Rock the vote: Classic or Dud

In Québec, then-prime minister René Lévesque once led a crowd into a sing-along of Gilles Vigneault's "Gens Du Pays", after losing the referendum in 1980, but I guess that's more folk than pop. But I can't really imagine pop music being used as a hook to get voters around here. Not so much because pop is the Great Unmentionable, but just 'cause it would come off a little frivolous - politicians here are just expected to manage the country, and that's about it. In the USA, where the Prez is also expected to be some sort of moral/cultural leader, it makes more sense for stuff like Reagan saying his new administration will "shake, rattle and roll" (or whatever) to happen.

Sorry Patrick: this will read like I'm just totaslly ignoring what you just said — too tired tonite to actually think abt what *I* want to think abt, let alone respond to actual intelligent response!! But I've just realised there *was* a use-of-pop moment in this election, over and above the mere handy here-let's-use-er-THIS soundtrack: Geri Halliwell starred in a Labour Party Political Broadcast. So does this make what I said up top rubbish, or does it somehow sneakily confirm it?

Also v. tired, but what about the fact that pop music is inevitably linked with evil drugs in the minds of - whoever. Tony Blair got loads of shit from the tabs for having "a know drug-taker" (N. Gallagher) round to Number 10. All parties, but maybe Labour in particular, shit scared of being seen as "soft on drugs"...

I agree with what Andrew said there. I just dont like politicians using pop culture for their own means. I find it a bit icky.

I actually didn't vote Labour (FWIW, if I had they'd have won Dorset South with a majority the same number as a Wire album title ...) partially because of the appallingly patronising condescension to first-time voters through such things as getting people from EastEnders and Hollyoaks to sign letters to 18-22-year-olds in marginals, and sending text messages promoting themselves.

Therefore, dud. The decline in turnout is down to the increasing distance of the political process from the lives people actually have to life, something for which Blair must take much of the blame.

"I just dont like politicians using pop culture for their own means. I find it a bit icky": sure, so do I. It's *always* stupid. But what I suppose I'm a bit obsessive about is WHY is there this huge divide? How and why did pop culture and political culture become *so* divorced?

I mean, democratic politics is nothing if it isn't "popular culture": so why is it that THIS bit of popular culture doesn't even begin to merge into that bit. What happens, when, to young aspiring politicians, that they suddenly start to blank out * everything* that we ("we") do here? And then when they try, yes, it does come a Space Alien trying to order a pot noodle at Fortnum & Mason: not so much patronising and duff as totally meaningless and pointless.

The best argument re Geri H that I heard was that (step one) the Watercooler Blab next day would be all about how rubbish it was to use Geri, followed by (step two) the further argument by some at the Cooler that, * despite such a blunder*, policies x , y and z weren't so bad. Well, hmmmm: all that happened with Tamzin Outhwaite as pop-face to get the yoof vote out, was she was outed next day as one of the Majority Party of Not- Going-to-be-Voters. ie another example of the non-connection of the Two Popular Cultures.

"The invisible secession of a million minds"

Michael's and Robin's posts are *making* my point, really. We ("we") take it for granted that pop is (can be) somewhat smart: that's why we're *here*, for a start. I mean, we could back-and-forth about the merits and particular bitz of it (Buffy = better than Hollyoaks, or not, Blur = cleverer than whoever, or not). But unless we simply assume that to be a politician is to be culturally *retarded* — like poor old Roy Hattersley forever piffling on about writers like Galsworthy — I don't get what it is THEY don't get. Andrew's point (abt drugs) has SOME weight, but I'm not suggesting that Bobby Gillespie be made Minister for Arts. I'm just baffled by (a) the TOTALLY pervasive fact of the gulf, and (b) the total GULFNESS of the gulf.

Or to put it another way, Ken Clarke is a jazzfan: so right, we instantly assume, Monty Sunshine — Armstrong and Parker at the outside. Well, actually, he likes Ornette.

Obviously this goes back before Blair. Yes, he takes responsibility for NOW: but it's old. He comes to it as if it's natural. It's a longstanding thing. Sure, I can understand why Harold MacMillan, say, wasn't a Beatlemaniac — and yes, Thatcher's version of pop culture was predicated on asset- stripping one side of 60s libertarianism (market libertarianism, if you like) and presenting it as if it were its opposite, the Essence of Constitutional Tradition, and a bulwark against all other aspects, not their motor. Neat trick if you can pull it off — she didn't. She just trainwrecked Olde Englande.

But either way, the Cultural Gulf hasn't changed AT ALL in the 20-odd years I've been voting (this is the sixth national election I've been able to vote in). And I don't get it. Everyone throws symptoms back at me.

Mark, you've just nailed Thatcher right there.

The great paradox of Thatcherism was claiming to support traditional British imperial values while in fact totally destroying the social setup on which they were built, and redirecting the aftereffects of 60s liberalism from the communal to the self-seeking (claiming to love "tradition" while destroying its social / cultural base is a profound post-79 Tory streak; see also their idealisation of traditional farming while ruthlessly imposing intensive methods, etc.).

Saw a Macmillan-era British film earlier today, actually, "Heavens Above!". I still can't get over how extraordinarily formal and institutional Britain *looked* around 1962, and how fixed and consensual we felt we were - I think this is the key to why people often talk about the 64-70 Wilson government in terms of wider changes in aesthetics and design at least as much as *political* changes.

When you made that comment about what *kind* of jazz Kenneth Clarke likes, were you thinking about the cultural link between the Tories and trad jazz (Major being famously into Barber and Bilk, the trad stuff I once mentioned that I heard being played when I was protesting at a Tory conference, and the general association of that music with the cosily consensual Britain of the Macmillan era for which Major so obviously yearned)? I'd agree with you that Clarke's taste defies what you'd *assume* of a Tory.

All very interesting stuff, naturally.

Politics: Fat men/women talking about tax reforms

Pop: Love, sex and death

Michael:
1: D'you think it matters whether or not you have power over the forces that run in your own life?
2: If not, in what way and how much would things have to change for the worse before you did?
3: What would you then do to take control back? PS I agree tax reform is not sexy.

True, mark, it does matter whether or not I have the power over the forces that run my life. In an odd way, Two Jags getting punched was like a dying twitch for democracy. It's like punching a politician is the only way to get thru to them after the layers of impenetrable spin they put around themsleves. Not that I'm condoning that kind of behaviour, mind.

I'm not apathetic about politics. It's just pop culture is always going to be more exciting and alluring than politics. I mean I'm more at home discussing Sergio Leone and sonic Youth than the Nice Treaty which is disgraceful, but there you go.

I wasn't dogging you, Michael. I don't think the apathy is a fault in YOU: far from it — for a start, you're a member of the Majority Party, as of Thursday! But I just wonder when and where all possible allure left — or was driven from — the political wing of Pop Culture, and how it might get put back? "Spin" is the attempt to put it back, but it makes things worse. Without it, politics is boring because stuffy; but with it, politics is alienating because repellent.

(PS, for the record, Prescott punched the mulletman: mulletman only egged Prescott: I think wishful thinking got the better of you!)

Where is my mind? Sheesh. Although that egg was fired at such close range, Prescott must've thought it was a housebrick. No wonder he punched him.

Has anyone else read the polemic of Andrew Rilstone, and others, along the lines of "Vote Nobody"?

Well, it's official. Nobody won this election. I think there's something *very* wrong with a system which gives one party (and, really, one man within that party) such unbridled power with the support of just under a quarter of the electorate ...

Indeed, it's positively criminal. I heard that throughout Thatcher's tenure, the Tories never got more than 40% of the vote, or something like that. That someone could change the country in the way she did with so little support is terrifying when you think about it. Might as well resurrect King Charles The First...

Well, I would only support Proportional Representation if it including the choosing (by lottery) of a group of MPs whose job was to represent in exact proportion, that sector of the electorate who didn't vote.

This answer started off as a joke, but actually I think it's genius!! Who do I tell? I shall write to my MP! (Actually, he already mainly behaves as if he was representing the Can't-Be-Assed on the world...)

The decline in turnout is down to the increasing distance of the political process from the lives people actually have to life, something for which Blair must take much of the blame. (Robin)

Partly yes, but I think it runs deeper than that. The underlying trend is towards de-communalisation of life. People no longer feel like citizens. Individualism/consumerism has taken over. In an abstract sense I deplore this, but in reality I'm like it myself. I don't want to know who my next door neighbours are. In day to day life - travel, shopping etc. - I find myself wanting to insulate myself from things and people around me - get what I want..go where I want...then out...as quickly as possible...minimum engagement or delay.

I am absolutely positive that these kinds of feelings lie at the root of the downward trend in turn-outs at elections. The kind of engagement that's required seems somehow old-fashioned. I noticed the same thing when I did jury service - a lot of people seemed to have an attitude of 'why should I have to do this - I'm far too busy'. I would have felt the same way except I was glad of the opportunity to absent myself from work and be paid for (mostly) doing nothing.

How and why did pop culture and political culture become *so* divorced? (Mark S)

Pop culture is about individualism, fantasy, juvenile romanticism, consumerism etc. etc. It crosses class and national boundaries and is seductive and enticing (but from the politicians' point of view it's shallow, and tainted by undignified low-culture associations).

Political culture is about being (or at least appearing) sensible. It's also about boring, mundane things like running a country.

But unless we simply assume that to be a politician is to be culturally *retarded* — like poor old Roy Hattersley forever piffling on about writers like Galsworthy — I don't get what it is THEY don't get. (Mark S)

Well Roy Hattersley is obviously an 'old school' high-culture man (though he likes football which, as you pointed out in the original discussion, is permissible in his own terms). But as for younger politicians, they probably do have some understanding of pop culture, but (once again) they probably think it's rather trivial and *irrelevant* to the business of political issues and debate (and, on top of that, possibly damaging by association).

I don't want to know who my next door neighbours are.

I should have qualified this by adding...'with the possible exception of the woman across the landing given to affecting bursts of unaccompanied folksong as she unlocks her bicycle'.

"I still feel angry with, and insulted by, New Labour when it embraces Britney or Geri": Robin, you said this over on Pop-Never- Happened, but I want you to expand on it here!! Would your feeling apply if the LibDems or the Greens attempted the same embrace? Or if NewLabour embraced, I don't know, the Avalanches — or anyway something not so brazenly chart-topping, something that perhaps suggested they were connecting to content, rather than mere success?

(I'm not suggesting there's nothing more to B or G than mere chart-success, only that there's NO reason to suppose New Labour recognise or are interested in what more there might be...)

David: "The underlying trend is towards de-communalisation of life": exactly, and like you I dislike this *in principle* but play along with it and have no knowledge whatsoever of the people who live in this street nor do I *want* to know. My conversations with them are along the lines of "Nice day" or "You've got a lovely dog" and that's it. I'd agree with you that voting seems too collectivist / compulsory / official / institutional for a lot of people. The context - ancient scout hall or primary school, memories of a musty, long-distant childhood - is also offputting to some, I think, and certainly not suggestive of any kind of modern society.

There are too many contributing factors to mention: the main two I think are Thatcherism (and its detraction from any sort of collectivist ethos) and the internet (which certainly has made me feel less need and requirement than ever to engage with people outside when I can live in "communities" like ILM / ILE).

David: "Roy Hattersley is obviously an old-school 'high-culture' man": yes, but not as overwhelmingly so as a previous generation of socialists. Something that fascinates me is how Robert Blatchford, a great pioneer of socialism, wrote books called "Merrie England" and "Britain For The British" and denounced (I'm guessing) early US silent movies and 78 rpm records as "alien artforms": these have been considered inherently Tory thoughts and motivations for decades now (Thatcher's "swamped by an alien culture" etc.). It does fascinate me how the left lost its grip on a lot of cultural concepts: it was probably the industrialisation of the working class that did it.

The more principled younger politicians (the Lib Dem / SNP / Plaid Cymru ones) probably *do* think pop culture is "possibly damaging by association" but the Blairites seem to have no fear: the New Labour clique seem to have a mercenary desire to stay in power at all costs and this very often manifests itself in a belief that *nothing* is above exploitation.

David: "with the possible exception of the woman across the landing given to affecting bursts of unaccompanied folksong as she unlocks her bicycle"; I'm guessing you have her in mind as a collaborator, a Fairport Convention to her Sandy Denny, yes?

Mark: "Would your feeling apply if the Lib Dems or the Greens attempted the same embrace?"; well I suspect they probably would not, because both the above parties seem prepared to be judged on their ideology and principle rather than covering themselves in image and gloss. If it *did* happen, though (for example Sandra Gidley or someone being photographed taking their children to a Britney show) it wouldn't seem so repulsive to me because I would feel there was a greater ideological convinction within the party doing it than I do with Labour.

"Or if New Labour embraced, I don't know, the Avalanches - or anyway something not so brazenly chart-topping, something that perhaps suggested they were connecting to content, rather than mere success?": yes. I wouldn't feel quite the same way because they'd be associating themselves with something that spoke to me and that didn't seem such an obvious attempt to connect to a crude idea of The Youth Of Today. I wouldn't feel so insulted and patronised, put it that way.

Balls to the people in my street. I don't like them. Communities should be based on some kind of shared belief or set of principles rather than geographical location. For the most part, you can't choose your neighbours, can you?

"it was probably the industrialisation of the working class that did it": I think you need to unpack this a bit (like, er, when, and how...)

The "Merrie Englande" nonsense goes right back to the 18th century: one of the rhetorical devices by which radicals countered the power of Old Corruption (the Thing, as Cobbett sometimes called it: meaning unreformed pre-Chartist Parliament) was by appeal to the rights of Saxon Yeomanry, as crushed under the Norman heel. As history, this was rubbish, basically, but it had the virtue of appeal to the traditonally minded (as if to say, radicalism was superpatriotic), and it also linked the Powers-that-Be, to Frenchness (when said Powers were busy associating any reform with Jacobins and Boney).

The aesthetic reformers – the Pre-Raphs, Ruskin, Morris, the Art-Workers Guild lot - also had a bent for the pre-industrial marvels of the past: the Gothic, the medieval worker-of-the-hand blah blah. This fed into Euorpean modernism, but NOT BACK AGAIN: as if Brits were inoculated. Plus Wilde's fall was the smash of art-for-arts-sake here: no equiv. to the 20s surrealist embrace of jazz culture. Brit surrealism was a v. pasty affair.

Exactly, hence why ILM / ILE are the only sort of community I want *any* part of (though I may, utterly hypocritically, rant and rage about that tendency).

Mark: "I think you need to unpack this a bit"; can't go into much detail now, but I was thinking of the "flight from the land" in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. Blatchford's "Merrie England" stuff was in the 1890s before the foundation of the Labour Party itself; the growth of Labour and the decline of the Liberals coincided with the furthering and intensifying of the effects of the Industrial Revolution (which had of course begun a long time before). My point was that the whole pastoral aspect of early socialism, before there *was* a Labour Party, made less sense as Labour grew because the working class was more industrialised: in 1934, 100 years later, the equivalents of the Tolpuddle Martyrs would have been overwhelmingly concentrated in the areas we think of as "Labour heartlands", while the landowning classes had actually *increased* their grip on Dorset and the other shires as the working classes had moved elsewhere. I suppose I'm saying that the victories of Chartism etc. were felt in the urban areas ***but not in the places where the workers' revolts originally took place*** because, by then, industrialisation had fully set in.

OK: but why wd all this this cause "the left" to lose grip on cultural concepts?

I don't claim to speak from a position of authority, but it seems to me that, as the working class (Labour's core support) became more urbanised, their interest in the countryside would obviously decline (except as a place to visit, in which context it was *in their interest* for it to be preserved in aspic). After the "flight from the land" there was less of a rural proletariat and so the landowning classes had less of a challenge within the countryside itself. Therefore we got ourselves into a situation where the two main parties were seen as urban / progressive and rural / backward respectively, a situation only (partially) rectified with the resurgence of the Lib Dems and Labour's disassociation of itself from its old industrial base.

Dreadful music, of course, but I notice Peter Wishart from Runrig (and, previously, Big Country) has become an MP for the SNP. Not only that, but Runrig's Donnie Munro has got involved in politics with, I think, the Labour Party: he *may* be an MSP but I'm not sure. Is this a first?