Weekendus Mirabilis

Lots of things to be patriotically proud about this weekend. Our gutter press is not one of them but Kate is – a sensible pretty English upper middle-class girl who, having been going out with a Prince for a decade, bravely enters her gilded, paparazzi-patrolled prison with eyes open.

So, a cynicism-defyingly joyful Royal Wedding, Manchester United lose and they kill Osama bin Laden; yes, I’d call that a pretty good weekend.

But it’s back to work now, a mega-Tuesday, the hangovers have accumulated and, to put the tin lid on it, it’s my birthday.

Cheer yourself up over at The Dabbler with my selection of four songs that will make you LOL.

Work ethic: start 'em young

Good to see the BBC doing its duty re the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Work Ethic. The concluding moral of this morning's edition of Chuggington - a train-based entertainment on CBeebies, in front of which I sometimes stick Brit Jnr to divert her while I make our breakfast - was "Remember Chuggers, hobbies are what you do in your spare time. The daytime is for learning and working."

I wonder if they have the same lesson in the Spanish version?

This incessant nagging is, I suppose, why at one time the sun never set on the British Empire, and we must carry the joyless moral from cradle to grave, so that when literally on one's deathbed one should feel vaguely guilty about not being up and about, hoovering the living room or washing the net curtains.

The second post

Reading the opening chapter of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty I stumbled upon this line:

The second post was still scattered across the hall…

It took me a good five or six seconds to process what he meant by ‘the second post’. The novel is set in the mid-1980s, but, almost unbelievably, Royal Mail deliveries were only reduced to the once-daily mid-morning job six years ago, in 2004. Yet ‘the second post’ seemed to me like a quaintly archaic feature of a period piece - surely an indication of how spectacular has been the decline in significance of snail mail in our personal lives?

Burka

Philip Hollobone’s arguments for a France-style burka ban make little sense – “it’s part of British culture to see people’s faces and say ‘Good morning’”? Oh really? Has he been to any British cities lately? Anyway, by that logic we’d have to ban low hats and high scarves in bad weather. But France generally gets it wrong. From the British perspective the only thing that matters is whether all the women who wear burkas are being forced to wear them against their will. If some but not all are being forced, then the possible ban available would be on the forcing of burka-wearing. And by all means, feminist or moderate pressure groups can feel free to encourage Muslim women not to wear it. But if at least some women are choosing to wear the burka, then that’s the end of the ban idea.

The thing was neatly summed up by a correspondent to a BBC Radio 2 programme yesterday morning. “When I’ve been to Arab countries,” she wrote, “I have had to cover my head and body. I strongly feel that when they come to this country they should obey our rules.” Her error, and the nub of it being, of course, that we don’t have rules like that.

The St George Car-Washers

Having a constitutional resistance to washing my car I tend to… well that’s not quite right. ‘Constitutional resistance’ suggests a thought-out principle, but it’s more that it rarely occurs to me to wash my car, which I see purely as a daily transportation machine and a place to listen to my CDs. Last year I had to interrupt a well-known blogger and some-time autophiliac, who was launching into a paean to some sporty motor, to tell him that I drove a Ford Focus with roofbars. “Ah then you wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” he admitted, correctly.

Start again.

Not often thinking to wash my car I tend to allow months to pass between cleanings, but when the Focus becomes unpatriotically dirty outside and repugnantly fungal inside I take it, reluctant as a dog to its bath, to Church Road, opposite St George’s Park. Here an unlikely horde of Lithuanians, Turks and possibly Poles will clean it inside and out for a tenner. They do an incredible job – I always have to check the numberplate to make sure it’s the same car, and then drive it home carefully because the bit underneath the pedals is slippery with polish (Polish?) – but for those used to shopping at Tesco it’s a disconcertingly chaotic arrangement, especially the first time.

You turn up, manoeuvre your vehicle nervously into the general melee of motors, spraying hoses, eardrum-rattling dance music and Lithuanian/Turkish cusswords, get out and stand looking vaguely about yourself, waving your car keys. Eventually from the melee a particular Lithuanian or Turk will emerge and take the keys from you and bellow “inside and out?” You will nod and exit rapidly, praying for the safekeep of your vehicle. After a stroll around the park with your wife and offspring, perhaps a coffee at Grounded, you will return to the melee and once again stand looking vaguely about yourself, mouthing “Ford Focus?” until somebody emerges to take your tenner and return your keys. Then you cross the road to the Park carpark where they’ve left it, check the numberplate and drive carefully home.

At least that is how it’s been for the past few years. Last weekend however, I noticed a creeping service-industry legitimation of the melee. For a start, it has acquired a sign and thereby a name: Diamond Car Wash. Even more alarmingly, it has sprouted a professionally-printed menu, with different price bands according to the size of the vehicle. The next stage is, I suppose, a till. Then uniforms, then a website, then health and safety, then expansion. Then they’ll stop washing cars themselves and hire employees, then they’ll get fat and lazy and buy big houses in Kingswood and wash their own cars for fun on a Sunday while their uni-educated kids hang around in Clifton where nobody washes their cars because they’re too bohemian and good luck to all of them, why not, its really none of my business.

7/7

This is a heartening story. It takes a lot of skill and effort to undo the work of stupid, evil people, but we win.

Mechanism

The new Coalition document has a whole civil liberties section, which includes a pledge to "introduce a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences."

I like the cut of its jib, but what could this 'mechanism' be?

A surge of ebullience and pep

A surge of ebullience and pep last night as I noted that in the supermarket you can now buy 12 loratadine tablets for less than 90p. When Clarityn had a monopoly on this marvellous antihistamine drug a few years ago it was 6 tablets for a fiver. Loratadine, along with a liquid called fluctisone-summat wot I squirts up me snoz, has utterly transformed my quality of life in spring and summer (or Tally and Spate), seasons that used to be crippled by wretched blasted rotten hayfever.

Thus our lives have sneakily improved in so many areas over the last decade, even as New Labour tried to spoil them with endless legislative micromanagement. I have been attracted to the notion of a fallow year of Government, where no new laws are passed for 12 months; let the land recover, like Glastonbury.

But now I find that our boys CamClegg are going to go much further than that, and will have a burst of glorious unlawmaking.

According to the BBC, Clegg will today make a speech about how the Coalition aims to…

"transform our politics so the state has far less control over you, and you have far more control over the state".

This would include scrapping the ID card scheme and accompanying National Identity Register, all future biometric passports and the children's Contact Point Database and ensuring CCTV was "properly regulated" and restricting the storage of innocent people's DNA.

He will also accuse the previous government of "obsessive lawmaking" and pledge to "get rid of the unnecessary laws" and "introduce a mechanism to block pointless new criminal offences".

He will also pledge to ask the public "which laws you think should go" as they "tear through the statute book".

I agree with Nick.

Tonight show stitch-up

Following Welsh rugby captain Gareth Thomas’s courageous self-outing there is an interesting television documentary to be made about the reasons that professional sport lags behind the rest of society in its toleration of homosexuality. Unfortunately, last night’s Tonight programme, Afraid to be Gay wasn’t it. The ITV show instead attempted to prove that society is still intolerant of homosexuals by using precisely the same disingenuous tactic employed by Panorama to prove that Britain is still racist.

They took a couple of pretty gays, dressed them in tweedy boyband suits and Jedward haircuts and with hidden cameras followed them parading about the streets holding hands and snogging, until they had collected enough footage of name-calling from male teenagers to ‘shock’ us. The ITV producers performed this stunt not in London or another metropolis where the sight of a gay couple wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow; but in Wigan town centre, carefully selected for being a chav hotbed. In other words, they went fishing for idiots in a pond swarming with them and, not surprisingly, they caught a few. In Wigan town centre, merely sporting spectacles and wearing anything other than trackie bottoms and a crew cut will be more than sufficient to elicit name-calling from teenage male chavs; the snogging was quite unnecessary.

The treatment of the lost British white underclass is a national disgrace. Ignored by the political class, especially Labour which should be its champion, it has been left to stew and turn septic in a hopeless, inescapable swamp of welfare dependency and lawlessness. I hope this is what Cameron-Clegg mean when they talk about ‘deep social problems’. The chav-fishing method employed by Panorama and now Tonight says precisely nothing about our national attitude to race and sexual orientation – which by any reasonable comparison either to previous decades or to other nations, is exceptionally tolerant – but everything about the media class’s attitude to the white poor. They are either exploited and dehumanised by Jeremy Kyle or vilified by the London hipsters for hate crimes, and every year the chasm between the underclass and the rest of us widens, and the prospect of any particular poor boy or girl successfully leaping it diminishes.

Welcome to the Quantum Flux (official)

Politics eh? Bloody hell. It’s fair to say that this remarkably generous Coalition changes everything about the political landscape, and raises the intriguing possibility that, if it works, the Lib Dems might not be able to untangle themselves from the Tories at the next election, leaving a two-party system and Labour…where? Possibly very strong if they get it right. But in the meantime, did you see Newsnight? Was there ever such trio of prize turnips as Ben Bradshaw, Diane Abbott and Polly Toynbee, all lamenting the failure of the ‘progressive’ coalition. It’s come to something when Toynbee is the most sensible person on a panel. And I loved Cameron’s muted entry to number 10. It was the opposite of Blair, very retro. God knows how this is all going to work but it probably will.

Hung up

John Gray, perhaps the most curate's egg pundit about, wrote a post-election article about 'bigoted' Tory MPs which strikes me as largely a load of old blather, like the worst bits of Straw Dogs.

But to the extent that it isn't blather, it does raise more awkward questions about our current electoral system versus proportional representation. First-past-the-post encourages broad church parties, where the fringes of the Labour left and Tory right are kept in check by the moderation that is perceived by the leadership to be needed to win elections. Under PR, there would be a much greater incentive for the partially-loony to abandon middle-ground politics and join or form wholly-loony spin-off parties. Those who call for PR generally assume that progressive, left-of-centre governments would dominate as a result. But might not the whole parliamentary centre of gravity shift rightwards? If we follow the percentages at this election, by some distance the biggest winners outside the big 3 would be UKIP, and the BNP gained twice as many votes as the Greens.

The theoretical arguments for PR are irresistible. The practical arguments against it are immovable. This is why liberals support it and conservatives oppose it; it's not just that each thinks their favoured system would deliver them power. In the long-term we'll probably end up with a greatly diluted version designed to deliver results as close as possible to those expected from FPTP, but with a few bones thrown in the direction of superficial 'fairness'.

Democracy 2: Cleggmania

Before midnight, an eternity ago, Andrew Neil on BBC 1 conducted a bizarre four-way interview at an election cocktail party on a boat with Tony Parsons (cocky), Joan Collins, Victor Meldrew and Armando Iannucci, during which the last complained that the British people had, essentially, chickened out of voting for the Lib Dems even though they wanted to. This confirmed what I had dimly suspected about Iannucci – that he is a staggeringly arrogant git who hates people and thinks everyone but himself is an idiot. Luckily he also makes funny programmes. Contra Armando, the dismal failure of the Lib Dems to live up to the hype reveals (1) that “who do you think did well in the debate?” is a different question to “who will you vote for?”; and (2) that people didn’t vote Lib Dem yesterday because the Lib Dems have all the same bad policies they had at the last election.

Meanwhile, the Scots and Welsh, who have devolved Parliaments, continue to prevent the Conservatives forming a Government despite the clear will of the English people that they should. Thus we English continue to oppress the Celtic people in our tyrannical way, just as we have since 1746 when our Royalty order-…oh theyre is so much more a could say but a canny be arsed…

Democracy

The BNP have pushed a leaflet through our door. Their local candidate, a pensioner called Brian (left) with an amusingly giveaway Hitler moustache, makes no mention of race in his Dear Voter letter, but promises to increase the state pension and immediately withdraw troops from Afghanistan. In stark contrast, skeletal teacher Rae Lynch of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition promises to increase the state pension and immediately withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The far Left and Right could be factions of the same party. Perhaps when we complain that the three biggies are 'all the same' we should remember that the other available slots on the political spectrum are, apparently, occupied entirely by evil and/or stupid parties, such as the Greens. Or, as with Monty Python's election, there are only the Sensible and the Silly Parties.

That said, I'm reluctant to include the Lib Dems amongst the Sensible Parties. As for Labour, Nick Cohen attempts to dredge up a few half-arsed reasons to vote for them. That they're not any of the Silly Parties is the best he can manage - and one can't help the feeling that this is classic Cohen contrarianism, appearing as it does in the Guardian which has of course turned yellow. The Tories are the least worst option because they alone lack the ideological/paymaster-dependency obstacles that would prevent them making the necessary cuts to address The Debt Which Passeth All Understanding, which our great Chancellor-cum-PM has generously bequeathed to the nation during his 13 years of Prudence.

Mind your own business

David has been posting an informative and typically brainbending series on statistics, in which we commenters have touched on the problems of opinion polls. As we know, political opinion polls favour Labour because Conservative voters are worried about possible haranguings from passing 80s alternative comedians; but I suspect that another element is that conservatives are more likely to answer with ‘mind your own business’, and thus polls are biased leftwards via self-selection.

Talking of which, I was once entering a branch of Sainsburys when a female peddler of some sort of plastic usury approached me and demanded: “Excuse me sir, but how much debt is on your credit card?” Now I like to think of myself as a cooperative sort and I always tell chuggers, surveyers and other pests to sod off in the nicest and most roundabout fashion, but the impudence of this one had me reeling and I couldn’t help but reply: “Um, that’s my business, thank you very much.” The sales trollop then had the gall to look stung and hurt, as if I had been rude to her.

That was some years ago so I can’t honestly say that such intrusive salesmanship is part of a trend; which is just as well or we’d have to dodge people trying to get us to test out free samples of Preparation H in the medicine aisle; or viagra-mongers demanding to know how the old fella has been standing up to his task lately.

Multiculturalism at its best

A thrillingly postmodern concern has been pushing its takeaway menus through the front doors of east Bristol. The 'Bombay Pizza Company' has hit upon the idea of selling classic Anglo-Indian dishes on pizzas. The 'Machlee Masala', for example, comprises balti sauce, masala fish, onions, tomato and coriander, and comes on a 9 or 12-inch dough base. Jalfrezi, rogan josh and even vindaloo pizzas are all available; or you can Build Your Own from a list of toppings including mushroom bhaji, tarka dhall, aloo gobi and mozarella.

The restaurant has apparently been much discussed in Mrs Brit's coven of new mothers. All the wives are, frankly, repulsed. Their husbands, by contrast, unanimously agree that this is a culinary enterprise of unprecedented genius.

Binegar (Gurney Slade), Foreign Office, Chancellors

I haven’t been able to write much this week, first because my business is to a large extent based on a mountain of work around the Budget, and second because I spent yesterday driving to Dorset and back on the rain-blasted A37, a road of constant accelerations and decelerations, tiresome enough to break any man’s spirit were it not enlivened by the yokel-sounding village names, such as Farrington Gurney and Binegar (Gurney Slade). Love those brackets. Pertinent to Gaw’s recent musings I did enjoy the scrawled but massive handwritten Somerset sign “Cider Here”, conjuring visions of a swimming-hole full of the stuff with gleeful rustics plunging.

I did catch a couple of political programmes on the gogglebox. The Great Offices of State is my kind of politics – long, long views, in which the politicians of the day are but passing pests in the night while faceless, rigid-backed civil servants run the country. This episode was about the Foreign Office. Old Etonians prowl dark leather rooms, patriotically formfilling, standing on burning decks, keeping Britain British in a hideous, irrational world. Frowning, they sift dud intelligence from the lamplighters and pavement artists (The only problem with the TV adaption of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that it took the action out of Le Carre’s timeless shadow world and put it in a real one with cars and hairstyles). Robin Cook as Foreign Sec was remembered as a vandal who removed a big old painting from King Charles St in the name of ‘modernisation’.

Douglas Hurd noted a notable thing in the discrepancy between perceptions of Britain at home and in Europe. When he goes off to Brussels, the Foreign Secretary leaves the country as a craven compromiser, all too eager to sacrifice British interests to his Eurocrat cronies. He arrives in Europe as a bully and wrangler, wily, suspiciously well-briefed and determined to protect British interests at all costs and hang the rest.

Channel 4’s Ask the Chancellors ‘debate’ proved that we are living in a golden age of Tinkering Politics in which there is absolutely no ideological distinction between any of the main political parties. Vince Cable had nothing to lose and was therefore in the strongest position, but he blew it by admitting that even he, the great Lib Dem sage, couldn’t have predicted the scale of the banking collapse, even as the monkeys in the audience were poised to applaud him for predicting exactly that. He should have milked it – most people want to believe that people can predict things and therefore we can blame those who don’t, because they cannot compute the brute fact that we live in a hideous, irrational world. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter who wins the Election in the long run but you should vote Tory because they’ll have a second Budget and I’ll be quids in.

Hell, handcart news: the Relics of Cheryl Cole

Last night on an episode of Channel 4’s hard-hitting social documentary Come Dine with Me, a young lady uttered the following profundity: “You know, I would really love it if Cheryl Cole brought out a perfume.”

This struck me as an unusually frank admission by a consumer that the quality of the product is not only secondary but irrelevant compared with the value of the celebrity endorsement.

Have we then reached the stage where a celebrity is no longer used as an excuse to sell pieces of merchandise, but where merchandise is used as an excuse to sell pieces of a celebrity?

Or is it only certain celebrities? And is it a new thing or has the Relic element always been there at the extreme end of the fame and tat-flogging business?

Poetry is rubbish 2: Impeach Duffy

Is it possible to impeach a Poet Laureate? Read Carol Ann Duffy’s 12 Days of Christmas effort and weep. This is probably the worst verse of a pretty shocking bunch:

THE FIRST GOLD RING WAS GOLD INDEED –
bankers' profits fired in greed.

The second ring outshone the sun,
fuelled by carbon, doused by none.

Ring three was black gold, O for oil –
a serpent swallowing its tail.

The fourth ring was Celebrity;
Fool's Gold, winking on TV.

Ring five, religion's halo, slipped –
a blind for eyes or gag for lips.

Capitalism, oil, warmenism, s’lebs and some anti-religionism. Elsewhere there’s a lot of the old soldier-as-victim routine.

This is ‘poetry’ as a set of banal soundbites from the student section of the Question Time audience. It’s poetry about ishoos.

The Laureate’s job is to write about Britain. Britain is not made of issues, it is made of people and places and things and time. If you can’t find something worthwhile or memorable to write about in there, then don’t take the post. Anyone could write this kind of ishoos crap from outside the Laureateship. And they do, mostly as GCSE coursework.

Duffy is abusing the post. The Impeachment campaign starts here.

Noughties, craftivism

The Arnolfini art gallery emails me with details of an exciting new movement:

Craftivism is a participative exhibition responding to the resurgent interest in craft as it relates to socially-engaged art practice. It involves 14 projects developed by artists and collectives that work with craft-based traditions and activist practices, and who employ the tactics of 'craftivism' (combining crafting & activism) to question the prevailing codes of mass consumerism.

Thus making a wooden spoon becomes not just an act of making a wooden spoon, but a small, wooden spoon-shaped blow against the prevailing codes of mass consumerism. Uh oh, this is the Kingsnorthian interpretation of Ed, Will and Ginger. I don’t rate its chances. But that’s 2009 for you. Good grief we’re at the end of the decade already. The noughties started with a terrorist atrocity and ended with a credit crunch, neither of which has yet brought down America or capitalism. As Presuming Ed has so consistently pointed out, they have failed to paint it black. Some people can’t let it go; Jane Elliott was still hammering away at her forty-year-old idea while a black man was in the White House. More importantly, the noughties were when I got married and became a daddy. You’ve got to know your place. I thought the way Paul Kingsnorth handled the ribbing he got here was wise, good-humoured and, in an important way, very English. In fact, I told him this off-blog and we’re pals now. This is as it should be.

Two-thousand-and-nine was a sci-fi number when I was my daughter’s age. Strange to think it’ll all be in the past very soon, quaint and naive, a more innocent age. Remember the fuss about the wardrobe malfunction? And about the lascivious dancing on Ulysses S Grant’s grave? But what a great tune by which to dance lasciviously on a grave, eh?

So, a few weeks and then here comes another decade. Uh oh, uh oh, uh uh uh oh...

Thirty Years of Pop Music: A Narrative

The fractious economic and political climate of the late 1970s saw a flowering of musical creativity, as a generation of British youths, energised by a radical left-wing ideology, turned their alienation and anger into musical gold. With The Jam’s Paul Weller and The Clash’s Joe Strummer at the forefront, the end of that dark decade was lit up with music that represented both a primal scream of rage and a reaction to the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of the Prog Rockers. The raw excitement of the seventies has never been recaptured since and a decade of superficial posing was to follow…

…The seventies were the decade that taste forgot, with the garish naffness of Abba and Glam Rock giving way to the anti-everything nihilism of punk. The briefly-interesting Clash had imploded with the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of triple-album Sandinista, while the nadir was reached with squalid death of Sid Vicious. Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the 1980s saw a renaissance of colour, light and refinement. Paul Weller read the signs, disbanded The Jam and took his songwriting to new levels of sophistication with The Style Council. The mood was enacapsulated in the slogan “Choose Life” and peaked with the world-uniting Live Aid events. Freed from the limitations of punk’s three-chord thrashings and primitive production values, in an era of economic prosperity and optimism, pop music, led by the swooning New Romantics and the hedonistic freaks of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, became a joyous expression of living...

… Heaven knows I’m miserable now, sang the Mancunian Morrissey in perhaps the defining British pop song of the 1980s, a decade in which urban alienation plumbed bleak new depths under the harsh realities of Thatcherism…

... I wanna be adored, sang Mancunian Ian Brown in perhaps the defining British pop song of the late 1980s. A generation of creative youths rejected miserabilism as Baggy and Acid House exploded in a glorious celebration of shimmering music and drug-fuelled dancing. Shunning politics and ignoring the harsh realities of Thatcherism, the Stone Roses gig at Spike Island in 1989 marked the musical zenith of the decade…

…By 1989 pop music had reached a nadir. Stock Aitken and Waterman’s soap stars dominated the charts while the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of The Style Council had alienated rock fans and left the once-mighty Paul Weller without a record contract. The time was right for grunge as a wave of American bands, led by Nirvana, swept across the Atlantic. Themselves influenced by the British punks, but with a gloriously a-political outlook that freed them from the naïve and tiresome cod-leftist sloganeering of the likes of Joe Strummer, the howl of grunge guitars was like an injection of pure adrenalin into the moribund music scene…

… You and I are gonna live forever, sang Liam Gallager in perhaps the defining British pop song of the 1990s, Live Forever. Reacting against the bleak and self-indulgent noodlings of US grunge, Oasis represented a defiant new optimism in British music. Influenced by the punk bands of the 1970s but shunning the outdated politics and class-warfare elements, Britpop dominated the mainstream media as well as the indie charts. Re-cast as “The Modfather”, Paul Weller found a new lease of life, producing his most mature and consistently high-quality work to date. ... Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for? sang Liam Gallagher, in perhaps the defining British pop song of the 1990s, Cigarettes and Alcohol. With Pulp’s Common People also crossing into the mainstream, and Blur vs Oasis representing the middle-classes vs the workers, Britpop was the time when class-warfare returned to the agenda…

…By the late 1990s, pop music had reached a nadir. The pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of Oasis’ Be Here Now and the so-so Dad Rock of Paul Weller represented a creative lull in British music…

…By the late 1990s, pop music had never been more exciting and varied. Inspired by the mad genius of Aphex Twin, innovations in dance and urban music had led to a flowering of genre-bending creativity, crossing into the mainstream with Underworld, Goldie and the Prodigy, and flooding abroad with the Ministry of Sound's euphoric Ibiza anthems, which rejected the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of the likes of Aphex Twin, Underworld, Goldie and…By the early 2000s, pop music had reached a nadir, with the crass commercialism of the Ministry of Sound’s Ibiza anthems endlessly retreading old ground. The time was right for a resurgence of back-to-basics guitar music. It came from the US in the thrilling form of the White Stripes and the Strokes, augmented in the UK by The Libertines’ irresistible combination of pop sensibilities and self-destruction…Reaching a nadir with the self-indulgent and self-destructive tendencies of Pete Doherty’s Libertines, the mid to late 2000s saw mainstream rather than alternative music as the place for real innovation, as the wild electronic beeps and jagged underground rhythms of urban music seeped into the hits of the likes of Beyonce, Britney and even manufactured reality stars such as Girls Aloud and Leona Lewis…

...The mid to late 2000s saw an unprecedented homogenisation of youth pop culture. Simon Cowell, perhaps the single most powerful force in popular music since The Beatles, read the signs and capitalised with a constant supply line of commercial acts. While the kids slumped like zombies in front of The X Factor, the mainstream monoculture had never been so dominant as the scene moved further than ever from the days of the late 1970s when tribal youth movements were so musically and politically vital…

...The mid to late 2000s saw an unprecedented splintering of youth pop culture. While their parents slumped like zombies in front of The X Factor, the kids were at their bedroom computers or on the streets with I-phones and I-Pods, creating and downloading material from a bewildering fractal array of genres and sub-genres and specialist online music streams. Radiohead, perhaps the single most innovative force in British pop music since The Beatles, read the signs and gave away their album In Rainbows free on the internet. The mainstream monoculture had never been so irrelevant as the scene moved further than ever from the days of the late 1970s when a small number of tribal youth movements dominated the restrictive BBC and chart-led media...