Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain

by Kari Kallioniemi, Bruce Johnson (Editor), Kari Kallioniemi (Editor)

Overview

English pop music was a dominant force on the global cultural scene in the decades after World War II – and it served a key role in defining, constructing and challenging various ideas about Englishness in the period. Kari Kallioniemi covers a stunning range of styles of pop – from punk, reggae and psychedelia to jazz, rock, Brit Pop and beyond – as he explores the question of how various artists (including such major figures as David Bowie and Morrissey), genres and pieces of music contributed to the developing understanding of who and what was English in the transformative post-war years.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783206018
Publisher:	Intellect Books
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Series:	ISSN
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	249
File size:	767 KB

About the Author

Kari Kallioniemi is a researcher, adjunct professor and the leader of the ‘Thatcherism, Popular Culture and the 1980s’ project at the Cultural History department, University of Turku. His research interests focus on the relationships between different notions of nationality, neo-right and popular culture. His recent book on this subject is Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain (Intellect, 2016). His current project deals with the themes of fascination with fascism in popular culture.

Bruce Johnson is adjunct professor of communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, visiting professor of music at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and docent and visiting professor of cultural history at the University of Turku.

Read an Excerpt

Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain

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By Kari Kallioniemi

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-601-8

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CHAPTER 1

Strategies for Conceptualizing Notions of Pop-Englishness

1.1. The Peculiarities of English National Pop Identity

One of the most important and complex notions is English identity, perceived through innumerable books, especially since the end of the Cold War. These are as often linked to the national as to the popular, with popular culture as 'the battleground for identity' (Richards 1997: xii) while defining, mythologizing and disseminating the popular's national dimensions. In these debates, national identity is often conceived of as a performance (Featherstone 2009: 5), and in most popular songs, connected to a range of ubiquitous and complex notions of cultural identity, ethnicity and nation. Because of these diverse linkages, the illustrations of Englishness through symbolic national cultural production deploy a whole range of institutions, events, symbols and ceremonies – from flags through museums to popular heroes and heroines – (Featherstone 2009: 1–8), offering also sources for the imaginaries of pop-Englishness. The claim that Englishness has been in identity crisis since the 1980s and that the English have lost their national identity – even that there is no such thing as Englishness – is often denied by pop imaginaries, which often see English identity refracted through the glorification of the mundane, 'by the hidden, unspoken rules of English behaviour' (Fox 2004: 1–2) in everyday life in pubs, racecourses, shops, trains or street-corner queues.

However, national identity understood as a process of becoming or connected to (post)modern identity formations, exemplified by the bildungsreise of a star biography, contests this idea of a located and static identity of English everyday vernacular. The famous figures in whom identity can be represented, from the pilgrim to the tourist (Bauman 1996: 18–36), provide one instructive metaphor in the search for the boundaries of pop cultural identity. In these figures, the pilgrim is 'truth-seeker'; the stroller as a flâneur of modern performances and spectacles; the vagabond and the tourist as 'the escape artists'; and the player as 'the modern trickster', for whom nothing is fully predictable or controllable. These dynamic models of identity – distinctive to modern and industrialized urban society – increase this pluralization of identity and decentring of subjectivity by constituting a new creative displacement in the age of post-imperial diaspora and neo-nationalisms, as manifested, for example, in dance musics as well as the physical and imaginary migrations of people (Zuberi 2001: 131–180). In these new articulations of identity, and especially in the theatrical presentations of the self, national identity is explored in acts of pop impersonation. This was exemplified in David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust figure of 1972 with its 'tumultuous impact on scores of British artists' (Hawkins 2009: 96) from Morrissey to Marc Almond, as the English 'marriage of alien and dandy giving birth to the ultimate outsider figure for the modern age, queer messiah from space' (Bracewell 1997a: 198). On closer inspection, these messiahs are often seen to be constructed from the performance of old, often masculine, English gender stereotypes and mythical concepts of English original genius. These can be such figures as the English romantic adventurer or gentleman traveller who writes a little, is always in transit, thought by some to be homosexual and who has 'a mysterious, exciting, sentimental or nostalgic quality associated with the place' (Walsh 1999: 1).

I will argue that, because 'nostalgia has a constant presence in British culture, a prism through which Britons understand their present and their past' (Bennett and Stratton 2010: 5–6), old stereotypes such as the dandy and the eccentric and their 'queer' performances, both as escape routes from and the celebration of English tradition, are still important in understanding English pop identity. Nostalgia is often associated in British pop with the feeling of displacement in England (Zuberi 2001: 179–192) and in relation to 'classic' British popular music artists like Morrissey or Bowie, their 'fascinated revulsion towards England' (Cloonan 1997: 55) is often imbued with longing for the place. Apart from his queering, Bowie has also been a clear example of the English and transnational flâneur, who performed a pilgrim while 'staying a night in Old Kioto/sleeping on a matted ground' (Move On), and turned into a player, while having a 'banger' with Iggy Pop in Moscow's Red Square under the totalitarian eyes of Red Army guards. Flirting with a 'demonic fascism' (MacDonald 2003: 140–147), also 'a hobby' of Bowie's flowing and dislocated mind in the 1970s, is one of those regressive constructions of postmodern identity formation. It is in the tradition of the eccentric folly of the Englishman dressing-up as a Nazi officer, but also showing how dislocated identities tend to flow into premodern formations, and disclose the alienation and rootlessness of western rock stardom. In this connection, I will also argue that this peculiar imagination of English pop identity is trapped, not only in its past, but also in its subversive modernity, sometimes entering a cultural cul-de-sac with its more shocking performances.

English or British? The Roots of Pop Identity

Cultural dislocation has created many strange/familiar appropriations of Anglo-American rock culture, like British synth-pop, but conversely it has strengthened reactionary parochialism, in the form of Oi!punk, Britpop's laddism or the comedy duo Chas and Dave's celebration of pub singalong, music hall and pre-Beatles rock'n'roll. The supposed celebration of globalized culture, in which the self of a privileged gentleman traveller experiences his tourist-like meetings with 'the other', can be viewed as an extension of the utopian promise of rock modernity, but in terms of pop-Englishness it is also a search for roots in the postcolonial world. When the dominant forms of pop in all contemporary societies have originated at the social margins – among the poor, the migrant, the rootless and the 'queer' (Frith 1996a: 121–22), it makes a position as a privileged English pop aficionado, coming from the centre, often fragile and uncomfortable:

And where – in the end – are my roots? I'm a white Englishman (whatever that is). I have no idea where my family came from originally – the line gets wavy just two generations back. Someone just told me that the name Hebdige comes from 'the Baltic plains' and that's it. If I have any roots at all, then they have been made in my own lifetime, in my own life. It's always been a case of cut'n'mix. What else is there? Morris dancing? Baltic sea shanties?

(Hebdige 1987: 157–158)

Because of this confusion, the crisis of national identity is easily romanticized. Thus, the partly imagined and partly desired position of 'the other' in England, based on popular music's utopian soundscape, provides a solution to the problem of being a white privileged (academic) English male. As much as Hebdige, David Bowie and Stephen Patrick Morrissey are escape artists, gentleman travellers and aesthetic cosmopolitans of the postmodern world, in the end they cannot escape their origins as representations of Britishness as gendered and racially homogeneous (Featherstone 2009: 23–27). In contemporary British society, multiculturalism is an indisputable fact, clearly exemplified by the recent news, that 'the most commonly listed non-Christian name for baby boys on the nation-wide Register of Births in modern Britain, in the year 2006, is now Mohammed' (Featherstone 2009: 11); in such a context, the nomadic escape artist finds it difficult to test the boundaries of race and right-wing issues.

However, in the case of Englishness, there has never been a self-evident idea of ethnicity of the English in England. Britain has never really tried to define itself in such terms, although there are numerous definitions of England that refer to its isolated and implicitly ethnic uniqueness. Winston Churchill, for example, proudly boasted about a 'mongrel race' during the Second World War and used the title 'The Island Race' at the start of his history of the English-speaking people, associated with the people who are 'content to share their nationality while recognizing others' differing ethnicities' (Bragg 2006: 78). The most usual way of defining ethnic divisions in Britain by reference to the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon binary constructs a Celtic identity as 'the romantic other', often constructed as the opposite of the perceived qualities of the English. This is characteristically imagined in various cases of British pop, as in the image of Anglo-Irish band Dexy's Midnight Runners, in which impulsiveness and a Celtic poetic imagination were further highlighted by gypsy look; '"shabby chic" served to dissociate Dexys from the showy glamour of their (English) pop milieu' (Campbell 2010: 37). Thus, this designed look not only played with the ethnic origins of Britain, but also defined a certain 'in-betweenness', the invocation of duality, identifying both as either and or (Campbell 2011: 9–10).

Thus, the idea of the valency-neutral ethnic distinctiveness of English national identity and its special status creates important elisions, including the experiences of the large number of nonwhite residents, who cannot easily fit themselves into essentially an ethnic rather than a multi-ethnic conception of national identity. 'Englishness' becomes a complex, highly contentious label, especially when it has been simplistically associated with things like the rural past, the Royal Family, the Anglican Church, the Empire and middle-class suburbanism. This complexity is reflected in the fact that the historically created national signs and emblems, as much as national characterizations, can transgress this model of Englishness when deployed as part of a bricolage of popular culture. The Union Jack is the most common of these, used today as a design for underpants, a pattern for dyed hair and a favourite symbol of the far Right British National Party, 'used nostalgically, ironically and even callously as a sign of solidarity against others' (Storry and Childs 1997: 77). As seen in the recent use of symbols like the English Rose and St George's Flag, England can be imagined through them both as an opening bloom and an ancient country, 'perhaps acknowledging the consequences of United Kingdom devolution and registering a need for a new England' (Featherstone 2009: 1–2), while celebrating its former glories.

Because of this search for a new England, one of the peculiar strengths of post-war English pop, from the mods of Swinging London to Two-Tone groups of the early 1980s and beyond, has been the urge to 'imagine the other' in multicultural society as a mutual experience, and discover the narrowness of the term 'Englishness' as a definition of the socio-geographical reality of pop-Britain. Even if Britishness could be seen as more suitable than Englishness in defining modern English popular music, it has some illogicality built into it, disclosed in the conflation and confusion of Britishness and (pop)-Englishness. For example, the Rolling Stones, who are English, are apparently capable of representing both, but, 'the Scottish band Runrig could represent Scotland, but not Britain. It seems that only English bands get the opportunity to represent both their own country and the larger entity in which it is located' (Cloonan 1997: 58–59). Thus, it is interesting how the Irish band U2 built its American reputation and world-wide success in the 1980s through its overtly mediated 'Irishness' – catholicism, down-to-earth mysticism and Irish political issues. But this was transformed in the 1990s to a superstardom that was strongly associated, from the point of view of the non-British, with British art rock culture, while it seemed impossible in Britain at least to read about U2 without them being described as Irish. It equally seemed impossible to read about the Manic Street Preachers without the fact that they are Welsh being mentioned. This can be understood in the context of the romanticized folklore tradition in which, impregnated with authenticity, Welsh, Irish or Scottish popular music can be viewed as more authentic than English or British pop, and thus their ethnic regionalism functions in the music industry as a marketable guarantee of originality.

Subversiveness, Eccentricity and Imaginary Class

The problematic nature of British ethnicity is often bypassed by arguing that the key to British/English (male) identity lies in a quality referred to as 'character', traditionally formulated in the process of the (Victorian) public school system that created the idea of the shaping of a gentleman, including the values of chivalry, Protestantism and evangelicalism (Wiener 1981: 12–20). This idea of a unified notion of national identity, attractive and stereotypical enough to be satirized, has generated innumerable parodies of cultural divisions in the British Isles, ranging from music hall and pop music, to humour, while 'encompassing multiple identities, intimately tied to social class, sexuality and gender' (Ellis 2012: 8).

In terms of pop-Englishness, well-known examples are music and sketches related to the cockney, a character based on the London costermonger, as 'the representation or trace of an identity that asserts itself as indigenous and regressive-nostalgic' (Laing 2003: 209). One of the most famous examples of 'chirpy chappiness' of a cockney character can be found in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, but a type quite different from this, related to the extreme political conservatism of the working class, can be found in the bigotry of Alf Garnett in the television comedy Till Death Us Do Part. Alf combines old-fashioned British patriotism with Donald McGill-postcard seediness while wiping his backside on the face of Adolf Hitler in the toilet and aggressively removing the poster of Harold Wilson from the wall of his Swinging London daughter's apartment. In a different manner, Peter Sellers' comedy-recordings in the 1950s and 1960s toyed also with cockney characterizations, like a recording of the music hall favourite Any Old Iron, but his versions of Beatles songs She Loves You and A Hard Day's Night discovered other ways to identify absurdity in British identity while revealing subversiveness in innocently naïve pop songs of the early 1960s. Sellers' performance on the 1965 television show The Music of Lennon and McCartney as Richard III, orating A Hard Day's Night in the sinister but precious manner of Lawrence Olivier's film performance, is a prime example of this imaginary. Sellers' performance transforms pop song into the world of high art, both recognizing the legacy of English theatrical tradition and in a fashionable manner satirizing high-class pretensions.

The usual British rock myth often goes against upper-classness and argues that 'there is a sense in which pop's Englishness is a common man's (the gender is important) Englishness, rooted in the mythical streets which are used to back-up its claims to realism' (Cloonan 1997: 64–65). This pop masculine myth related to rock's lad-camaraderie and giving prominence to traditional masculine values comes from a long tradition in which it is common to talk of the free-born Englishman, but somewhat problematic to talk of the free-born Englishwoman. Although rock culture foregrounds working-class images, the more traditional British identity has been, according to Forster, 'essentially middle class' (1936: 3), more socio-economically aligned to British pop as the product of art-school sensibilities than to any authentic street-culture. Therefore, the continuing projection of predominantly male class-authenticities in British pop has created another side to the masculinities of British pop – the dandyish, eccentric, effeminate or 'queer' – from which the British pop dandy has drawn continuing inspiration for his performance, resonating with Warholian ideas of pop art and the long tradition of Baudelairean subversive modernity (Hawkins 2009: 40–47).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain by Kari Kallioniemi. Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: Englishness, History and Writing about Pop Music – Seeking the Authentic Voice of Pop-Britain

Chapter 1: Strategies for Conceptualizing Notions of Pop-Englishness

1.1. The Peculiarities of English National Pop Identity

1.2. Between Modernity and Tradition: Imaginary Englishness

1.3. Englishness and Pop Geography

1.4. Pop-Englishness and Transnationalism: The History of Americanization and Relation to Europe

1.5. The Peculiar Entrepreneurialism of British Music Management

Chapter 2: From Tommy Steele to Village Green Preservation Society

2.1. Pop, English Parochialism and Post-War Britain − Change and Continuity

2.2. Young England, Half English: Englishness, the History of National Music and the Emergence of British Rock’n’roll

2.3. The Myth of Swinging Englishness: The British Invasion and Swinging London

2.4. Lazing on a Sunny Psychedelic Afternoon − Englishness and the 1960s Nostalgia for Imaginary Spaces of England

Chapter 3: Anarchy and Enterprise in the UK and the Multiplying of Notions of Pop-Englishness

3.1. From the Winter of Discontent to Free Enterprise: Thatcherism, Pop and Englishness

3.2. Punk, Disco and Progressive Rock: The Proliferation of Pop-Englishness in the 1970s

3.3. Dandyist Masks and Escape Rout(in)es of David Bowie and the New Pop

3.4. Pop-Englishness and Politics: The White British Soul Boys

Chapter 4: The Road to Britpop and Back

4.1. Blairism and Cameronism: Pop, Politics and Englishness

4.2. Morrissey as an International Outsider

4.3. The North Strikes Back − Madchester and the Northern Metaphor Revisited

4.4. The Battle for Britpop

4.5. Post-Britpop and the Ghosts of Englishnesses Past

References

Index