Sport and class and stuff

Social mobility has been declining, most people would admit for some time.

. The interesting thing is, as class divisions have been re-entrenched, our collective ability to recognise class, especially class-for-itself, for what it is has taken a battering. When Nick Clegg is considered a communist, David Cameron says he's middle-class, and Ed Miliband stands for the squeezed middle (whatever that is, perhaps it’s something to do with toothpaste) then you know we’re in trouble.

We’ve talked a lot about how the popular culture industry, especially pop music, is increasingly becoming an upper-class paid vacation, and the worse for it. An interesting article in today’s Graun: though only 7% of the population attend private, fee-paying schools, roughly one quarter of the British Olympic team is drawn from those schools   . Further:

It is the same with many non-Olympic sports. Of the England cricket squad chosen to play this week's Test match, all seven batsmen, including two reared in South Africa, and one of the six bowlers (who do the harder work and are, therefore, traditionally drawn from plebeian backgrounds) were privately educated.

The writer’s reasoning?

Cricket, rugby and most Olympic sports, have been professionalised beyond recognition. All sports now aim to identify talent early, give it intensive practice and coaching, eradicate technical deficiencies, and encourage (not always successfully) the right diet, lifestyle and mental discipline. Sport has become an industry, using scientific techniques to enhance performance. The opportunities for raw, untutored talent are correspondingly fewer. The fee-charging schools, with their lavish facilities and full-time professional coaches (many schools employ former first-class county cricket players), were in pole position to prepare their pupils for the new era.

There is a significant paradox here. As sports became more professional – and no longer the preserve of those who could afford to play for fun – the social base of the top performers was expected to widen.

It is similar to the contradictory fact that as university places expanded, the fee system and the compartmentalisation of subjects (turning universities into sausage factories of knowledge) led to fewer education opportunities and less social mobility. This is the seeming paradox of meritocracy. The word and the concept behind it was invented by the Labour philosopher Michael Young , who used the word in a pejorative sense. Merit in a class society is a retrospective judgment. Opportunities to succeed in a career or vocation etc tend to fall to those best placed to receive them. Money, class, power, however you want to put it, is capable of opening or closing doors to you. David Cameron described himself as “sharp-elbowed middle-class”, suggesting he had to struggle to get to where he is today, which is a gross insult to those who actually struggle in life. The idea that bankers should receive bonuses because they deserve them, while teachers, nurses and dustbin men should tighten their belts is offensive to many, but this is where so-called meritocracy gets you, the idea that financial reward is the same as just desert. Put in athletic terms, in the context of our society: You and I were born on the starting blocks, while David Cameron was born in the home straight. 

Sport, like all other aspects of culture, needs to be rescued from the bourgeoisie. 

More thoughts for the brain...

Marshall McLuhan noted that teeangers use(d) the radio to create a wall of sound, allowing them privacy, vital and prized at their stage of development. The modern urban working class in Britain faces long commutes on public transport, especially in London and especially this summer. As digital sound devices have become cheaper and more portable, more and more commuters have resorted to using them while they travel. It creates the same effect. The commuter is sealed off, aurally at least, from the rest of the world. Notes:

1) There is no such thing as music for music's sake, all music is ambience or soundtrack.
2) This is another expression of alienation. You cannot get more insulated from the world, millions of people together alone, short of people travelling to work in a personal plastic bubble.
3) This bodes ill for democracy, however one might define it. Cities are the home of democracy. Democracy relies on large-scale interchange of people, items, ideas, languages, religions, races. In dealing with the shock to the system delivered by late capitalism on a purely personal level, people are shutting down an aspect of themselves and of their society that makes it liveable and enjoyable. Without conscious intervention this process is self-reinforcing. Have you ever tried petitioning a tired worker with a headset on and eight hours of work ahead of them?

Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact...

We live in an age where it's better to look young, act young, but not be young. Post War rebellion ...and upheval was driven by prosperity, its bearers were the young. Who saw the no material reason why they must defer pleasure or self-realisation, as previous generations did. Anything that stood in the way, the class barriers, organised religion, the education system, had to be razed. An ambigous urge that could be just as much Thatcherite as socialist, you could see it as a class moving up or people moving up out of their class. 


That dream has been eroded almost to nothing. Neoliberalism means the end of the future. No one looks forward to the future anymore, compare that to the 1960s... The dream of ever expanding prosperity started to fade between the oil crisisand the IMF bailout. Punk comes after this, it comes in with all the other music trends that have happened since; plenty of good music, plenty more mediocre and awful music, but it does not have the spark, it is the Imitation of Life. It needs repeating. The constant worry about whether pop music and youth culture are vital any more is at best tilting at windmills. Youth culture today makes no impact on wider society because young people have been progressively marginalised.

So long, REM, we hardly knew ye

And that's the point with a band that trades on lyrical mystique. They were perhaps the original indie dweebs gone overground. If their bandwagon wasn't stalled by New Adventures in Hi-Fi (generally good but way too long) then today's news was on the cards since Bill Berry left in 1997, that was really the beginning of the end. REM had fewer big hits than you think, though everyone should check out their 80s stuff too (Murmur is fantastic in my opinion).

REM were a college rock band. In America this refers to the network of campus radio stations, which popularised a certain style of music, not metal, between 60s retro and punk. As an aside, campus culture is under threat, globally speaking caught between cuts and profit making; a vision of education austere and functional.

In Britain the ideal of comprehensive education is being dismantled. This will impoverish popular culture, pop music especially. Musicians have traditionally met in college or on the dole queue. Both avenues are closing, if not already closed. Popular culture is nothing without free time and disposable income. We face a future of more and more public schoolkids dressing up and twanging banjos.

Let's pee in the corner
Let's pee on the spot-light...

Cultural commentator in shock conclusion: "pop's not what it used to be"

If rock stars are our functional equivalent of Greek gods, cultural criticism is our version of scholastic debate. The big wheel has turned, now the arrow is pointing at grunge. Everyone it seems agrees that, while great music was made, in the end the music industry killed the Seattle Scene. Where did it all go wrong?

Colin Horgan of the Graun isn't sure but does an interesting turn trying to find out.

Two points have to be mentioned. (1) All culture is in some way retrospective. Any completely original sight or sound is in fact a new combination of old ones. Things have to be that way. Inspiration must predate composition. (2) It is difficult to make an unambigous case for Generation X passion and activism without acknowledging its obvious passivity. The climax to the generation's consider anthem is, after all, "I tried so hard/So hard to find/Oh well/Whatever/Never mind". Exhausted acceptance of the system began long before the Strokes, Is This It?

The conclusion?

In this context, hipster nostalgia makes a crazy sort of sense: rather than summon the energy for a defining statement of anger or outrage, Gen Y has only mustered a shrug, and waited as the consumerism that grunge initially fought off washes over.


"It's sad to think what the state of rock'n'roll will be in 20 years from now," Cobain told Azerrad. "It just seems like when rock'n'roll is dead, the whole world's gonna explode … it's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool."


Rock'n'roll has gone from a linear derivative art form to an abstracted, nominal designation. It's not dead, just more or less spent.

There's just one problem. Who gives a flying monkey-wotsit if rock and roll is dead or not? The idea that pop music is some kind of vector for significant social change is based on a brief conjecture, mostly an illusion, sustained by baby-boomer arrogance. The 1960s counterculture fought its toughest battles in the United States. In the end, however, it was an attempted alternative capitalism. There is no capitalist alternative to capitalism, as all the current headscratching about the recession and the sovereign debt crisis should just be further proof. You either accept the system or you don't... as Kurt Cobain found out.

The author hints at a reason why this slow death is taking place. The medium of rock and roll is (or was) the single*, which is now an almost defunct form. At the smallest scale the cultural cycle is so fast now rock and roll seems a pedestrian art now. Whole cultural phenomena can rise and fall while a rock band spends 18 months diddling about recording its new album.

* A sub-medium would be the radio.