RFI: Laddism

There was a backlash in the early 90s to the concept of the "new man", the Athena poster archtype of the sensitive yet strong man, mainly because it was too much effort for most men to both learn a) how to change a fuse and b) where the clitoris is. So, there was a shift to "new lad", or "laddism". Typified by classic male working class characteristics, yet adopted mainly by the middle classes, in a kind of knowing, ironic manner. Traits included excessive alcohol consumption (because, hey, alcohol is, like, cool, huh?) only of beer though, a move to the hideous casual style of dress (Ben Sherman ad nauseaum), a leering attitude to woman a la Sid James (especially towards woman like Kathy Lloyd and Jo Guest, woman presented as easy lays who, hey, like a beer as well). Laddism was represented on TV by the sitcom Men Behaving Badly (never before has one TV show aged so much in five years), through the magazines Loaded and FHM (back when anyone read them), and musically it linked into the more stadium side of Britpop (ie, more Ocean Colour Scene than Menswe@r). It's not comparable to the US jock, the British equivalent of the Jock is the Rugby Boy. Which is a whole new thread in itself.

That's a basic primer, anyways. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong, and a grotesquely ugly freak.

and/or the new editor of Rolling Stone

http://galleries.lycos.co.uk/d/17909-3/danny-dyer.jpg

I think we shd get to the heart of this tbh

gonna start with the non-controversial opinion that praise of Sean Connery as a bastion of manhood is the first sign of nultish savagery and premenopausal angst

then am gonna state that a sense of easy boredom and superficiality has led Britain's 25-40 population into this Dave TV-strewn hollow banter culture where nothing is committed and nothing is sacrificed - fuelled by a mediated sense of inadequacy in the face of popkult figureheads

this has existed as long as i remember?

it's getting lazier and more unconscious now, tho? perhaps it really has been around for years, but it somehow seems more endemic now

I think we shd get to the heart of this tbh

― I've been dancing since 9 and I'm tired and hungry (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 25 January 2011 11:47 (1 hour ago)

Never mind. Let's get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty-four hours ago we was sitting in the Regal Lounge of the Chelmsford Travelodge -- in the patio section, of course -- and we was just sitting there under a fake palm tree when this uniformed dwarf done come up to me with a pink Nokia and said, 'This must be the call you've been waiting for all this time, sir.'

I said FUCK OFF and ripped open a beer can that foamed all over the back seat while I kept talking. "And you know? He was right! I'd been expecting that call, but I didn't know who it would come from. Do you get me?"

The LAD's face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment.

I blundered on: "I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is a LEGEND! He's not just some dingbat I found on the Strip. Shit, look at him! He doesn't look like you or me, right? That's because he's a foreigner. I think he's probably Samoan. Are you prejudiced?"

"Course!" he blurted.

"No worries son," I said. "cause in spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me." I glanced over at the LEGEND, but his mind was somewhere else.

I whacked the back of the driver's seat with my fist. "This is important, goddamnit! This is a true story!" The car swerved sickeningly, then straightened out. "Keep your hands off my fucking neck!" the LEGEND screamed. The LAD in the back looked like he was ready to jump right out of the car and take his chances.

it's getting lazier and more unconscious now, tho? perhaps it really has been around for years, but it somehow seems more endemic now

You're just in a position to notice it more.

always sort of wondered if 90s laddism was not only a reaction to "political correctness" but also to the androgynous, post-punk, black music loving, critical theory reading, 80s "style culture" celebrated by mags like the face, city limits and even the inkies to a degree. all those big words and weird fashion were a bit elitist and alienating, so lets go back to cosy 60s guitar pop, easy lols, football and not really thinking about shit too much.

i think "baggy" has something to do with this, like a tipping point, somehow.

i was born in '81, so this is all a lil bit before my time and gleaned retrospectively. any truth in it, you think?

that sort of determinism via popkult history kinda comes off as kinda gauche, as if the ppl who bought northern uproar records were inspired by revulsion at simon reynolds

/lad/ is just too vague a category rly, need to begin with a niche and think outwards (like SSB)

do u reckon there's enough mileage to sustain a rolling 2k11 SSB thread?

Oy oy.

there are SSBs all over the snoop photo thread

dre affiliate/pimp/legernd and 'huge' nfl/nba/'epl'/wwe etc fan, he's like a lantern to the moths of the transatlantic SSB world

Laddism totally existed through the 80s and style culture, they were just called casuals then. Some of the fancier casuals probably even read Arena, along with Boys Own etc.

that sort of determinism via popkult history kinda comes off as kinda gauche, as if the ppl who bought northern uproar records were inspired by revulsion at simon reynolds

/lad/ is just too vague a category rly, need to begin with a niche and think outwards (like SSB)

do u reckon there's enough mileage to sustain a rolling 2k11 SSB thread?

― nakhchivan, Tuesday, January 25, 2011 10:48 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

i know it is kinda gauche and reductive. BUT hip 80s pop culture seemed to be more cool-headed and intellectual somehow, 90s seemed cosier, more inclusive. like the cool kids had relaxed a bit, less interested in weird/trendy shit, more interested in having fun. funny you should mention reynolds, because there's a bit in energy flash where he talks about how all the snooty london club people were horrified by how dressed down and messy the acid house kids were. they weren't interested in having the right trousers or whatever, they just wanted to *gasp* enjoy themselves!

Laddism totally existed through the 80s and style culture, they were just called casuals then. Some of the fancier casuals probably even read Arena, along with Boys Own etc.

― Stevie T, Tuesday, January 25, 2011 10:54 PM (12 minutes ago)

but this was bubbling under rather than being anything anyone in the media gave a shit about, wasn't it? guess i was a casual at 11-12, honestly just thought it was how non-nerds dressed at our school.

see i think we need to listen to the veterans here

i think the 80s stuff yr describing was kinda niche, and probably continued or had its analogs in the 90s via stereolab, early bristol sound, 'wired' tech futurism, clerkenwell internet startups, some sort of chill ass metropolitan sophistikult

underworld probably went from that to the LADworld

yes, would like to hear from some gen-x headz.

i dunno, maybe my perception is coloured by being a little kid in the 80s and finding grown up, non-family stuff in general a bit weird and foreboding.

Scarily exhaustive: http://perryboys.com/

ok i've frowned on fear & loathing rips since my sophomore year but that was quality

but y'see, even those 80s casuals were obsessed with having the right gear and looking sharp. wasn't laddism about lack of pretension and not giving a fuck? an untucked ben sherman shirt and bootcut jeans?

xpost

idk if laddism exists tbh

or at least lj is just talking about men being horrid, i think, not about youth subcultures

Isn't cliché genealogy of modern media laddism that the arrival of Loaded in 94 is the first total articulation of the 'we are smart but we like beer/crisps/breasts' stance that's seminal for the feedback loop that incubates Dave culture? (feedback loop because it's not just 'laddism', it's have-it-both-ways ('phwoar' vs 'I respect women') laddism that can be distributed in broadly liberal media channels, eg the first coming of Chris Evans)

I can buy this Loaded genealogy as 'total articulation' (& a media-reading-media journalist narrative), but it is too broad: things feeding into the mid-90s lad-burst are also maybe the rise of Viz, WSC + fanzine culture (?????OUT OF DEPTH ILFtbl ppl help), early issues of The Idler.

Analogous impulse/deterioriation maybe in the 50s generation? The Movement as grammar school 'we like jazz & pubs & war flicks, Modernist seriousness & Lord David Cecil be damned' -> '<3 Thatcher'

(oh, I'm 20-odd in the mid 90s, so this is recollection.)

the_movement was a thing among a small audience of intellectuals

loaded reached a much bigger market

but again, all lj is really talking about is mainstreamer men and their attitudes. the big thing in the 90s was contrasting the 'lad' with the 'new man', but it was just a war of media stereotypes, a question of semi-made-up north london types reading nick hornby and going 'actually YEAH it is ok not to read books and pretend to like football'... which is different from the laddism louis means.

Think there is a vaguely Carmodic thesis to be written about mods vs lads after the break-up of The Jam and the decline of the Labour Party. Post-90s laddism as the death of mod aspiration. Maybe John Harris has written it.

the football ish seems kinda confusing ime

i went from a shitty london primary school to a moderately l33t prep school in the mid 90s, i knew nothing about football yet it was HUGE at the latter, i mean most of those kids would have 'got into it' via their parents, baby boom bankers and lawyers

i guess there was probably a less well to-do middle class where football would be frowned upon as plebby, until the whole speculated post-gazza third way cultural detente or whatever, but i think it always had a 'proper' middle class following....john peel wrote about his schooldays as a liverpool supporter

Was Peel really an LFC fan as a kid? I associate it with his postpunker reinvention. Don't think he mentioned Tommy Smith much on the Perfumed Garden.

yeah he wrote about being the only liverpool fan in a class of manchester united fans at his prep school

not an experience i can remotely empathize with of course

the_movement was a thing among a small audience of intellectuals

Really? I think Larkin and Amis reach a decent audience.

But y, lj's rant targets & truelad culture are for sure part of standard issue mainstream laddism, but it takes distinctive colours from Loaded laddism, which shared ground with Hornby sensitive football-liking initially, but accelerated away from that quickly: like the initial eds of Loaded and current eds of Nuts could prob come to an agreement on a shortlist for 'Greatest Living Englishman' very quickly (w/o even disputing the concept).

It's a 'nuum.

Yeah, the Face I was reading seemed to spend silly amounts of time on casuals and filtered it through a sieve of Boys' Own and Peter Hooton, but bottom-line these people were being written about because they fetishized certain brands (and were copied/reified on the terraces so KERCHING Lacoste buys a two-page spread from Wagadon next month). I always saw 'lads, the birth of' as a combination of middle-class football fandom (prole interests, rather than actual proles, easier to deal with by mediabots), acid teds, nostalgia for more 'certain in their masculinity' types from the '60s and '70s as cult heroes and the whole attitude of 'having it large' as well as a mass discovery of "irony" that made jokey sexism and bigotry OK because it was "ironic".

This might be a weird aside but I think Thatcher was such a lightning-rod for people's misogyny throughout her leadership that when she was gone, it needed someplace to go. Laddism - knowing you're in a gang, but not that what you're being is homosocial - kind of took off in 1991 amongst formerly geeky guys having nerd revenge who would have identified as lefties (or at least it did in my office, where a certain ex-fanzine kid and socialist was discovering coke and girls and 'aspiration' LOL),

I remember a baffled Face feature on disillusioned late 80s scallies staying in bed and listening to Pink Floyd!

Think 90s Laddism in some ways was what happened when the ecstasy wore off for the Boys Own types and they got into Big Beat or Oasis or whatever. The career of Paulo Hewitt is probably instructive.

xpost
J&MC are irrelevant really. The real connection is Stone Roses > Oasis. And the initial Stone Roses audience is really the Perry Boys - see above - +MDMA.

The Face's Scally Pink Floyd article! - by John McCready, who wrote for the NME at the time. Probably defining the milieu of the early LAs
http://www.johnmccready.co.uk/scallies_rally_to_pink_floyd.htm

ha i'm not sure if it's a clear causal link, tho there is some musical inheritance in oasis from j&mc, but think of it as an occult or overdetermined history where a riot at the ica somehow prefigures the doughty pageant at knebworth a decade later

no

idk yr still on some truth claims verificationist ish, different currents

in terms of irl ladkult, does london matter?

sort of wonder where this went come 'acid house'

Music death-riot energy of public school bourgeois? 89-90 = My Bloody Valentine, Pixies? Mosh presence in ironed flannel.

no-one in my private school had heard of those bands. they did like rave music though.

in terms of irl ladkult, does london matter?

― nakhchivan, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:38 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

to my mind the real villain of the 00s isn't osama bin laden, it's john simm... cult of the aggressively average 'sound bloke'

think the thing with jamc is that they were they first big hip band after punk to be totally retro. no synths, no funk, no politics, but lots of classic rawk signifiers and cheeky little steals.
so, deffo a precursor and influence on oasis' wall of guitar noise and classicism, but not too sure what this has to do with laddism?

that's what i'm thinking woof!

aren't u a diff gen tho mayne? mid 30s ppl i know would certainly correlate with that.....shoegaze and dinosaur jr/sy/pixies etc xp, resolutely anhedonic and lad-unfriendly

xxxxp
More noisy indie than rave at mine, but I think I'm a little older than you? (16-17 in 90) (And it's still only like 10% of the class.)

think the thing with jamc is that they were they first big hip band after punk to be totally retro. no synths, no funk, no politics, but lots of classic rawk signifiers and cheeky little steals.

like the smiths

smiths are better candidates than j&mc

ah beat me to it

smiths would be the apollonian j&mc i guess, but morrisey was so sui generis that they must have had fans of nearly all classes and dispositions

The Smiths had politics; or, old person remembers the days when Morrissey read Molly Haskell and said the group would never sign to EMI, eg. 1983.

max i guess j&mc (themselves not at all posh iirc) were also a bit of a 'rush' at the time...kicking out the cobwebs, no neurosis, fuck shit up, have good cold fun, do it artfully

not sure where this is going tbh. j&mc = not laddish. smiths = not laddish. stone roses = pretty laddish. shaun ryder = early (pre-black grape iirc) loaded cover star.

think the thing with jamc is that they were they first big hip band after punk to be totally retro. no synths, no funk, no politics, but lots of classic rawk signifiers and cheeky little steals.

like the smiths

― read before patoing (history mayne), Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:46 AM (2 minutes ago)

the smiths were so un-rock n roll, and still quite political, no? their classicism doesn't seem as thought out and considered as jamc's.

i mean happy mondays are better than that and deserve better but they had a lad following and (im p sure) j&mc did not.

ur splitting hairs re the smiths, and yeah they're political (everything's political [via skunk anansie]) but not in a bily bragg way. and they were not un-rock-n-roll!

the smiths are just weird and always will be, they fed into a million things but belong in no given category

the smiths had loads of improbably laddish followers [via johnny marr]

happy mondays are shit imo, ryder is vile and the dystonic dancing fool is just unspeakable

johnny marr would be a proto-loaded rock revivalist i guess

un rock n roll in comparison with jamc who were like a pomo cartoon version of lou/iggy/ramones/etc... xpost

UM WHUT? 'Thought out' is nothing I've ever given the JAMC much credit for beyond having certain style icons that they imitated.

Smiths: launched the discussion about 'rockism', made plenty of political moves occasionally with your actual Billy Bragg in tow. SHEESH.

Johnny Marr was the focus of many lad-crushes which is why it's great that he's a vegetarian buddhist who loathes Tories. He's also the link from Smiths to Oasis because his little brother brought the demo from his friend Liam to JM's manager, who signed them with Sony and had them boutiqued out to Creation before Alan McGee could say 'King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut'.

UM WHUT? 'Thought out' is nothing I've ever given the JAMC much credit for beyond having certain style icons that they imitated.

Smiths: launched the discussion about 'rockism', made plenty of political moves occasionally with your actual Billy Bragg in tow. SHEESH.

Johnny Marr was the focus of many lad-crushes which is why it's great that he's a vegetarian buddhist who loathes Tories. He's also the link from Smiths to Oasis because his little brother brought the demo from his friend Liam to JM's manager, who signed them with Sony and had them boutiqued out to Creation before Alan McGee could say 'King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut'.

oic... always thought jamc were artfully contrived hipsters, obsessed with rock n roll mythology, 1969 and all that.

Groups like Joy Division, Magazine and the whole Zoo label axis based in Liverpool were ridiculed as "student crap” .

ha i can kinda see max' ideas popkult ideas in this, but the nw of england seems kinda singular, and obv split between liverpool and gtr manchester.....these kinda chill, kinda 'thoughtful' LADS into mumbly indie but still sceptical of students/southerners/tories, a continuum more than two decades old

oasis added the overdriven feedback rush of the j&mc to this northern psych indie tradish

LADS in london&environs don't seem to have any sort of continuity of popkult affiliations.....at various times non-indie dance has prospered, also probably more rap, more black influence generally

re nakh's dionysian riot energy in public schools non-empirical made-up narrative… some adolescent hit-one-another homosocial energy leaks into runnels of Faith No More, Ministry, RevCo etc around 1991. (But maybe that's just the metal division, never quite distinct from the sy brigade in the midlands at least) (This has little to do with lads at this point. I may sleep)

thank u woof, yr lucubes always valued

the narrative is kinda pynchonian flannel but i do know at least one psychocandy era sixthform j&mc superfan and rimbaudian manqué so u know, improvise, darwin, i-ching and all that

Johnny Marr was the focus of many lad-crushes which is why it's great that he's a vegetarian buddhist who loathes Tories. He's also the link from Smiths to Oasis because his little brother brought the demo from his friend Liam to JM's manager, who signed them with Sony and had them boutiqued out to Creation before Alan McGee could say 'King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut'.

― champagne in the arse (suzy), Wednesday, 26 January 2011 01:05 (12 minutes ago)

ha, is this common knowledge? <3 it anyway

from his twitter feed

Listening to an old Radio 4 recording of The Brothers Karamazov. It's a right laugh.

wonder what he chats to noel about

sort of feel weird w/ the NG thread cuz the uhm idea was for fragments of amentia (or dementia praecox?), glimpses into the inner death of the faustian ur-lad

and yet LG et al have created versions of him (however disturbed) with inner lives that are really quite colourful!

i'm guessing irl he is somewhere between the two, tho i don't really know much about him

that's from marr's twitter just to be clear

haha i had googled it to be sure...

well duh, noel prefers gogol. i hear he and john power are adapting 'diary of a madman' for the stage

ha i can kinda see max' ideas popkult ideas in this, but the nw of england seems kinda singular, and obv split between liverpool and gtr manchester.....these kinda chill, kinda 'thoughtful' LADS into mumbly indie but still sceptical of students/southerners/tories, a continuum more than two decades old

maybe the u.s. equivalent here is r.e.m. in the "college rock" years and early '90s? some of their fans being the kind of guys who are a set of chiseled abs away from appearing in a levi's commercial? sorta proud of being ruggedly plain and vaguely disdainful of fashion and pretense and the big city, but not above getting wistful while driving around in their honda civic, thinking about the cute girl at the record store.

see also: the replacements, the minutemen

the kinda guys who'll move to new york and then spend all their time telling their friends how much they "hate" new york

I never knew any male REM fans until I got Internet access in the early Nineties.

sorta proud of being ruggedly plain and vaguely disdainful of fashion and pretense and the big city, but not above getting wistful while driving around in their honda civic, thinking about the cute girl at the record store.

i know loads of dudes like this

they're called...."dudes"

maybe the u.s. equivalent here is r.e.m. in the "college rock" years and early '90s? some of their fans being the kind of guys who are a set of chiseled abs away from appearing in a levi's commercial? sorta proud of being ruggedly plain and vaguely disdainful of fashion and pretense and the big city, but not above getting wistful while driving around in their honda civic, thinking about the cute girl at the record store.

― minsktrans.by (get bent), Monday, 14 March 2011 15:33 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

see also: the replacements, the minutemen

― minsktrans.by (get bent), Monday, 14 March 2011 15:35 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the kinda guys who'll move to new york and then spend all their time telling their friends how much they "hate" new york

― minsktrans.by (get bent), Monday, 14 March 2011 15:37 (3 hours ago) Bookmark

these ppl sound a lot like....american ilm contributors of a certain age

It's a bit frustrating to read this because a few years ago I wanted to move to Philly for some of the very reasons that this article brings up -- that it's affordable and that people can support their creative habits with regular jobs that don't eat all their time. I've tried to convince my girlfriend (who does art) that, but she's obsessed with NYC. We settled on Jersey City, which is not so bad, but doesn't have any music or art scene to speak of. I just came back from there today and really enjoyed being there. I kind of hate New York. But I have job, band, and girlfriend here so I hae reason enough to stay.

At the same time, having played Philly many many many times, and having been more a part of that "scene" (or "anti-scene") than any other, I agree with Scott S. There's a sense that no band should be TOO good or hustle TOO hard. I don't feel like anyone wants to see their homeboys really make it, at least in rock. It's odd that places like Louisville Kentucky and Athens Georgia have been able to give the world so many indie bands and that Philly, a fairly major city with lots of indie fuxors, hasn't.

― Hurting (Hurting), Sunday, 14 August 2005 21:06 (5 years ago)

haha louisville is ground zero for this shit

At the same time, having played Philly many many many times, and having been more a part of that "scene" (or "anti-scene") than any other, I agree with Scott S. There's a sense that no band should be TOO good or hustle TOO hard.

eh i know i just need to grow up or whatever, but there is this attitude that i received from people almost from day one of living there, which i can only describe as people being really pretentious about how salt-of-the-earth they are. this annoys me to no end. like, just be pretentious ffs. it's infuriating.

like people as much as said to me "heh-heh, well california boy, we do things a little bit differently out here" like i just landed in central kentucky and not the sixth largest city in the country or whatever.