The B.R.A.

When Evan Haga, my editor at Tidal, asked if I wanted to write something on Britain's out-size contribution to rock,  I said: "That's my special subject! Just about the only thing I feel patriotic about!". (Well, historically - I wouldn't say there's a lot in recent times that stirs vicarious pride). 

Here's the resulting essay on the British Rock Achievement and what its causes have been.  And here's a Tidal playlist I made - it just kept getting bigger and bigger (wotta lotta achievement to cram in there) 

Questions for the massive:  

What special factors and conditions did I miss here?  

What, if anything, could currently sustain a musical Brit-jingoism? 

What else is there to be patriotic about, as a Brit? 

As I note in the piece, I don't follow sports, so saying football or cricket (or tennis - or did the French invent that?) will not count for me. We'll leave out the political: things like parliamentary democracy, the jury system, etc. Anyway, they are offset by imperialism etc.  English Literature seems like it belongs to the entire world, somehow. So what does that leave? 

I might try to make an exhaustive list at the place where I do that kind of thing.  

But right now, off the top of my head, I can only think of British comedy (the subject of David Stubbs 's imminent book Different Times).  

Then there's our slender contribution to global cuisine: Yorkshire Pudding, Marmite, Gentlemen's Relish, and the sausage roll (I assume that's a British invention). Toast, the greatest comestible ever invented, feels British but it seems unlikely we came up with that first or alone.

Oh and Radio Four - something I gave little thought to as a youth, and never listened to at all as an adult when I still lived in the country. But on my visits back to the U.K. over the years, especially staying with my mum (who has it on almost constantly - sometimes even has it on in the background while the TV is on), it has become something that amazes and comforts in equal measure.   

We value authenticity (consistency, integrity, etc) in politics.

And abhor those without core.

But in intellectual / theoretical / critical circles, flexibility is generally a positive term;  open-mindedness and adaptability are deemed virtues and advantages.

And in pop music, all right-thinking people regard authenticity as an irrelevant concept and an obsolete criterion for judgement...  a quaint throwback thing to concern yourself with.

In pop, reinventing yourself is considered not just clever and artistic, but the essence of what pop is about.

Pop is the art of the "true lie". Even apparent real-ness is a pose and an act, to be judged according to how convincingly it's executed rather than whether it correlates with the artist's lived reality.


So how come there's this discrepancy, this fissure, between what's valued in politics and what's valued in culture?

I guess you could say that art/culture/pop is altogether less consequential; it doesn't matter if an artist or performer is pretending to be something they're not....

Still, it's quite a gulf...  I wonder how it came about.
 
(It's true that politics, or in political commentary at least, there's been a lot of pomo-tinged, Rorty-esque talk in recent years of "optics" and "narratives"...  even Obama talked openly last week about his having failed to "tell a story" to the American people about what's been going down these last three-four years... but generally that kind of thing is about the successful or not-so-successful presentation of what's essential and actual, as opposed to outright fiction...  overall, in the public political domain, people still tend to talk in the language of Truth and Right).