have hit Glasto, set the co-ordinates for Ibiza, things might start improving around here…