Identity is the Crisis, Can't You See

One of the less successful (though no less entertaining) chapters of Fintan O'Toole's Heroic Failure sees him attempt to connect Jacob Rees-Mogg's use of the word "vassalage", via the aristocratic self-indulgence of the Hundred Years War, to the MP's father, William Rees-Mogg, and the latter's book, The Sovereign Individual. Though he is right to point out that "for them the exit from the EU is really a prelude to the exit from the nation state into a world where the rich are truly free because they are truly stateless", and he is also correct that the ties that bind the rich to each other trump national loyalty, he is wrong to dismiss this as hypocritical self-interest masked by an antiquarian conceit. Imagining them imagining themselves as the modern equivalent of the Knights Templar or the Order of Malta unnecessarily diverts attention from obvious class interest to the trope of elite conspiracy. Similarly, I think that those who this week charged James Dyson with hypocrisy for both supporting Brexit and moving his company headquarters to Singapore are mistaken.

Central to capitalist ideology is the separation of the public sphere of politics from the private sphere of business. Just as charity is ostentatiously performed as an annex to business but has little apparent influence on its ethics, so politics can be treated as a private matter of conscience that has no bearing on commercial decisions (and vice versa, hence Boris Johnson's "fuck business"). Liberal outrage when partisan politics is all too obvious in the boardroom, such as JCB handsomely rewarding David Davis, merely reinforces this idea of separate realms. But that ideology in turn means you cannot be a hypocrite if you sacrifice your political beliefs to commercial logic, as Dyson is accused of doing. In reality, James Dyson and Jacob Rees-Mogg see no conflict between "global Britain" (in practice the free movement of capital) and national chauvinism, not because they rigorously separate their political and economic selves, but because they identify the nation's interests with their own. This stance conflicts with the worldview of many leavers, particularly those who hope for a more protectionist national economy, but there has been no attempt by the Brexit elite to hide this difference of opinion (that the media have been rubbish at interrogating it is another matter).

What their insouciance points to is the dominance of an identity that has been a long time in the making. Fundamentally, the Tory-Whig division of the 18th and 19th centuries was between the relative priorities of domestic and foreign wealth in the management of the state: between land and trade. This was decisively settled in favour of the latter in 1846 with the repeal of the Corn Laws. The cause of empire allowed the two to be temporarily reconciled, essentially by projecting the idea of the homeland and its associated virtue of loyalty to the colonies. With the coming of universal suffrage in the 20th century and the shift of the cause of the national economy from the political right to the left, empire as a field of elite action also became an escape from democracy and its attendant obligations, most obviously the funding of a welfare state through taxation. With the end of empire, that field of action moved to international finance capital, with the result that Tory reactionaries like the Rees-Moggs happily adopted libertarian theory. It is no coincidence that so many contemporary Tories admire Singapore, despite it being an unattractive model from the perspective of working-class leavers.

I raise this to point out that the contemporary identities of "leaver" and "remainer" are not homogeneous. Just as leavers are divided over capital mobility and communal obligation, so remainers are divided over the direction of EU reform (more social democratic versus more neoliberal). That might seem obvious, but there is a growing belief that Brexit is forcing a fundamental realignment of political loyalties (that this belief co-exists with an insistence that Tory Party members are overwhelmingly in favour of no-deal and Labour members in favour of remain doesn't seem to trouble those advancing the idea). The latest example of this comes from The UK in a Changing Europe, an avowedly "non-partisan and impartial reference point" funded by the ESRC and based at King's College London: "The UK is increasingly polarized by Brexit identities and they seem to have become stronger than party identities, a new academic report finds. Only one in 16 people did not have a Brexit identity, while more than one in five said they had no party identity."

I would interpret the latter as a sign of sophistication on the part of those polled. We have long been exposed to the idea of the floating voter, and it is inevitable that parties in a first-past-the-post electoral system are coalitions of shifting interests whose complexion changes from election to election. In the circumstances, I'd be surprised if more than 80% said they had a fixed party identity (I'm actually surprised it's that high). In contrast, if you put people on the spot over a binary issue then you'd expect them to come down on one side or the other, even if they have only a weak preference. This in itself doesn't constitute an identity, any more than an opinion on Marmite does. The insistence that Brexit is dividing the country into two camps serves an obvious centrist interest, but it also allows the fragile coalitions formed around the referendum to avoid self-interrogation. The People's Vote campaign in particular has been a classic exercise in displacement. Instead of building a case for the EU beyond the negatives of departure, there has been a focus on process and legitimacy.

As I noted in the previous post, Fintan O'Toole believes that punk is central to understanding the character of Brexit: "If you are English and in your fifties or early sixties, two things are likely to be true of you. One is that in 2016 you voted to leave the European Union: 60 per cent of both men and women in the UK aged between fifty and sixty-four did so. The other is that you were, in the immediate period after the UK joined the Common Market, a punk. Or if not an actual punk, then a vicarious one, living off the thrills of this most powerful and original English cultural movement of modern times. These two truths are closely related. At the level of high politics, Brexit may be defined by upper-class twittery. It seems more P.G. Wodehouse that Johnny Rotten. But at the level of popular culture, it is pure punk". While he accepts the difference between "high" and "low" Brexiteers - his book's premise is essentially deluded lions led by venal donkeys - he reduces each to a stereotype: Bertie Wooster and Johnny Rotten.

The central flaw in O'Toole's argument is not his bonkers claim that punk turned the English character towards masochism, but his dodgy sociology and even dodgier maths. Punk was just as popular in remain-supporting Scotland and Northern Ireland as it was in England and Wales, but it is also true to say that it was a minority interest everywhere, and not just in 1976. Not only were teenagers in the late-70s more likely to be into disco or heavy metal, but a strong identification with any musical sub-culture was atypical. Most people simply weren't that bothered. Despite the iconic status of Never Mind the Bollocks: Here's the Sex Pistols, the biggest-selling LP of 1977 was Abba's Arrival, while the albums released that year that would go on to rack up the most sales over time were Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and Fleetwod Mac's Rumours. I'm all for blaming Brexit on the lasting damage done by Barry Gibb and Stevie Nicks, but I'm not sure I could really justify it.

If you can't find a convincing explanation for an identity, then maybe the identity doesn't really exist. Maybe it is just an ideological frame, or a psychological projection, like marketing "tribes" or the belief that supporters of your football team's main rivals are all arseholes. There is also the danger of political scientists conjuring up a field of work: "The Brexit juncture comes in a new era of UK politics. It marks the first real crisis of politics in the post-devolution era in which the UK has become formed as a multi-national state, not just in terms of its governance, but in its identity too. Formal decisions concerning Brexit reside with the Westminster Parliament, but the consequences ripple across the UK’s nations and their assemblies, parliaments and civil societies. The European question has layered another deep cleavage onto the already fractious territorial politics of the union." Brexit is certainly an emotive issue, but I wonder if the assumption that it will be a disruptive part of our politics for years to come will prove true. The real lesson of punk was that it only lasted a few years.

Heroic Failure

According to Sellars and Yeatman, the English Civil War was the Central Period of English History. While some academic historians might demur, the 111 years between the deaths of Queen Elizabeth I of England and Queen Anne of Great Britain were certainly pivotal in the formation of the modern state and can still justifiably be called The Century of Revolution. Its current topicality owes less to the corporeal drama of monarchy in the films Mary Queen of Scots and The Favourite, and more to the struggle of Crown (i.e. the executive) and Parliament over Brexit. An irony is that the modern parallels drawn with the Civil War reflect a view of history that is as antique as 1066 And All That: anglocentric, focused on high politics and prone to dividing the population into irreconcilable camps. The historiography of the 17th century has evolved since that comic classic of the 1930s, first through a focus on class and culture, notably the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and then through a shift in perspective from the geographical core to the periphery, notably to Ireland and Scotland. The 17th century is now defined as a more complex but integrated story of "the wars of the three kingdoms" or the British Civil Wars (plural).

The lesson I'd draw from this is that the future histories of Brexit will be quite different to the contemporary narrative. One element of this that we can predict with some certainty will be the realisation that the population at large was motivated by a host of different, often contradictory motives and that the degree of engagement was generally quite shallow outside of a small minority of the politically-engaged. Far from being divided into culturally coherent tribes with views as unyielding as a Scottish Covenanter, most people struggle to identify strongly with either "side". In this regard, polemical cod-sociology of the "somewheres and anywheres" type is no more accurate or meaningful than the idea that Cavaliers were "wrong but wromantic" and Roundheads were "right but repulsive". Similarly, the simplification of "take back control" may have been great marketing, but it isn't an adequate explanation of why 52% of the voters in 2016 opted for leave. From the perspective of an 80 year-old working class woman in Burnley, the last 100 years of politics has largely been a struggle to gain control.

Contemporary interpretations for the leave vote often focus on immigration or the impact of deindustrialisation, but the anxieties of the "left behind" over the damage done to community, and their associated contempt for politicians, clearly pre-date the Empire Windrush, let alone the accession of Poland to the EU. There is a line that can be traced back from 2016 via the Jarrow March of 1936 all the way to Peterloo in 1819. This is not to suggest that we should see this history exclusively through the prism of material concerns (though that has been underplayed), or "culture" (which has been overplayed), but that it fits into a much longer story of disadvantaged classes and territories in which the demand is for voice. What links these three dates is the belief of ordinary people that they weren't being listened to generally, not just ignored on a particular topic. Brexit can't be reduced to a single issue, such as immigration or sovereignty, no matter how convenient or congenial it is for the media to do so. In thinking about the contemporary narrative we should therefore keep the treatment of voice front and centre.

For example, a feature of the TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War was that while it recognised the struggle of ordinary people to articulate their feelings in the face of disinterest and dismissal, it accorded this strand only a tiny fraction of the time devoted to elite backbiting and conspiracy. Likewise, the call for a citizens' assembly currently being pushed by the Guardian is not just motivated by the expectation that such a mechanism would favour remain, because that is the rational position that any fact-based discussion would surely lead to, but also by the belief that the voice of others must be managed by the articulate to be effective. This is the essence of representative democracy, but it is here being promoted as a solution to the apparent failings of representative democracy. The difference is that we can dispense with the need for political parties, with their unhelpful focus on class interests, and instead rely on conventional expertise and a curated people. Fundamentally, there is no difference between a citizens' assembly and the BBC's Question Time.

Another notable aspect of the narrative, at least the version consumed by the liberal middle-class, is the idea that Brexit is a pathology of the country's confused personality and dysfunctional state. One of the leading proponents of this framing is Fintan O'Toole, whose new book, Heroic Failure: The Delusions of Brexit, has more than a whiff of Sellars and Yeatman about it. O'Toole made his name with Ship of Fools, a forensic analysis of the political corruption of the Celtic Tiger years in Ireland. But that was an inside job (as a columnist for the Irish Times he is very much part of the Dublin elite), whereas his new book is of the outsider-looking-in genre. Its central premise is that Brexit is "Britain's reckoning with itself", which strikes me as nothing if not optimistic. According to O'Toole, summarising his case in the Guardian (naturally), "Brexit plays out a conflict between Them and Us, but it is surely obvious after this week that the problem is not with Them on the continent. It’s with the British Us, the unravelling of an imagined community. The visible collapse of the Westminster polity this week may be a result of Brexit, but Brexit itself is the result of the invisible subsidence of the political order over recent decades."

From the opening reference to Lewis Carroll to the in-jokes about the tabloid press ("Drop the dead dodo") this synopsis is a distorting mirror that produces a caricature rather than a sharp image, but a caricature is what the audience wants. O'Toole's popularity owes much to the belief that he is telling home truths not about "Us", the British as a whole, but about the "clownish ruling class" and the intellectually-stunted working class. Very much "Them". He stands in a long tradition, going back to Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, of privileged Irishmen servicing the needs of British navel-gazing: close enough to understand the peculiarities and distant enough to appraise them clearly. While this tradition has been politically broad, including both Tories like Swift and Burke and soi-disant socialists like Wilde and Shaw, its common features have been a tendency to personalise Britain (or more precisely England) and an appreciation of absurdity. The result is that modern exponents like O'Toole still place great emphasis on understanding the peculiarities of the "national character".

An example of this is his emphasis on the hackneyed trope of heroic failure (the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott of the Antarctic, Dunkirk etc). O'Toole is intelligent enough to develop this cliché in interesting directions, pointing up both the irony of "the fever-dream of an English Resistance" (fictionalised in Len Deighton's SS-GB), with the EU substituted for the Nazis, and the bad faith of the trope of the UK as a colonial subject, which serves to occlude its actual history as the colonial oppressor. He also acknowledges that "the lure of self-pity" (a nod to Anthony Barnett's The Lure of Greatness) is largely an English failing. For O'Toole (like Barnett), "Brexit is essentially an English phenomenon". But this allows him to all too easily ignore the majority vote for leave in Wales and the complexity of the vote in Scotland where Brexit and Scottish independence are not mutually exclusive. The commercial reality is that the audience for this type of work is predominantly English, indeed metropolitan, so why would you bother with the periphery of Britain when discussing the thing called Brexit?

No analysis of the English character would be complete without a reference to le vice Anglais. Indeed, O'Toole's central claim is that Brexit is a psychosexual act of self-flagellation. Bizarrely he attributes this to punk rather than public schools, largely to provide a wider social setting: "For it is in punk that we find not just the nihilistic energy that helped to drive the Brexit impulse but, more to the point, the popularisation of masochism. What heroic failure and fantasies of Nazi invasion did for the middle and upper classes, punk did for the young and the working class." This is both demographic balls (punks were a small minority: most kids in the late-70s were into heavy metal or disco) and a misreading of the semiotics. O'Toole may be familiar with bondage trousers but it doesn't sound like he ever heard X-Ray Spex's Oh Bondage, Up Yours, a song that employs masochism as a metaphor for consumerism. He also casts punk as an organic and native production, forgetting the international influences, from the New York scene to the Situationists, along with the continuities with the counterculture of the 60s and 70s and the intersections with black British culture (dub, the later ska revival). To serve his idea of punk as a reactionary howl he ignores the DIY ethos and foregrounds the gobbing, much as the tabloids did in 1976.

Key to O'Toole's reading of punk is the vulnerability of the working class to "sadopopulism", though the word itself, coined by Timothy Snyder in his critique of the global growth of illiberalism, suggests a tendency that is isn't specifically English. Insofar as O'Toole ventures a class analysis of Brexit, it doesn't proceed beyond the linked ideas of a mendacious, camp upper class, typified by Boris Johnson, and a self-harming working class: "You can hurt yourself for someone or something. 'So,' sings the great balladeer of English self-pity Morrissey, 'scratch my name on your arm with a fountain pen. This means you really love me.' For some, marking Leave on the ballot paper in June 2016 was a way of scratching the name of England on their arms to prove their love." The overheated imagery here (not to mention Morrissey's own political baggage) evokes tattoos and the Cross of St George, and so the vexed issue of English nationalism. In a review of Kevin O'Rourke's A Short History of Brexit, O'Toole flips the author's idea that the EU was a conscious attempt to preserve the European nation state: "if the EU was about rescuing the nation state, might the great structural problem of Britain’s attitudes to it be precisely that the UK is not a nation state?"

This gets to the heart of the matter for O'Toole, which is not about the pathologies of the English working class or the legacy of punk but the viability of the United Kingdom: "An archaic political system had carried on even while its foundations in a collective sense of belonging were crumbling. Brexit in one way alone has done a real service: it has forced the old system to play out its death throes in public. The spectacle is ugly, but at least it shows that a fissiparous four-nation state cannot be governed without radical social and constitutional change." In fact, the Scottish independence referendum result was the opposite of fissiparous - a decision to stick together - and there remains no majority for unification in Ireland, North or South, despite growing dismay at the behaviour of the DUP. That the UK's political system is archaic is obvious, but it is still capable of evolving, as the recent fuss over the Speaker's willingness to update process has shown, so announcing its imminent death is likely to be fake news.

Though this kind of hyperbole plays well with a liberal audience, you know that "radical social and constitutional change" is likely to be no more than stale Blairism and proportional representation. Compare and contrast with Pankaj Mishra. In a New York Times essay entitled The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class, he foresees a violent break-up of Britain, essentially as payback for the suffering of India's rushed independence: "As partition comes home, threatening bloodshed in Ireland and secession in Scotland, and an unimaginable chaos of no-deal Brexit looms, ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britain’s bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans. More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cossetted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was." Though more blood-curdling than O'Toole, Mishra's analysis is just as shallow and just as likely to be wrong. The upper-class fools who infest British politics and the media aren't about to disappear at the stroke of midnight on the 29th of March.

The problem with O'Toole is that he does not seek to understand the variety of Britain or to accord the neglected a voice, any more than Burke sought to understand the weavers of Manchester. It says something when an establishment figure like Philip Collins in the Times can see the shortcoming of a narrative that makes too few demands on its audience: "The strongest reservation about Heroic Failure is that it is a comforting and luxurious read for people who already agree. O’Toole tells you what you think already better than you could say it yourself. Unless, of course, you don’t think it already, in which case he is unlikely to persuade you." If O'Toole serves a useful purpose in the context of Brexit, it is in skilfully highlighting the delusion of the language deployed by the leave campaign and in particular the advocates of no-deal. But that still means a focus on the language of the social elite, albeit a different segment to the audience that will buy his book, and thus a failure to give voice to the bulk of those who voted leave, voted remain or simply didn't vote. Just as few critics thought fit to comment on the anti-democratic origins of the central trope of Ship of Fools, so I doubt many will note the irony of his new title.

The Entrepreneur of Himself

I hadn't planned to write a full piece on David Bowie, limiting myself to reviving some older thoughts from 2013 on the nature of "cool" via Twitter, and slipping a couple of references into Monday's post on the impact that social media norms have had on the BBC's institutional bias, but I ended up pretty much writing one in disjointed comments elsewhere. So, in the spirit of the man himself, I have decided to rework the material: something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

Bowie wasn't musically innovative, but he knew a good thing when he heard it. His breakthrough came with Glam, an essentially reactionary form that revived Rock & Roll and conservative affectations in the post-1968 era. If you couldn't stand James Taylor and liked saxophones, Glam was where it was at. As with any cultural fashion, there were multiple strands at play, from Roxy Music's art-school irony via T-Tex's non-nonsense boogie to Sweet's Carry-On Popping. Bowie happily nicked ideas from all of them. Despite the retrospective claims of revolution, his theatrical "gender-bending" caused less of a fuss at the time than Marc Bolan wearing high heels with jeans (long before Eddie Izzard appropriated the look), while The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was, as the title suggests, an unimaginative concept album in an era of unimaginative concept albums that was saved by some great standalone songs.

Following the peak of Ziggy-mania, Bowie's mid-70s albums were patchy, still obsessed with daft concepts (Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs) and increasingly short of ideas (Station to Station delivered 6 tracks painfully stretched out to 38 minutes). Everyone agrees that his move to Berlin, supposedly to kick drugs but more to get off the US stadium treadmill, marked a creative renaissance, but this was less about the right time and place and more about the right people, specifically the melding of indirect influences via Iggy Pop (proto-punk), Brian Eno (German electronic music) and Robert Fripp (avant-garde noodlings). If Bowie brought anything to the party himself it was his love of Soul. His real talent was that of an impresario: a manager more than collaborator, with a shrewd assessment of others. He was a Diaghilev, not a Nijinsky.

After the Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger), Bowie reverted to form with patchy albums, fewer tracks and some less assured collaborations, but there were always a few gems to keep you interested until the mid-80s slough (a period he later dismissed as the "Phil Collins years"). As he turned 40, he also began to excavate his own past, both through the exploration of youthful memories (Let's Dance and Absolute Beginners) and the reworking of older songs, both his own and others, such as China Girl and Wild is the Wind. For all the emphasis of his fans on the Ziggy years (or later on Heroes the single), Bowie never lost his fascination for the music of his formative years in the late 50s and early 60s, nor his weakness for ballrooms and cocktail bar chic (it's funny to recall that Saturday Night Fever and Young Americans were both originally inspired by the dance-halls of London, not New York).

The last 30 years of his life saw little of real artistic note, though his marketing skill meant that any new release stimulated a brief frisson of hope. In the late-90s, he got aboard the zeitgeist train, launching his own Internet business and issuing Bowie Bonds. He even developed a reputation as a new media guru, correctly forecasting the impact of digital downloads on the music business: "'Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity ... You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left". Of course, not all his predictions were sound ("I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years"), while his forays into politics or wider social issues (e.g. his inadvertent role in founding Rock Against Racism) were foolish even by the standards of a very foolish time, but then his career was a triumph of the brand over inconsistent product releases.

As a cultural figure, you cannot discuss Bowie without mentioning his emblematic role as neoliberal man, best captured in Michel Foucault's definition in The Birth of Biopolitics: "In practice, the stake in all neo-liberal analysis is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as a partner of exchange with homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings". As well as his pioneering work with IP securities, Bowie would eventually turn his old dressing-up box into a highly successful exhibition at the V&A, proving that nothing was beyond the realm of monetisation. But his real contribution to neoliberalism was the twin concept that you could be whoever you wanted to be and that achieving this was down to your own efforts. Society was just a backdrop, a thought that would chime with Margaret Thatcher.

But where Bowie diverged from the Iron Lady was that he didn't change his persona from year to year like a new coat, rather he suggested there was no base persona to begin with. In the 1970s, when the counter-culture had ossified into a new conservatism, this essentially postmodern attitude was as welcome to a Northern kid struggling with his sexuality as a London Bohemian looking for novelty. Morrisey and Vivienne Westwood, despite the difference in age, were both children of Bowie. Nicolas Roeg's film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, captured this sense of wide potential. Despite the tragic story arc, what remains in the memory is not Thomas Newton's paranoia or dissolution, but his physical construction (false eyes and nipples) and his ability to become the fabulously rich CEO of a technology business despite being socially autistic. Whenever I see a modern tech-titan posing near a space rocket, I imagine he is trying to smuggle water off the planet.

Bowie's appearances on film were rarely satisfying, apart from The Man Who Fell to Earth, largely because his emotional range was narrow outside the pressure-cooker of a song and his non-singing presence owed much to a stillness that few directors managed to successfully capture (an exception was his appearance as Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige). Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is an acquired taste, while Labyrinth is best approached as panto. Despite this, Bowie always seemed to be in demand by film-makers, which probably reflected their own youthful memories or the projection of fantasies triggered by Bowie's personae. What a lot of them discovered was that he really was a blank slate and that beneath the public image lay a polite, well-mannered, lower-middle class South Londoner.

When we mourn the passing of a public figure we are often mourning our own past through the prism of that figure's history, hence the "what he meant to me" spin of many of the Bowie eulogies. That's narcissistic, but it's also a feature of modernity. When collective memory has been globalised, and when we have been exposed to so much of a particular personality's "output" over the years, we inevitably feel a greater sense of involvement than a nineteenth century peasant hearing about the death of a distant monarch. Berating others for ostentatious mourning, or berating those doing the berating for a lack of humanity, are two sides of the same me-coin. To an extent we also resent this strength of feeling, much as we resent the emotional investment in a football team when they concede a 90th minute equaliser. A tribute connects us to the deceased, but it also means we get the last word.

As a creative artist, Bowie was an exemplary narcissist because he had the courage to selfishly pursue his desires, despite the collateral damage it caused to others. In contrast, most of us compromise with the world. I've sensed in some of the Bowie tributes a relief that he went quietly at the end and apparently without regrets, that he didn't turn into a bitter old man hectoring the media about the shortcomings of electronic dance music or the threat posed to the nation by Jeremy Corbyn, which meant the belief that "He gave me the courage to be myself" wasn't compromised. Our collective response has been narcissistic because its what he would have wanted. We are merely holding up a mirror to Bowie's now breathless face.

All Your Pop are Belong to Us

The chief interest of Dominic Sandbrook's Let Us Entertain You is in determining who he means by those first and second persons plural. It gradually becomes clear that "us" means the aspirational middle class, while "you" is a patriotic, deferential mass that hankers after a cheerful conservativism. This is a rummage through the cultural second-hand shop that marginalises working class autonomy and the pretensions of intellectuals. It is relentlessly middlebrow, mildly xenophobic, and obsessed with big houses and private education. Give him a Union Jack waistcoat and Sandbrook would make an excellent John Bull, or perhaps a Toby jug. In the spirit of the series, the following sneer is based on only the first two episodes and I have carefully selected the most amusing tropes and misrepresentations for best effect.

The thesis of the Daily Mail's resident social historian is "that our modern cultural success is rooted in the experience of the Victorian period". To illustrate this, we start with Tony Iommi quitting a Birmingham metal-bashing factory, after losing a couple of finger-ends, to help invent Heavy Metal with Black Sabbath. The new music's roots apparently lay in the "forges and foundries of our industrial past", rather than the Mississippi Delta. This autochthonous creation myth neatly sidestepped the debate over the Americanisation of British popular culture and is the first (but not the last) occasion on which Sandbrook passes up the obvious cue to introduce George Orwell. In the circumstances, it is no surprise that the influence of Django Reinhardt on Iommi (working class lad impressed by continental Jazz) is not mentioned.

Sandbrook's theme is the continuity of social values beneath the change in material forms, from Matthew Boulton and James Watt to Elton John and Grand Theft Auto. Equating the two eras in terms of creativity and entrepreneurialism allows the cultural economy to be presented as inventive, rather than parasitical, and the industrial revolution to be eulogised without reference to its social costs. The serial structure of this conventional narrative - we used to make steam engines, now we make music - also downplays the longstanding commoditisation of class, from the Gothic Revival to Queen Victoria's Jubilee mugs. Sandbrook sees this continuity as self-evidently a good thing rather than the persistence of unequal social relations and the resilience of ideology.

J Arthur Rank is presented as a bridge between the old and the new: an industrialist who treated British cinema as an industry, British history as a commodity, and Britishness as a brand (though Sandbrook fails to note his contribution to the demotic as a euphemism for masturbation). The reaction to the conservatism of Rank's films, namely the social realism of British cinema and theatre in the late 50s and early 60s, is blithely ignored, presumably because of its problematic focus on working-class aspiration and its criticism of conservative values after Suez. Despite the supposed emphasis on Victorian roots, the lasting legacy of music hall in British culture isn't mentioned. There is no Joan Littlewood, no Shelagh Delaney.

In fact, there are no women outside royalty. This is a great man history in which Sandbrook praises white, middle-class "entrepreneurs", such as Brian Epstein, Chris Blackwell, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Charles Saatchi. Their commercial nous is elided with creativity, suggesting that culture should be thought of largely in terms of units shifted. Epstein's genius is dressing the Beatles in tailored suits and wangling OBEs for their contribution to exports; the continuity between the exploitation of sugar and reggae in Blackwell's family history is delicately passed over; Saatchi is praised for creating a market for modern art - the creativity of money; while tales of Lloyd-Webber's first night anxiety fail to elicit sympathy when you remember his recent role in voting for tax credit cuts.

In the second episode, Sandbrook uses a 1960s drug-bust at Keith Richards' Sussex manor to ram home his continuity message: rebel buys posh house at earliest opportunity. This vignette of the louche and the conventional, like Chipping Norton avant la lettre, reveals Sandbrook's fascination with property, which he proceeds to indulge in a tour that takes in Castle Howard (the "star" of Brideshead Revisited) and Highclere (the set for Downton Abbey). This is a view of history that reduces the subtlety of class identifiers to mere possessions. For example, Sandbrook's celebration of the" aristocratic" James Bond confuses Ian Fleming's festishisation of commodities with status. He fails to appreciate that Fleming, as the scion of a banking family, was looked down on by landowning aristos who preferred shabby-chic to an obsession with tailoring and cocktails.

The tour of stately homes allows Sandbrook to transport us back to Edwardian times and imply that gracious living reflected right moral values. TH White's The Sword in the Stone is held up as evidence of a persistent popular appetite for these values into the 20th century, including a sympathy with the travails of monarchy (The King's Speech gets an airing). This reading ignores White's pacifism and misrepresents his ecological concerns (Camelot has echoes of the League of Nations, Wart is repeatedly metamorphosed into animals who find man's cruelty baffling). White's romantic conservativism is closer to Jeremy Corbyn than Boris Johnson. Merlin and Arthur's embodiment of the elderly tutor/young student trope is used to establish a link to the present in the form of Dumbledore and Harry Potter. In fact, White's themes of might versus right and family dysfunction find a better echo in Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. Star Wars is excluded because it isn't British and because it doesn't feature an impressive rural pile.

The visit to Hogwarts allows Sandbrook to delve back even further in time to the Victorian roots of public schools. Rugby, Eton, Harrow et al are held up as inculcators of right values. Their historic role in moulding the administrators of empire is finessed with the comic interlude of Harry Flashman: a variation on the now-traditional "absent-minded" defence of exploitation. The public school system's role in moulding the social attitudes that undermined British industry during the interwar years isn't mentioned, nor its baleful influence on postwar grammar schools and today's free schools. Again, Sandbrook misses the obvious cue: Orwell's experience as an ex-public schoolboy enforcing the systemic cruelty of empire in Burma, and his experience of the social and economic waste inflicted on the industrial towns of the North in the 1930s.

In the book that accompanies and expands on the TV series, The Great British Dream Factory, Sandbrook finally engages Orwell, but only to criticise the Old Etonian's antipathy to the schooldays stories of Frank Richards. Despite his modern appropriation by neoliberals and neocons, Orwell remains problematic for the right, both because of his unpicking of the ideology of class and his distaste for Americanisation. Where he can't wholly ignore a subject, Sandbrook belittles it: postwar satire is written off as ineffective, other than in undermining respect for politicians (he ignores pre-Victorian levels of contempt); Punk is dismissed as merely "aesthetic" (i.e. by insisting on its lack of significance, which elsewhere is held up as a virtue for pop commodities, he admits its unsettling force); and the Jam's Eton Rifles is misread as showing a secret admiration for Etonians (it's actually about working class cynicism at middle class posturing).

According to Sandbrook, the period from the death of Princess Diana to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee shows royalty's ability to absorb and appropriate popular culture, which glosses over the near-terminal impact of the former event on the institution. The popularity of Elton John's Candle in the Wind is held to prove this resilience, rather than anything as banal as the British public's mawkish rubber-necking. This not only ignores the significance of a eulogy to an American icon being repurposed for a British one, but means Sandbrook fails to note the title comes from TH White's fourth book in The Once and Future King series, where it reflects the fragility of peace. In its way, the song is a perfect emblem of Sandbrook's cultural history: sentimental and superficial, in denial about the adoption of American social mores, and unwilling to accept the diversity and contradictions of British society.

Above the Sea of Fog

The traditional start of the summer holidays is marked in even-numbered years by international football tournaments. In odd-numbered years it is marked by a Martin Kettle article in The Guardian insisting that politicians should develop a more extensive cultural hinterland, ideally centred on an appreciation of Richard Wagner. I don't know if this is just the lazy recycling of the same piece while he is otherwise engaged at the Bayreuth Festival, or whether it's an idiosyncratic rider to his contract that he should be allowed to indulge this particular hobbyhorse every couple of years, but I do know that his philosophy is as depressing as it is familiar.

In 2011, Kettle greeted the Israeli State Orchestra's appearance on the Bayreuth fringe as a welcome step in the rehabilitation of the composer of The Ring Cycle: "Wagner was indeed an antisemite and a composer. But that does not make him an antisemitic composer, whatever that means, any more than being a reactionary ant-Dreyfusard makes Cézanne a reactionary painter. I confess that I do not understand what antisemitic music is". This is historically tone deaf, as the categorisation of music, or any other cultural product, as either halal or haram is clearly a political judgement. Wagner is the antisemitic composer supreme because the Nazis (abetted by his family) made him so, not because of his antisemitic essays or any questionable tropes in his operas. Kettle almost concedes this point in his own contradiction: "None of this means that the ban on the playing of Wagner in Israel and by Israeli orchestras is anything other than utterly understandable". Well, quite. It's a political decision.

What this shows is Kettle's desire to demarcate areas of life, but to then use the resulting dichotomy (art versus politics) for instructive purposes: a pointer to better political behaviour. This compartmentalisation is one of the chief legacies of Ancient Greek philosophy, with its alienation of gods and men and its distinction between personal ethics and communal politics (Greek tragedy, and biography - e.g. Socrates, addresses the tensions this gives rise to). It stands in obvious contrast to the totalitarian approach of the monotheistic religions, in which scripture and clerical interpretation extends to all aspects of the natural world. The great irony is that Wagner's "transcendence" (i.e. overwrought romanticism), as much as his conservative vision of an ordered and organic world, was taken as supportive of the Nazis' totalitarian ambitions: the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of society. It is precisely the quality that Kettle praises in Wagner, his ability to stand outside of politics, that makes him such a favourite of politicians, particularly those of a neoliberal persuasion who see a similarly transcendent (and instructive) role for the market.

In 2013, Kettle observed that "Politics may seem to rule the public roost much of the rest of the year – but it is a striking fact that politics has no power against the summer. ... This, after all, is the time of year when politics can no longer keep up the pretence that it is all-encompassing". But Kettle isn't going to fall into the trap of sports administrators down the ages, claiming that sport and politics don't mix and have been separate spheres since the sacred truce of the original Olympic Games (which actually mixed sport, religion and art, including the political skill of rhetoric). The singling-out of politics as an area of life that must be restricted is too obviously a reactionary impulse, so better try something a bit more sophisticated: "So it is therefore also an opportunity not for suspending all thought about politics but for trying to put politics into a more life-enhancing balanced context. ... I know this from watching and listening to Wagner, and I know it with absolute certainty too: I know that political engagement and a sustained cultural life are twin necessities of the civilised condition, twin embodiments of the belief that the world can be a better place than it is".

In his latest post from the interface of politics and high art, Kettle sums up his worldview thus: "I’m fascinated by politics because it embodies life as it is in reality. I’m fascinated by music because it expresses life as it might ideally be." It might be a little glib to simply claim that I'm the opposite, but I certainly don't think that politics should be reduced to a pragmatic managerialism that stultifies imagination and reinforces conservatism. Politics must embody aspiration at the social as much as the personal level, otherwise it is reduced to the transactional, utility-maximisation of neoliberal lore. Equally, the idea that music gives us access to a higher realm is just religiose, po-faced nonsense (the traditional corollary of the idea that "primitive" rhythms are bestial). Kettle needs to muddy his Apollonian elitism in the Dionysian moshpit. Much great music succeeds because it provides a thrilling perspective on reality, not because it "takes us to a better place". I suspect Kettle's distaste for genuinely popular music reflects a fear of that mundane, unsettling power.

The recurring theme of Kettle's pieces is the "philistinism" of British politicians, which has long been shorthand for their isolation from the continent and reluctance to embrace the European project. The summer months, when well-paid columnists decamp to their spiritual homes in the Dordogne, Tuscany and various Mediterranean islands, is an opportunity to recharge cultural batteries in the warm south before re-engaging with the recalcitrant denizens of these misty, northern isles. For some, like Kettle, it is also a chance to reaffirm the "higher project" of neoliberalism, which has a well-known weakness for Alpine mountains, from Mont Pelerin to Davos. Wagner, and the festival setting at Bayreuth (pan-European, exclusive and with the faint whiff of transgression), offers an emblem not only of a syncretic European culture but of a higher power that animates our collective will, ensuring good order and common sense through its political personifications (Frau Merkel to the fore) while vouchsafing a hint of the sublime to the adepts of the invisible hand.

The Great American Songbook

The standard reaction to the death of anyone famous divides into two parts: the attempt to neatly fit them into the historical record, with authoritative claims about their significance and legacy; and personal reminiscence, with precious first-hand anecdotes trumping "what he/she meant to me" solipsism. The passing of Lou Reed has been an object case study.

Most media outlets have wheeled out Brian Eno's quote to the effect that everyone who bought the first Velvet's album formed a band. The quote dates from 1982, and was apparently based on Reed claiming that sales were only 30,000 in the first 5 years (1967-72). In fact, it is likely the record sold nearer 60,000 in the first couple of years after release, may have reached six figures in the early 70s, and has probably topped a million since then. My own personal recollection (I warned you) from the mid-70s is that the Velvet Underground and solo Lou Reed were as familiar to rock fans as Jethro Tull or The Byrds, and this owed relatively little to the personal recommendation of David Bowie.

I also recall buying the NME C81 mixtape in 1981. A running joke in the booklet that accompanied it was how every band had been influenced by the Velvets, which was perfectly credible when you consider the album included Cabaret Voltaire, DAF, Scritti Politti, the Buzzcocks and Orange Juice, among others. In other words, Eno was reflecting the widespread and longstanding influence of the Velvets (which had reached the point of parody) while insisting that this was still an interest limited to discerning avant-gardists like himself. What a knob.

The band catalyst trope has fought for top billing with tales of Reed's obnoxiousness in interviews, which are just opportunities for saddo journalists to try and filch some stardust. Some have seen this as the careful creation of a brand ("just showbusiness"), directly influenced by uber-commoditiser Andy Warhol, though the more thoughtful see determined authenticity. Others interpret it as the deliberate evasion of an "unknowable and contrary" man who valued privacy. The claim that it was an act has the ring of truth to it. You're not likely to have a lasting relationship with an artist and musician of the stature of Laurie Anderson if you're an irascible and selfish egotist in private too. Reed's confrontational stance and unwillingness to play the PR game owe much to his own romantic notions of the role of the artist (historical record bit coming up).

Reed's love of the marginal and despised has its roots in late nineteenth century decadence (which explains his interest in Frank Wedekind's Lulu). The template for his provocative public persona can be found in the original enfant terrible, the French poet and all-round reprobate Arthur Rimbaud, whose Une Saison en Enfer was translated by another poet, Delmore Schwartz, with whom Reed studied in the early 60s. A feature of the New York music scene, from the Beats and jazz experimentalists to Sonic Youth, has been the centrality of poetry and the role of the poet as critic/outsider. In this regard, French and American poetry have a lot more in common than either has with the British variety.

Poetry was a marginal taste in the UK music scene up to the late 70s (and tended towards the fey), where the Glam avant garde, exemplified by David Bowie and Roxy Music, was more influenced by visual art and theatre (hence the Ramones had a bigger impact here than Patti Smith, despite supportive media coverage for the "punk poet queen"). But the influence of Reed & co on provincial post-punk bands, like the Postcard stable and The Smiths, changed all that, reasserting the primacy of the heartfelt lyric after years of London irony and cut-up mannerisms. The major legacy of the Velvet Underground in the UK is landfill indie.

Bowie and Reed shared an interest in Berlin and the Weimar era, and both identified in their own ways with Isherwood's observer: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking". But while Bowie (like Eno) was influenced by post-war German music, from Stockhausen to Krautrock, Reed remained more sonically conservative and essentially American (Perfect Day could have been sung by Doris Day), despite his best efforts on Metal Machine Music to prove otherwise. In the original Velvets mix, Reed provided the pop and John Cale the experimentation. For all his literary ambitions, Reed never deserted Tin Pan Alley.

The C81 joke worked because the modern bands, though different from each other, could be harnessed to a specific song or period in the Velvet Underground's back catalogue. This was a testament to the range and mutability (and even instability) of the original band: their naive enthusiasm for trying something different as much as their artistic pretensions. It was this range and unpredictability that Reed carried forward into his solo years, though his finest releases would be the "classic" pop songs of Transformer and the Velvet's out-take compilation, VU. In truth, he was just doodling from the mid-70s onwards.

His Dork Materials

Philip Pullman, author of fantasy fiction for well-bred teens and president of the Society of Authors, has decided that illegal downloading of books and music is a kind of "moral squalor". This media-friendly hyperbole originates in an otherwise polite joint article with Cathy Casserly of Creative Commons in the Index on Censorship magazine (whose strapline is "the voice of free expression"). Pullman is just doing his job as a trades unionist, but his logic is as wonky as a timber-framed North Oxford bookshop. Though he takes aim at the likes of Google for facilitating illegal downloads, and thus "theft" from the pockets of artists, he is chary of voicing more than the traditional author's exasperation with the unequal terms of trade, noting that when he produces a book the publisher will "collect the money it sells for, and pass on a small proportion to me" (my italics).

What actually caught my eye was not this conventional bleat, but Pullman's extension of his criticism to encompass digital music: "The ease and swiftness with which music can be acquired in the form of MP3 downloads is still astonishing even to those of us who have been building up our iTunes list for some time" (can't you just feel the anguish in those last few words?) At no point does he acknowledge that Apple are the real culprit when it come to the transformation of the economics of artistic content, presumably because the Cupertino corporation's prestige remains strong among Macbook-wielding creatives. Despite the popular history that holds the arrival of Napster and other P2P networks around 1999 as responsible for the implosion of music sales, it was actually the introduction of the iTunes Store in 2003, and specifically the decision to sell individual tracks at 99 cents, that did the deed. The change to the landscape can be seen in this chart (source here), showing the distribution of revenue by music format.

Albums were always where the money was, while singles were primarily promotional devices. In terms of the quantum of revenue, there has been a steady decline since the turn of the millennium, however this appears relatively worse because of the peak that occurred during the 90s when we all spent extra money duplicating old vinyl with new CDs, as this chart shows.

What the chart doesn't include is the growth in revenues from live performances and ancillary merchandising (US live ticket sales tripled from $1.5b to $4.6b between 1999 and 2009, when cumulative inflation was only about 28%). Digital media revolutionised the music industry, but this simply meant that the money moved to new channels and publishers, it didn't mean that we stopped buying music or related commodities. The claim that taping/downloading was (and still is) killing music is simply the special pleading of incumbent publishers whose lunch was eaten by newer, more nimble service providers.

In ways that would make a dialectical materialist happy, you can see the history of music culture in this progression. After the 8-track bump (a mainly US feature) and a flurry of big-selling LPs (Rumours, Hotel California etc), revenues began to drop in the late 70s as home-taping set off the first wave of "illegal sharing" (this mainly ate into LP sales - C46 and C60 cassettes were obviously designed for album length recordings). This was exacerbated by the increased market segmentation, and consequently lower profit margins, driven by the popular reaction to the overwhelming dullness of the mid-70s. Record companies attempted to offset this by pushing higher-margin singles, often with coloured vinyl and fancy sleeves, which produced a flowering of new music (notably Punk and New Wave) as bands that would never have got an album deal were indulged for a couple of singles or an EP, but this strategy proved unequal to the task and so we got the inexorable 80s trend back towards the superstar and the multi-platinum record, exemplified by Michael Jackson's Thriller, which was amplified by the effect of videos and MTV.

The invention of the CD brought in the golden age of music sales in the 90s, more than offsetting the losses experienced due to taping, but with the consequence of slowly killing off the once-more marginal single and the EP (and eventually Top of the Pops). The CD also allowed ageing artists to monetise their back catalogue with reissues and remastered versions. The birth of corporate rock and all-conquering global sellers, from Nirvana and REM to Madonna and the Spice Girls, was a product of the CD age. One positive consequence of the new format, which has a much lower per unit production cost than vinyl, was that it allowed for more short run releases. This encouraged the reissuing of rarities and the introduction of more foreign music ("World Music" is a product of the nexus of CDs, the feelgood end of Apartheid and cheap global travel), which in turn helped fuel the growing eclecticism of music in the late 90s.

The decline in cassettes was sparked by the introduction of dual tape/CD players in the early 90s, accelerated by PC-based media players (and the start of digital sharing), and finished off by the shift from personal tape-players to digital music players (the iPod launched in 2001). Illegal sharing via cassette was always a fiddle and prone to poor quality, but the biggest drawback was simply getting access to the source. I, like many others, would make mix-tapes of tracks off the John Peel radio show, jumping up and down to stop and start the recorder (he had good taste but his chat was incidental), and often missing the first few notes. The purpose was not to rip off the artists, but to have the ability to play songs of interest on demand. Once I'd decided I particularly liked a group, I'd go out and buy the vinyl and/or go to a gig.

Radio was a conspiracy of music company-endorsed playlists (Janie Jones was just the louche fringe of this) in an era when the opportunity to hear new music was relatively restricted. The actual liberation of the Internet was the chance to find and sample a vastly larger range of music than before, not the chance to steal it. It was about "everything" rather than "free". I still buy music, but I also download "illegally shared" tracks, which I consider to be a form of browsing, or "user-directed sampling", if you prefer. The music industry has accommodated itself to this new marketplace, both in its acceptance of Apple and Amazon's insistence on individual track sales, and in its support for the "new radio" of streaming subscription services like Spotify (again, I use the free version to sample music of interest before buying elsewhere). The idea that "digital piracy" is impoverishing musicians is no more true than the earlier claim that home-taping was killing music.

That said, the changes in the means of production, distribution and exchange have certainly affected some musicians more than others, leading to the polarisation familiar from the wider economy. It's now much more difficult to make money as a musician at the lower end of the popularity scale. This is partly because publishers and distributors take an even larger slice of the pie (hence the furore over Spotify's terms), partly because gig opportunities are reduced as older bands seek to monetise their back catalogue (in the CD era they could sit at home and watch the royalties roll in - now they hog the festival stage), and partly because wannabes giving it away for free on YouTube undercut the market for new music (the dominance of parent-funded upper-middle-class musicians is partly a consequence of this).

Meanwhile, at the top end of the income scale, a small number of rights-holders have become even richer (and in this regard Simon Cowell counts as much as Lady Gaga), as the enforcement of copyright and the profusion of distribution channels delivers ever greater scale economies to superstars. As with job polarisation elsewhere, the "middle class" of bands that could once make a living gigging in pubs and midscale venues, and even pay off the mortgage with a top-100 album, has all but disappeared. With the ability to reach economic viability as an independent increasingly difficult, and success in the industry increasingly dependent on corporate channels, more and more market share is being taken by existing rights-holders, which is not unlike where we came in during the mid-70s.

In contrast, the world of fiction remains little changed. Few authors have ever been able to make a real living from writing, even before the arrival of e-books and the chimera of long-tail sales. Success depends on co-option by the small coterie of author/critics that dominate each genre, the big money comes from film and TV rights and other commercial spinoffs, and you must build a personal brand if you want to monetise readings and appearances. "Bestsellers" are, by definition, atypical, and increasingly subject to superstar economies of scale as the same content is spread across more channels and commodities (e.g. JK Rowling and EL James). In this context, the idea that the chief challenge to writers is spotty kids downloading files in breach of copyright, rather than the predatory pricing of online retailers and multinational publishing houses, is laughable. As SF writer and blogger Cory Doctorow says (quoted by Cathy Casserly), "My problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity".

The central, revealing flaw of Pullman's argument is that he blames the consumer: guilty of "moral squalor" and little better than a thief. This is the classic, intemperate language of the property-holder, demanding that a yokel be hung for rustling a sheep. I sympathise with Pullman's desire to secure a larger share of the rewards accruing to the product of his members' labour, but his target ought to be closer to home: "The editor, the jacket designer, the publicist, the printer, the library assistant, the bookshop manager, the PLR administrator, and others, all earn a living on the back of the fact that I and my fellow authors have written books that people want to read". This list excludes the shareholders of Scholastic Inc and Random House, Pullman's publishers. He also omits to mention Amazon, which provides the online shopping facility for his own website. Nothing morally squalid there.

Shoegazing and the Cloud

I have been trying, off and on since yesterday, to download the new My Bloody Valentine album (mbv) but their card payment interface appears to be banjaxed and I refuse to sign up to PayPal. You can only download it from the band's own website, which is one in the eye for tax-dodgers like Amazon but a bit pointless if it doesn't actual work. I've even emailed their support address, but given they've taken 22 years to deliver this follow-up to Loveless, I'm not expecting a swift reply. Fortunately, they've also stuck the lot up on YouTube. I highly recommend "only tomorrow", "new you" and "in another way".

The experience has not just reminded me that the Internet doesn't always work, dammit, but also that we (or at least I) remain wedded to the joys of owning stuff. Even though I can quite happily stream it online I want the download and am seriously considering buying the vinyl when it appears in a few weeks (it's an analogue recording, so this is not just vinyl collector's completitis). This reminded me of Steve Wozniak's rant a few months ago about the dangers of cloud computing. Wozniak, if you didn't know, was the original engineering brains behind Apple who was marginalised because he wasn't as pretty or as psychopathic as his partner, Steve Jobs (think Chewbacca to Han Solo, only shorter). According to The Woz, "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away. I want to feel that I own things".

With the recent demise of HMV, it's hard to argue with the proposition implicit in Wozniak's plea: in the future we will have access to much more, but we will own much less. For most people in the developed world, the twentieth century can be characterised in terms of increasing property ownership. I don't just mean in the narrow sense of owning a house, but in the wider sense of acquiring more and more goods and chattels, from furniture to toys, from cars to CDs. While the rich obviously maintained a monopoly on certain types of property, the material prosperity of capitalism, the sheer profusion of commodities, meant that our lives were increasingly organised around the making, buying and using of stuff.

Since the introduction of the iPod in 2001, which coincided with the peak in UK property ownership, this process has taken a new direction. It's not in-yer-face obvious, as we are surrounded by a lifetime's collection of books, videos, DVDs and CDs, but the future is clearly the "weightlessness" of content on demand. Even the historic growth of user devices is misleading, both because commodity deflation means they account for proportionately less of our expenditure and because there is a limit to the number of dedicated devices we can practically use (we probably peaked with e-readers). Though Apple are obviously keen on high-margin devices, and pitch them as status symbols, the general trend is towards commoditisation and disposability. The commercial model of mobile phones, and the quickening pace of obsolescence, means that we're increasingly open to the idea that we acquire our devices as part of a contract for service access and content. We're renting more, and this applies to cultural products as much as homes. Just as the growth of buy-to-let means that property ownership is concentrating, so cloud computing is leading to a concentration of massive providers such as Amazon, Google and Apple.

There are two paradoxes here. The first is that openness and choice may be leading to homogenisation and oligopoly. The second is that the demands of cloud interoperability and the environmental costs of data centres may lead to the minimisation of data and the maximisation of access - e.g. a single copy of an MP3 file (allowing for backups and mirrors) that is accessible to everyone. This is the optimal rent model: the greatest revenue from the smallest asset.

The "move to the cloud" is central to business too. For some years now, the concept of IT as a utility has been pushed both as a desirable goal ("you don't have to think about it") and a practical service delivery model ("just plug in"). In fact, cloud computing bears little resemblance to a utility. Despite the contrived appearance of multiple providers in a free market, most public utilities are physical monopolies at the sharp end: one electricity cable, one water mains, one sewer etc. The characteristics of a utility are those of a natural monopoly. Unlike utilities, IT cloud services are neither consistent nor easily substituted between providers. Salesforce.com and Google Apps are not interchangeable. The utility trope is primarily a sales pitch, but it is also subtly ideological in that it hints at semi-official status (every accounts payable function knows you pay the utility bills first). There is also the semi-conscious derogation of "hard" IT, i.e. the equating of infrastructure roles with utility workers, which leads to the perception that cloud computing facilitates a shift from blue to white-collar jobs in IT (there is little expectation of net job reductions and some belief that the aggregate impact is an increase in roles).

The real commonality between a utility and the cloud is that the service cost includes an element of rent (in the economist's sense - i.e. a royalty). Despite the loud claims made by utility companies about their investment in infrastructure and labour (water pipes and engineers), the gross profit of a utility such as water is largely rent (the exploitation of a natural resource) rather than the surplus value of labour. Though the cloud may provide access to differentiated applications, which are ultimately the product of labour, in practice a large part of the fee you are paying is rent (hence pricing tends towards per-user rather than per-transaction models). The very opaqueness and indeterminacy of the cloud (notice it's "the" not "a") makes this difficult to see, though you get a hint of the role that rent plays in modern capitalism in the cross-charging of IP royalties by multinationals, such as Amazon.

Cloud computing consolidates capital with the cloud service providers. This not only gives rise to economies of scale for them, it also means that the businesses that use the cloud are increasingly capital light. This is good insofar as it lowers the cost of business entry and avoids the need for periodic loans or share issues to raise capital, but it also reduces the scope for internal productivity gains (e.g. by upgrading equipment) and makes process innovation dependent on onerous supplier management (this is a feature of outsourcing generally and not just cloud computing). In effect, we're seeing the centralisation of capital in fewer hands. This does not mean that cloud-using businesses are less profitable, but that profits are more likely to be recycled as bonuses and share buybacks rather than capital investment. This is the nature of the "weightless economy". The weight doesn't disappear, it simply moves to one end of the corporate spectrum.

It's early days, but the trend this century appears to be towards an economy in which the elite owns an even more disproportionate share of property than today while the majority of the population pays rent to make use of it. We will have access to more stuff, so we will feel materially richer than we did in the twentieth century, but we will own less of it. One by-product of this shift from property to rent will be the need to continue earning longer or face greater relative poverty in old age, when you typically seek to rely more on assets built up over your working life. The extending of the retirement age may prove to be about more than just a shortfall in pension contributions.

Weaselly Pop

David Hepworth recently asked: "When did pop become the dominant culture?" This begs the question by assuming that "pop" is a historically specific development that has displaced an earlier form. Presumably he means the musical styles that first came to prominence between the end of the Chatterley ban and you know what. The word dominant implies hegemony, the idea that pop is now the cultural orthodoxy, not merely the form that shifts the most units. As becomes clear in his piece, pop has expanded beyond music to encompass other forms as well: "Pop is now culture's default position. It's unimaginable that a new arts programme or supplement could be launched today without an interview with Damon Albarn or a think piece about Scandinavian detectives. It wasn't always like this." Indeed. Once upon a time we'd have had interviews with Charles Dickens, banging on about his latest release, or some smartarse like George Orwell trying to decode the social meaning of seaside postcards.

Hepworth seems strangely oblivious to the class dimension of culture (Albarn and Scandi crime are middle class identifiers) even as he quotes the claim by Liz Forgan, outgoing chair of The Arts Council, that politicians prefer to be seen at rock festivals rather than the opera in order to avoid the charge of elitism. This is just self-serving propaganda by someone whose job it was to persuade politicians to spend more money on opera. The cultural products that are dominant (in the sense of most visible) in a capitalist society are always going to be the ones where the largest amount of money can be made through their production and exchange. Opera is a luxury item: low volume, high price. In a world where exclusivity (aka "excellence") is seen as the antithesis of "dumbing down", you can bet there are plenty of politicians happy to be associated with it. Pop may be dominant in terms of sales, but it is not hegemonic in terms of culture.

When Hepworth draws a distinction between "serious" and "pop" he is guilty of categorising culture into rigid and competing blocs. This leads to the trope of conflict: "About fifteen years ago I realised there had been a war between serious culture and pop culture. It had ended and Pop had won. Clearly. Trouble is I have no memory of that war taking place." Such categorisation inevitably reflects existing social divisions, hence the ready identification of culture and class. Snobbery, masked as aesthetic judgement, is not far behind (consider how Miranda is indulged by TV critics while Mrs. Brown's Boys is sneered at). Hepworth's bemusement is the perspective of a former editor of Smash Hits realising that the counter culture of his youth is the mainstream of his middle age.

The artificiality of these boundaries is highlighted by the way that certain cultural products cross them. Thus football, which was once a working class identifier, is now seen (and criticised) as increasingly middle class. In practice, most mass spectator sports have always been cross-class. Just as some brickies have always loved Beethoven, so doctors and lawyers have watched Arsenal since the Plumstead days. What has changed is the media treatment, from the demonisation of football fans as representatives of the violent labouring class to the idolisation of them as a vanishing tribe being priced out of the game. The Liverpool fans who unveiled a banner at the Emirates this week, querying whether football was still a working class sport, were complicit in this sentimentalisation. They are entirely right to question the price of a ticket, but to imply that football is categorically working class is weaselly.

David Hepworth's fundamental error is to assume that there is a definable entity called "pop", with clear boundaries and characteristics, and that this is mutually exclusive to "serious culture". In reality, there is stuff that sells. All the rest is ideology.

High Street Not Dead, Just Resting

The failure of HMV has produced a wave of nostalgia about 7-inch singles and given another airing to the lament for the death of the high street. Even those who celebrate the creative destruction of capitalism can't help confusing administration with the loss of life. The personification of the high street, and the search for its killers, has been a persistent trope for some years now. We mourn the passing of a shop like that of an aged relative (an incontinent and senile relative, in the case of Woolworths). We individualise it, focusing on a specific branch, even though what we are often mourning is the end of a corporate chain, a form of shop that we simultaneously criticise as soulless when it elbows out independents. Recent TV series, such as The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge, have allowed us to combine nostalgia for pre-chain shops of character (i.e. exclusive and not open to the hoi-polloi) with the modern sentiment of shops as mini-communities with an identity and culture of their own (more Championship Vinyl than Grace Brothers).

Over the last 50 years, shops gradually became the locus of sentimental community as the older sites of communal action were emptied or undermined. Before the 1960s, when music and clothes shops became "counter-cultural", department stores were where you went to escape your community - to be exposed to possibilities beyond your immediate horizon. The hollowing-out of places of community applied to both traditional and hierarchical forms, such as churches and pubs (the class distinction between lounge and public bars), as well as autonomous and progressive forms, such as public libraries and social clubs. While these still live on, social interaction has been relegated as cash transactions have come to the fore. The primary activity of pubs used to be talking, not drinking. The introduction of juke-boxes, one-armed bandits and then food all served to make talk secondary to spending money. It is no coincidence that beer became stronger over the last 50 years, with lagers displacing bitter and mild, as higher alcohol stimulates impulse buying. Ironically, some brewers are now watering down their beer as austerity (and nostalgia for "authentic" ales) pushes people back to lower strength and cheaper drinks.

Proposals to save the high street are uniformly nostalgic, unrealistic and patronising. They tend to advocate either niche (i.e. expensive, middle-class) vendors, retail as a (middle-class) leisure experience (arthouse cinemas and authentic coffee shops), or the introduction of social functions such as health centres (nostalgia for the golden age of the welfare state). Wayne Hemmingway wants empty shops given over to quirky startups, as if everywhere could become Camden Market, while Richard Sennett and others want vibrant mixed-use high streets with creches, day-care centres and pop-up art galleries. No one is pushing for fast food outlets or bookies, or welcoming the growth in charity shops. Apart from the obvious class bias, these "free enterprise" and "pro-social" positions also share a common view of the high street as a good in itself, as if its preservation was to be welcomed by any means. The village green preservation society has given way to the high street taskforce.

This ignores the reality of what a high street is. It's a concentration of shops, and shops are just a concentration of products. The high street exists simply because it was the most efficient means of bringing buyers and goods together, much as market squares were the most efficient means in an earlier era when all goods were either perishable or had to be easily transportable at the end of each day. The high street is the result of the introduction of canning and railways in the 19th century, which made bulk purchasing by retailers attractive and necessitated on-site storage. Its modern incarnation is the result of widespread car ownership and the shift of bulk purchases to out-of-town retail parks and supermarkets. Its current transformation is the result of the Internet and the commodity deflation brought about by globalisation (which further advantaged superstores and home delivery). The high street will become more dispersed and more fragmented, because there is still convenience in a physical store but less desire to travel distance to reach it. The high street will cease to be a feature of the town or borough and become a feature of the neighbourhood. The replacement of main street with multiple suburban malls and convenience stores is well-advanced in the US and elsewhere. Britain will be no different.

The nostalgia for older forms of shopping focuses on incidental detail, the resonant smells and eccentric assistants, and ignores this base reality. Despite the foregrounding of the "retail experience", and the propaganda of luxurious cornucopia, shops were just stores. Literally places to store goods. Supermarkets, for all their air of modernity, replicate the form and organisation of the factory, with your amble down the aisles (the same route every week) a production line. You are the labour that pushes round the trolley, loads it with goods, transfers it to bags and transports it by car or bus. Increasingly you man the checkout. It is no secret that online delivery and click-and-collect are problematic because they transfer the cost of this labour (estimated at £15-20 a load) back onto the supermarket. Inflation at the till is only partly down to higher commodity prices. Supermarkets need to maintain margins as they transition towards the pure warehousing of "dark stores", where costs can be recouped by sacrificing the customer space. It is likely that robots will shortly replace the human "pickers", with the supermarket then nothing more than a sorting centre for the flow of goods from suppliers to customers. As presence technology improves (i.e. the virtual fitting room), this model will extend to clothes and other goods. Already today, you'd be hard pressed to spot the difference inside the fulfilment centres of Tesco, Amazon and Royal Mail.

When we sigh about the slow death of the high street we're actually lamenting the disappearance of common spaces where different classes mixed. The social significance of Woolies in its heyday was that it was used by doctor's wives and dockers, who'd also use the same public transport to get there and back. The modern utopia of mixed-use, of yummy mummies sipping cappuccinos next to OAPs keeping warm in a daycare centre, is an attempt to recreate that shared experience and social solidarity. The flaw in the plan is that the coffee shops will gravitate towards the "better" end of the street, while the daycare centre will be shunted round the corner. The map of the future high street will reflect the realities of property segregation as much as the change in the means of production, distribution and exchange.

A Career in Cool

The unheralded release of David Bowie's first single in a decade has unleashed a tsunami of self-regarding bloke-love in the form of free advertorials. Prominent among the flotsam was a front-page piece by Jonathan Ross in today's Guardian in which the great broadcaster spent many column inches establishing his credentials: he's the biggest Bowie fan on the planet, he used to have a long-running radio show, he might expect to meet Bowie socially, he knows his son slightly, he has enjoyed chats with Morrissey, and just to reassure any reader intimidated by proximity to such stardom that he's still an ordinary bloke, he caught the norovirus bug over the holidays.

Unlike Ross, Bowie is generally regarded as an astute manipulator of his own image, the creator of a brand based on permanent reinvention, a performance artist in whose trail imitators like Madonna look derivative and uninspired. In fact, his career has been far more a matter of chance than corporate strategy, let alone artistic integrity, a point made by his biographer Paul Trynka (on Newsnight) who doubted the new album had been long in gestation. Bowie's one-time employment of cut-up techniques in his lyrics was simultaneously emblematic of artistic pretension (a homage to William Burroughs), vapid fashion (the 70s vogue for the occult), and his own arbitrary impulses (he should have attempted a rock opera based on Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man). Perhaps the new album is just a random emission.

The new single, Where Are We Now?, is a wistful recollection of his time in Berlin in the late 70s. This period produced Low, Heroes and The Lodger, the three albums that will ultimately define his career, along with his contributions on Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life, despite the claims made for the earlier run of LPs from Ziggy Stardust to Station to Station. Bowie fled to Berlin not just to avoid the fallout from the ill-judged Fascist flirtation of his Thin White Duke persona, but (with Eno) to feed off the musical zeitgeist inspired by Krautrock and the fashion for Weimar-style decadence that also influenced Lou Reed and punk. The irony is that foremost among the latter crowd were the Bromley contingent, hailing from the South East London 'burb where David Jones had spent most of his childhood. Members of the contingent would go on to form Siouxsie and the Banshees, arguably the most Bowie-inspired group in the punk firmament, though shortly to be overwhelmed by the wave of post-punk and electronic bands inspired by his Berlin work, notably Ultravox (before Midge Ure) and Simple Minds.

In the era of the individual song download, the best guarantee of a high-margin sale is the box-set with previously unreleased material. I bought the missus Simple Minds' X5 for Xmas, which includes their first five albums and no less than 19 "bonus tracks". The first three albums were patchy, as they found their metier (you could do worse than buy the Arista compilation, Celebration, which is a decent cherry-pick), but the double-album Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call and New Gold Dream are the real deal. Simple Minds were never a cool band (Scots bands can do truculent, edgy or nostalgic, but not cool), but they produced some seriously cool music for about 3 years. My other recent purchases (as opposed to free downloads) have also biased towards compilations and gap-fillers, including My Bloody Valentine's EPs 1988-91 and Sonic Youth's Hits are for Squares.

There is a saying in football, "Form is temporary, but class is permanent". It's utter cobblers, as anyone watching a former maestro try to keep up with the game will acknowledge. It is even less true in music where the temporary intersection of talent, place and luck produce that most unpredictable thing, cool. Despite the best endeavours of the music industry, this does not translate into lasting class and thus a permanent asset. The Rolling Stones are no longer cool, and certainly not worth hauling your arse out to see play for a small fortune. They were cool once, but primarily as a live band, which is why they are condemned to spend their dotage trying to recapture that spirit on stage. Bowie, like Simple Minds, was actually better on vinyl, despite his theatrical pretensions and the shock and awe of his later tours. When only hardened fans still give Sticky Fingers a spin, you can expect to hear tracks from Low crop up all over the place.

Paul Trynka's 2011 biography of Bowie includes a comment in the epilogue: "In 2012, his back catalog will be available for license once more, and many fans hope to see what is thought to be the most intriguing set of unreleased recordings of audio and video outtakes of any major recording artist." In other words, the surprise new release may be the harbinger of a massive retrospective of Bowie's career, now that we've safely forgotten all the crud from the 80s and 90s. If it includes previously unreleased work from his Berlin oeuvre, I might be tempted.