Pop is too posh: Billy Bragg

I've blogged on this theme before - research which shows an extraordinary narrowing of the social range reflected in the pop charts, which has gone from mainly state educated (80%) in the 1990s to dominated by a public school elite today. Billy Bragg took up this theme at the annual John Peel Lecture; if you've never heard of John Peel but are interested in exposure to a wide range of eclectic music, the late DJ is a legendary figure whose annual 'festive fifty' is still something you can find as downloadable torrents many years later.

Billy Bragg: 'education reforms risk stifling creativity'

The singer and left-wing activist used a lecture in memory of John Peel to criticise Michael Gove's plans to scrap GCSEs

John Plunkett, guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 November 2012 20.51 GMT

Billy Bragg also turned his ire on 'culture-clogging shows' like Simon Cowell’s The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. Photograph: Andrew Stuart/Radio Festival/PR

Singer Billy Bragg has warned that the government's education reforms risk stifling creativity and leaving the pop charts the preserve of a well-off public school elite.
Bragg used a lecture in memory of broadcaster John Peel to criticise education secretary Michael Gove's plans to scrap GCSEs in favour of an English baccalaureate. He also turned his ire on "culture-clogging shows" like Simon Cowell's The X Factor on ITV1.
The singer and left-wing activist said the government's proposed new education system threatened to exclude creative subjects from the core qualifications expected of 16-year-olds.
"At a time of cuts to the education budget, the pressure on schools to dump subjects like music and drama in favour of those that offer high marks in performances tables will only grow," said Bragg.
He criticised the "insistence that knowledge is more important than creativity", adding: "As Albert Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the whole world".
Bragg, delivering the second annual John Peel Lecture at the Radio Festival on Monday, said: "Under the English baccalaureate, with its reliance on a single end of course exam, the child with the creative imagination will always lose out to the child with the ability to recall knowledge learned by rote.
"And it's not just the creatively talented kids who will suffer. Evidence shows that pupils from low-income families who take part in arts activities at school are three times more likely to go on to higher education.

Pop: by the posh for proles?

I think I've raised this before: research which claims that production of pop music has become the domain of the privileged, even if its consumption is primarily proletarian (working class).

In a wider article bemoaning/condemning the slavish, unthinking genefluction of so many pop icons to the monarchy, contrasting this to the rebellious antics of The Beatles in the 60s and the Sex Pistols in 1977, Julie Burchill raises the Word magazine survey that claims 60% of our chart acts are public school products [note before reading: her views are strong as is her mode of expression]:

People often yearn back to more innocent times, but more and more, as I get older, I find myself hankering after more jaded days. Surveying the simpering smorgasbord of crooning cretins queuing up to play the Queen's diamond jubilee concert in June, I long for the relative scepticism and sophistication of the mop-top Beatles.

It was back in 1963, at the start of their ascent, performing at the Royal Variety Performance attended by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, when John Lennon said: "For our last number I'd like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery." Yes, it was mild enough, but it did draw attention to the fact that, historically, the posh were only ever day-trippers in the world of popular culture. And, like the rich bitches who went to Harlem in ermine and pearls to get high on the sound of "le jazz hot" played by impoverished junkies, the monarchy was only really relevant to the purveyors of youth music as figures of fun. John Lennon would go on to boast about how the Fab Four had smoked dope in the bogs at Buck Pal and later even returned his MBE.

These are desperate dog days indeed when this otherwise arch-hypocrite – asking us to imagine no possessions while apparently keeping a separate apartment in the Dakota building just to keep his and the missus's vast collection of furs at the "correct" temperature – seems like a beacon of integrity.

"You're still f*****g peasants so far as I can see" – that was another good bit from Lennon's "Working Class Hero". And never are the peasants more revolting than when tugging their forelocks – with such enthusiasm you'd think they were teenage foreskins – to their self-appointed betters. June's sumptuous show of all-singing, all-dancing syncopated sycophancy is just another step in the re-peasanting of this country when it comes to the monarchy – the fall of Great Britain and the rise of the United Kingdom. It is the soundtrack to the reversal of social mobility – and the new dark ages of social unrest that such a failure to launch inevitably heralds.

...

Fewer than one in 10 British children attends fee-paying schools, yet more than 60% of chart acts have been privately educated, according to Word magazine, compared with 1% 20 years ago. Similarly, other jobs that previously provided bright, working-class kids with escape routes – from modelling to journalism – have been colonised by the middle and upper classes and by the spawn of those who already hold sway in those professions. The spectacle of some smug, mediocre columnista who would definitely not have their job if their mummy or daddy hadn't been in the newspaper racket advising working-class kids to study hard at school, get a "proper" job and not place their faith in TV talent shows is one of the more repulsive minor crimes of our time.

(Find more of JB's writings here)
Burchill is a notorious mouthpiece, and all papers are desperate to generate comments and debate on their articles - so its not surprise that this article can be read partially as an attack on the primarily posh (ABC1) readers of The Guardian!