Yet there is something profoundly odd about the hyperbolic championing of Florence Welch. At a time when a climate of burgeoning radicalism should be reorienting our culture so that hitherto suppressed voices from the margins might be heard, why is the Great British Hope of 2011 a fashion-obsessed, privately educated young woman from a family of privileged metropolitan movers and shakers? In fact, shouldn't the red carpet treatment afforded to Welch make us question the extent to which we are all complicit in a top-heavy system that no longer has any qualms about poshness and ostentatious consumer decadence?
The huge popularity of FATM's hermetic, Bloomsbury-meets-Björk aesthetic is symptomatic of a society that has become almost irretrievably divided without knowing it. Though it often makes the right noises and appears sympathetic to reform, liberal, middle-class Britain has abandoned counterculture and true radicalism for an unfortunate lingering obsession with escapist lifestyle fantasy. While inequalities have mushroomed in the UK in recent years, the British bourgeoisie has increasingly indulged in a way of life that seeks to cover over its affluence with vague gestures at radical chic, pastoral myth, and down-at-heel "folksiness".
Please elaborate:
The most aloof, entitled middle-class since the Edwardian period has become inured to its position at the top of an emphatically inegalitarian social hierarchy. Meanwhile, deprived of its vocabulary and identity, the real "folk" or working class has increasingly receded from view over the past couple of decades, as several commentators this year have noted. And the pervasive notion that There Is No Alternative has been compounded by the fact that the alternative, proletarian, bottom-up traditions of the past (independent music, folk culture, communitarian politics) have been casually appropriated by a liberal-conservative elite that blithely attaches itself to faux-populist causes such as "big society", nu-folk music, Blue Labour, and Green Toryism. FATM's catwalk pastiche of Kate Bush's wayward, subversive English eccentricity is merely the latest in this series of top-down co-options of "grassroots" marginality.
The answer:
So what is the alternative? Perhaps the point is that we politicians, journalists, academics, and indie musicians are part of the problem rather than the solution, and are likely to carry on being so until substantial reform of the political system allows the genuinely marginalised, alternative sectors of the world a chance to shine.
The author probably isn't suggesting workers power, but something like the above solution should be applied much more broadly, to all of our society.