Powerless to the People

We were in one of those awful playbarn things over the weekend. You know the types, former warehouses that have been kitted out with caged play areas and soft landing sites surrounded by cafes and chairs for the adults to sit and try and block out the incessant noise of hundreds of kids going mad. I looked around at the parents and wondered why on earth we did this stuff. Here's what I came up with.

1. Making play pay
We have been told that our world is dangerous even though all studies tell us we live in the best time ever for homosapiens. We see paedophiles around very corner, stoked by the media frenzy at every case. We are conditioned to be risk averse. The paradox of our increased safety leading to a desire for more safety is well documented. So we don't allow our kids to play in natural environments free of parental oversight. My childhood of leaving home on my bike in the morning with my mates and returning for tea is long gone. Even the after school back alley kickarounds feel like something kids did in history books. Play must be supervised and safety certified. Which costs.

2. Always on adulthood
Plenty of my fellow parents were on their mobiles and laptops. This was a Saturday. Now, they may have been looking at Facebook or doing their Ocado order or whatever but my guess is at least some of them were working. Because so many of us now are, constantly, totally on all hours. Again, studies have shown that this is a stupid idea, the longer the hours, the less productive the work but we have all bought into (or been forced into) this idea that being 'busy' is a good thing. Those of us that can be 'busy' anyhow. The reflection of this is the layabouts of George Osborne's closed curtains in the daytime, a handy bogey man or woman that all us 'busy' people can tut about as we stand by and watch their welfare disappear and have them forced to work for Mike Ashley for a pittance. We are too busy to look after the kids or supervise the play so we outsource it. And then work extra hours to pay for it. Which is a bit mad when you think about it.

3. On Demand children
So you take your kids to the playbarn because its good for them to run around isn't it? It may be in an air conditioned hellhole but at least they're moving aren't they. And you can get some work done while they chuck themselves down slides. So all good yeah? But then they get hungry or see that they could be fed something. Everywhere kids were tucking into £7 pizza and chips. Sugary drinks galore. Because if you are halfway through that Powerpoint for Monday or trying to deal with all the admin that being alive in 2016 requires (changing electricity providers is my personal bugbear) you don't have the time or the patience to negotiate a better food option. Easier to cave in isn't it? After all, we're now in a generation who can access any information at a moment's notice, pick from a menu of televisual treats, pause the program while they pop to the fridge or the cupboard for something to snack on - you're not sure what because you're buried in a work thing that is 'urgent' on Sunday morning or that latest missive telling you to change this or switch that before the interest rate / standing charge / monthly sub jumps as your 'exclusive offer period' is at an end.

4. The Endless Guilt of Parenting
So whilst you are buried under all the 'life' stuff and the 'work' stuff our friends in advertising are bombarding you with images of how it should really be. 50 Things Children Should Do, 100 Places Your Kid Should See, read with your kid every night and so on ad infinitum, a slew of messaging that is designed to make you feel crap if you don't tick every box in the good parent menu; a menu designed by coporations and their marketing henchmen to part you from your money as fast as possible because, as car firms know, nothing works better than getting the kid to ask for something.

5. The easy way out
Perhaps it was the Iraq War, or the coalition, or just your life experience that things never got better but plenty of sensible, thinking people have clearly come to the conclusion that politics is a waste of time. All the above and more exhaust us, just keeping our heads above water, irrespective of whether we are living in a mortgage house or scraping rent together, don't have the time and the energy to really think through things anymore. Far easier to pick up our opinions second hand and borrow them, whether from Katie Hopkins or Owen Jones. Far easier to say that voting is a waste of time, far simpler to not think about why it isn't working, to seperate the good MPs from the bad. Just lump them all in together and spend that hour watching zombies on Netflix or killing them on the PS4.

Given that this seems to be the year of 'what the fuck' you have to hope that we might look at this and think a bit about what needs to change. That we might remember the mess we are in was caused by the international finance institutions that have spent our bailout money and delivered precisely fuck all for us, that this was all set in train by the very corporations and banks that now overlord us destroying the manufacturing base of the UK and USA for profit in the 80s under Thatcher and Reagan. (It's all there to read up on, if you can't be arsed to read it, watch Michael Moore's 'Capitalism, it's on Netflix and it's very funny / sad). That we are all in the same boat pretty much, some people's boats are bigger, some own their boats (or rent them from a bank rather than a landlord), that we and our kids are being herded into a segregated, marketed and compromised world where peril will stalk our every move and uncertainty will mean we spend less and less time caring about each other and more and more time just surviving. And we might say ENOUGH and do something about it. Stop believing the ads, stop buying the stuff you don't need, stop relying on 60 second news to tell you what is going on, stop thinking that other people are out to get what you should have and think about what you should have and how you might share more and grab less. And if that sounds like pie in the sky hippy nonsense then that only says to me we've come a long way down a particularly dark and dismal road. Time to turn around.

Generation Terrorists?

This blog follows on from a Facebook discussion which you can read here

Cliche it may be but when applied to the music industry it is fair to say that life used to be so much simpler. A world where subcultures were easily identifiable was a world in which marketing music to those subcultures could be based on a reasonable amount of certainty. Trying to sell the new Primitives single? Well, you can assume that a fair proportion of The Smiths fanbase will be interested, that NME and Melody Maker will be interested, that Peel and Kid Jensen will be interested. Given that the market is to an extent ring fenced you can gather your (no doubt meagre pre RCA deal) finances and aim in one direction.Your target market wears a fair amount of black, cardigans, brogues and is totally plugged in to all the above. Your live play will be University bars and the pub circuit built up through punk and early post punk. You are working with certainties. The results will vary of course, music has never been a given, but within parameters that you can aniticpate to some degree. You make a cheap video and can expect it to air once a month minimum on The Chart Show.

Contrast that with now. Irrespective of the genre you are working within, if indeed your artist actually could be said to fit into a genre, there are no obvious subcultures of any size that you can depend on with certainty. There is no given media that can access your anticipated fanbase. There are no norms.

In conversation with a good friend who runs a highly respected UK metal label I aired this opinion whilst suggesting to him that his world was the last bastion of the dependable market. He swiftly disabused me of this notion. Even metal, that hermetically sealed world, was now subject to the vagaries of modernity. He pointed to the fact that half the population under 30 now sport tattoos and nose rings, that the 'metal' scene is now confused by an influx of new bands that look metal but sound pop, and that, oppositely, bands that don't look metal have co-opted some of its sound and production into their music. Even in this world there was no conveniently definable subculture left to depend upon.

In one sense this is free market theory brought to bear in an environment that previously depended on an element of self induced protectionism. From punk through to Britpop, non pop  bands were to some extent immune to the cut throat dynamics of the music industry. The truism that so many previously moderately successful indie acts (I'm looking at you in particular The Mightly Lemon Drops) failed when placed outside of the comfort blanket world of the indie scene seems only to demonstrate further that the ring fenced subculture of the 80s and 90s was a halcyon time when alternative music colluded with alternative media to create a hermetically sealed bubble in which artists and small labels could sustain a business model that would, just about, keep everyone from starvation. Looking back through my vinyl there are numerous examples of purchases made on the basis of cultural solidarity as much as aural excitement, donations to the idea of music rather than the actual tune contained within.

The death of this is, to some extent, linked to my previous post; a cutural pinpoint that stands for a wider political and societal disease. For that delineated music world was based on the idea of communities, of finding fellow feeling and idenitification within a group, a non reality that has now been distilled into an expression of pure individualism.

From a business point of view this offers an incredibly complex new world to navigate for artists, managers, labels and media. We can no longer depend on anything beyond results and it is no great surprise that the previous collective collusion that saw all defined by their genre has been replaced by demographics and market testing, a new search for a certainty in a very uncertain market. Interestingly, this removal of the basis of cultural marketing has created the very generational dislocation that so many commentators have been demanding since the last great musical / cultural shift of acid house at the close of the 80s. New artists, managers and industry members think less in terms of marketable groups and far more in terms of individual track exploitation. Applied to bands like the 1975, who prompted the discussion that led to this blog, that offers a much wider target market, albeit one that is far shallower and less dependable than those which preceeded it. As a side issue, it has removed the other previously precious pillar of music marketing, the novelty of the 'new' and replaced it with a wholly different, complex and challenging environment in which all those concerned with helping artists to succeed need to rip up what we know and start again. The newness of an artist, even whether they are still in existence, is irrelevant, music is now a strand of entertainment in business terms, the song is another marketable commodity to be exploited across all income streams.

For new artists, primary to this new approach is not how many social media followers we have or where we can secure our video premiere or which (if any) playlist we can get our song one but rather the primacy of the tune. We are now not just in competition with all the other new tunes but all the tunes that have gone before. Witness a day on 6 Music, the obvious radio outlet for an 'alternative' band and see how a new artist has to compete with classics on a minute by minute basis for exposure. Those old desires to frame a coherent PR campaign around media coverage have been blown apart by the change in the opposite side of the dynamic; the public. The public still want to hear music but not join a gang. A generation raised on streaming make no distinction between old and new and have no affinity towards a given subculture nor, conversely, a desire to reject music on the same basis. There are no golden bullets, our approach now has to be predicated on an ultra joined up attack on all fronts and, more crucially, an acceptance from all concerned that in all likelihood this is not a way to make a living, if not forever then for a fair amount of time.

This shift is already well underway at the major labels; a shift from prioritising the new to a mixed market economy in which catalogue, reissues, streaming, synch, live income and merch all coalesce to transform the business of making and exploiting new music into someting wholly different, a curation of music and its assocaited by products over time. Getting your track on a Spotify playlist is now worth a hell of a lot more financially than getting it onto the B List at 6 Music. The steady drip has replaced the sudden deluge. A similar process is in play at the independents, see Cooking Vinyl's mixed market of heritage artists and small label affiliation, a balanced business model that allows the possibilty of new success without betting the house on the outcome and is only one of many initiatives across the independent sector under the umbrella terms 'label services'.

Ultimately this means a continued shrinkage for the idea of the traditional music industry and its replacement by a semi-professional second tier where once those ring fenced indie labels stood. The generational shift for which us old timers hoped for has happened without us noticing because it was outside our experience and, therefore, our understanding. Where we desired a homogenous, easily categorisable musical movement we find a fragmented, non linear musical generation; predicated on its rejection of genre and, whether through choice or circumstance, focused on the temporary nature of is existence; a pick and mix, build your own image solution for a highly individualistic and precarious age.

Where Moderates now fear to tread

I thought it began in the run up to the EU referendum. Talking to a friend who was minded to vote Leave I engaged with her reasoning and pointed to a few of the (many) untruths that she was basing her vote upon. Rather than a reasoned response I got an escalation. From the EU want to create their own army we quickly reached the EU was created by the Nazis after the Second World War, one of the very outlier conspiracies that permeated in the run up to the vote. Still I didn't bite, calmly talking of the Marshall plan, the great idea of a peaceful Europe, the links that debunked this idea that Nazi gold stolen from Jewish holocaust victims was at the heart of the forerunner of the EU. It was to no avail...the EU was a reimagining of Hitler's greater Europe and stole money from the UK to give to fatcats in Brussels. Coherence and fact had left the building. Did I mention my friend is a teacher?

But then I thought about it some more. It hadn't started then. It had been with us for a long time before. This belief in what you believe in regardless of fact and, in tandem, its opposite, the refusal to try and persuade or accept that opposing view. It was there when my Dawkins loving University friend laughed in the face of my other Church going friend about her belief in 'made up stories', sweepingly dimissing 2000 years of history, of positives and negatives as 'all bad'. It was there at University when some of our peer group tried to have The Sun banned from the university newsagents because the best way to deal with something you find objectionable is to pretend it doesn't exist rather than persuade others to reject it. It wasn't a right wing thing or a Brexit thing or an anything you could put a political badge on;  it was a modern world thing.

And so it goes on. On my timelines today there are calls for Gina Miller to be killed as a 'traitor' (albeit retweeted from other accounts I don't follow), there is a news front page more suited to Stalinist Russia calling three judges 'Enemies of the State', there are Remainers calling Leavers all manner of names and Leavers calling Remainers names back. There are politicians who should know better suggesting that we remove the independence of the judiciary and there is, always seemingly, Nigel Farage making veiled threats of civil disorder if he doesn't get what he wants, a Wetherspoons dictator who won the lottery having been given the numbers by a PM too weak to hold a principle and a political class too venal and self interested or too inept and disconnected to withstand a basic level pitch to the basest of our desires and fears.

Nowhere, it would seem amidst this, are voices of moderation and calm amongst our political class. Too quick to resort to Twitter, too shorn of any meaning to command opinion, we are in possession of a parliament of job servers and CV shifters and a commentariat (excluding their amplifiers on social media) of paid by and paid for writers, churning out their pre-ordained positions by rote to secure their slice of a market. The right say the most outrageous things in the bluntest way but across the spectrum there is scant analysis and maximum polemic.

And then I understood a little more.

We are now fully immersed in a fiction in which the roles of the players are preset. We ourselves are also players in this fiction. The freezing of ourselves into one dimensional brands is the main feature of our current paralysis, not The Sun or Corbyn or May. They sell ourselves back to us, not the other way around. We presume victimhood when we self-abuse. We refuse to understand or accept this so we play on. We remake our favourite TV shows and films, we return to watch our favourite bands reform, we dress as we did in our youth, we smother anything genuinely new and innovative by clinging on to ideas frozen in aspic and, most crucially, we retain the same political beliefs and the same engagement with them that we had in our first flush of youth. We are hamsters in a wheel. We reject any sign of compromise, the liberal left and the free market right share the same approach towards different ends, a punch and judy show that lines the coffers of all concerned and makes literally no difference to the vast majority of the population who, in theory, look to all concerned to guide the cause of the country towards a stable and better future.

My generation were arguably at the vanguard of the creation of this fiction. We grew up with the polarisation of Thatcher and the unions, alternatively the last great ideological struggle or the first fiction to be sold to the general public depending on where you stand on the left / right spectrum and were told that we were the arbiters of our own destiny. Possibly true for those of us who escaped the industrial towns in decline (again, Thatcher's fault or the first flush of globalisation depending on who you believe) but certainly not true for those left behind. We travelled through the cultural shocks of rave and acid house, a seeming blooming of cultural understanding across our generation, a moment where all classes of a certain age seemed unified in an escapism that correlated with the collapse of the great communist enemy and a feeling that we weren't actually all going to die in a nuclear inferno and peaked with the arrival of New Labour and a feeling that things genuinely were going to get better.

But in truth we weren't going anywhere.The things that would really change - attitudes to race and sexuality, immigrants and women; the great campaigns of the four preceeding decades, were built on shifting sands. We won nothing really accept a reprise. We thought it was all over. We were on the pitch. It wasn't. History is a bitch. Ask the Romans, you think you've done civlisation and then you get lazy and greedy and before you know it the barbarians turn up and its all gone.

But we do not have the skills to understand this. We are not able to accept that some people hold different views and will not accept our facts. We refuse to think that things could get worse because that isn't what we were told. We cannot engage with each other if we cannot agree nor can we change anything if we begin with a fictional worldview. It's no great surprise that now the E's have worn off the hooligans are creeping back into football. That great totem of the left, the battle of Cable Street, the coming together of an exclusively left wing proletariat to reject the fascists, forgot that there were working class lads in blackshirts that day. Thatcher wasn't all bad. Scargill wasn't all good (or vice-versa if you swing the other way). Tony Blair and New Labour were not Paradise Regained. Nor were they the end of British values. On the left, the people simply didn't understand what was good for them, on the right, too many of the people didn't understand that you had to struggle to get what you wanted. In the middle...well, we're still here.

The Brexit debate is this paralysis in microscosm. It's endlessly analysed result was a direct result of this paralysis. No member of the much derided establishment (and I use that term to include the thinking middle classes of which I am a member) truly expected the result because we were too involved in our individual fictions to gain insight into the likely response of a whole swathe of people with whom we have zero engagement. I firmly believe that most Leave voters simply did not believe that the economy would be destroyed by the vote because, as Michael Gove understood, 'the British people have had enough of experts'. Who could blame them? Who knows, they may be right yet? Nothing is fixed and nothing is a given, whatever we would like to believe. The truth is complicated but our view of the world is not and so we cannot move forward.

Real change; the struggle for enfranchisement, workers rights, safe streets, education, the eradication of poverty and the most recent and crucial one; climate change, take decades and require compromise, struggle, suffering and dissapointment. We are not in possession of the qualities necessary to achieve these aims at the moment. Moderation is an essential of democracy, keeping all of the people happy for any of the time is a fallacy. A plea for the return of moderation in social and political discourse is urgent and necessary.