Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity

The Making of Modern Britain

Irene Morra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135048945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric around popular music and the dissemination of that rhetoric in various forms. Since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of modern British culture and identity. This position has been enforced in popular culture, literature, news and music media, political rhetoric -- and in much popular music itself, which has become increasingly self-conscious about the expectation that music both articulate and manifest the inherent values and identity of the modern nation. This study examines the implications of such practices and the various social and cultural values they construct and enforce. It identifies two dominant, conflicting constructions around popular music: music as the voice of an indigenous English 'folk', and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire. These constructions are not only contradictory but also exclusive, prescribing a social and musical identity for the nation that ignores its greater creative, national, and cultural diversity. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive critique of an extremely powerful discourse in England that today informs dominant formulations of English and British national identity, history, and culture.

1 Opening Ceremony

The notion of pride in being British is best left to the Olympics where it intermittently makes sense. Until recently one of the most characteristically British things you could possibly do is not talk seriously about what it means to be British. Not unless you were a white supremacist with an axe to grind.¹

“Impressive though (the opening ceremony) in Beijing was, they didn't have any great pop music to play, did they?” Billy Bragg's tweeted response to the opening ceremonies of London's 2012 Olympic Games was quoted extensively in the press the following morning, an apparently fitting summation of the event's primary achievement.² Popular music featured prominently and consistently throughout an evening that offered a loose narrative of the Industrial Revolution, a celebration of the NHS through Great Ormond Street Hospital and children's literature, and an extended tribute to television, pop culture, and social media in contemporary Britain.³ Live performers included Mike Oldfield, Arctic Monkeys, Dizzee Rascal, and Paul McCartney (whose performance of “Hey Jude” concluded the show). These performances were complemented by numerous excerpts from music by such well-known artists as the Who, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Queen, the Specials, the Jam, the Rolling Stones, Muse, Happy Mondays, Led Zeppelin, Blur, and—to the delight of many internet commentators the following day—Mud and Fuck Buttons.

The closing ceremony similarly foregrounded popular music, celebrating its position both as Britain's most dominant contemporary cultural export and as a signifier of a confident modern identity. Indeed, according to Kitty Empire, the two ceremonies together offered “the most prominent British music showcase of 2012.”⁴ Eschewing narrative in favour of a “Symphony of British Music” defined almost entirely by popular music, the latter event began with a filmed countdown that presented traditional London icons (10 Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye), introduced actor Timothy Spall reciting Shakespeare as Winston Churchill, referenced ‘classic’ television show Only Fools and Horses, and proceeded to a series of musical performances-as-street party featuring Madness, a recording of Blur's “Parklife,” and a gymnastics dance to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” The central ceremony featured a performance of “Waterloo Sunset” by Ray Davies, affirmed its central ethos with a choral performance of John Lennon's “Imagine” (and a human sculpture of the singer's face that released balloons into the stadium), shifted slightly uneasily into a performance by George Michael of his latest single—and from there moved fairly consistently through a pantheon of live and recorded performances by musical icons (the Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie) varying with performances by chart-topping favourites of more recent memory, from the Spice Girls through to Jessie J and Taio Cruz. As the extinguishing of the flame was announced, Take That performed “Rule the World” before the Who took a triumphant centre stage to conclude the event with a selection of their most classic hits.

Both ceremonies—like the Jubilee concert that had preceded them a few months previous—assumed and reinforced the representative significance of popular music. As larger, self-consciously international pageants that prioritized this popular music tradition, they also seemed to assume its signifi- cance as a dominant national signifier. In the Telegraph, Bernadette McNulty acclaimed an opening event that “paid homage to some of the greatest British hits of the last fifty years” and made her “proud of modern Britain.”⁵ As the very different critical responses to the two ceremonies suggest, however, the definition of “modern Britain” implicit in this musical tradition is characterized by numerous tensions and contradictions. Much of the closing ceremony seemed deliberately to mirror the aesthetic choices of the opening event: the Games began with Kenneth Branagh reciting Caliban's “isles of wonder” speech from The Tempest; the closing ceremony featured Spall as Churchill reciting the same lines. Where the opening event celebrated the birth of the newspaper, the closing pageant began with Emeli Sandé (who had previously performed “Abide with Me”) on a float covered in newspaper, singing “Read All About It.” This injunction was reinforced by a set decorated with quotations from the Beatles (“Let It Be”), Byron (“She Walks in Beauty”), and Samuel Johnson (“A man who is tired of London is tired of life”)—themselves echoing the tradition celebrated in the opening event's invocation of Shakespeare, Blake, and the Beatles. Both ceremonies paid particular attention to “the greatest hits” of British popular music: the final event featured a video of David Bowie, Kaiser Chiefs performing “Pinball Wizard,” Liam Gallagher performing “Wonderwall,” and Brian May collaborating with Jessie J on “We Will Rock You.” Where the opening montage at Boyle's event had featured an inflatable Pink Floyd pig, the concluding section furthered this reference by enacting the cover art on the band's Wish You Were Here album as Ed Sheeran performed the title track.

Nonetheless, according to Kitty Empire, the two events had offered “two radically opposed versions of British pop in naked competition.”⁶ The opening ceremony had “hymned a country built by mavericks, idealists, punks and ravers, Dizzee Rascal and Arctic Monkeys, and a Bristol digital noise band called Fuck Buttons”: the closing ceremony “featured the usual sacred cows—the Who, the rump of Queen, Take That, Annie Lennox—emitting the usual methane.”⁷ Michael Hann noted in the Guardian that the recorded medley was “like a Mojo magazine playlist come to life.”⁸ As a mere glance at the playlist for the opening ceremony reveals, however, the Who, Queen, and Lennox's former band, the Eurythmics, were in fact featured (albeit in recorded performance) at the earlier event. That the soundtrack of one ceremony could be received as offering an alternative, progressive manifestation of national culture while another could be received as familiar “methane” suggests the extent to which this one popular music tradition can invoke very different definitions of national identity.

“THIS IS FOR EVERYONE”

For Empire, Bragg, and many others, the Olympics opening ceremony voiced a self-consciously alternative narrative of English (and, by implication, London and British) national pride, celebrating Brunel, the NHS, and popular culture with an irreverent wit that eschewed Beefeaters and coerced the Queen into a skit with Daniel Craig's James Bond. In the Times, Simon Barnes acclaimed a show that “turned down the option to celebrate giants and supermen and power and might and chose instead to celebrate people.”⁹ For the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins, “it was [director Danny] Boyle's impassioned poem of praise to the country he would most like to believe in”: “you could feel left-of-centre Britain gradually giving into its curious and often unintentionally hilarious charms, while Tory Britain little by little grew more enraged.”¹⁰ Months later, the BBC's Neil Smith would assert that “the Olympic curtain-raiser over which Boyle presided” is now “ingrained in the public consciousness as a triumphant testament to our history, culture and sense of humour.”¹¹

These readings were epitomized by the ceremony's use of music: for Boyle himself, popular music represents an inclusive, progressive nation. In a stadium decorated with the words “this is for everyone,” he tried to offer “a story about extraordinary people who were ordinary people, really”: “we had this hidden agenda, of certain pieces of albums, certain pieces of music, the importance of British music.”¹² This project was appreciated by the BBC's Tom Fordyce: the ceremony dramatized “no simple Merchant Ivory fantasy, but a 21st century land of status updates, soap operas and a suburban red brick house with a single sulphur street light outside.”¹³ For Fordyce, this representation ensured a populist rewriting of traditional national signifiers, “a Britain as never seen before” marked by the featuring of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's “Relax”: “banned from national radio within memory, here it was at the heart of a global showcase.”¹⁴

Such responses align popular expression with an essential Britishness that counters more traditional, institutionalized pomp. This politicized reading was also evident in the event's scathing reception in more conservative circles. In an editorial edited and eventually removed by the Daily Mail, Rick Dewsbury denounced the event, declaring that “the NHS did not deserve to be so disgracefully glorified in this bonanza of left-wing propaganda.”¹⁵ The “multicultural equality agenda was so staged it was painful to watch”: “almost, if not every, shot in the [sequence about modern life in Britain] included an ethnic minority performer.”¹⁶ Like the ceremony's enthusiasts, Dewsbury recognizes the representative significance of popular music, bemoaning the event's celebration of “grime music (a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths).”¹⁷ In a much-cited set of tweets, Tory M.P. Aidan Burley voiced similar criticisms: “The most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen … Welfare tribute next?” and “thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multicultural crap.” As an apparent counter to the leftie multiculturalism of the NHS celebration, he exhorted: “bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!”¹⁸ Burley's response aligns the Rolling Stones with a very different ideal of national (and nationalist) celebration from that advocated by Bragg and Fordyce. In so doing, it underlines the extent to which ‘national’ popular music can be invoked to articulate very different social and political agendas.

These differing receptions only enforce the broader contradictions within the opening ceremony itself and within the rhetoric that emerged to acclaim the success of the Olympics overall. According to Boyle, the ceremony acknowledged that the Games had been “awarded not to a country but a city”: as such, it would focus on a more local definition of identity and pride through its celebration of the Great Ormond Street hospital and through its engagement with the social and cultural life of London's East End. At the same time, however, the ceremony consistently reached beyond this local emphasis, recognizing both the position of London as a capital city and its apparent ability to encapsulate national experience. A replica of Glastonbury Tor featured throughout the event, evoking a more comprehensive (if southern) Englishness—not to mention King Arthur, a Celtic past, and the mythical, mystical origins of the (British) nation itself.¹⁹ These larger associations were encouraged in the opening segment of a ceremony itself entitled “Isles of Wonder,” where the pre-agrarian, pastoral dramatizations of a “Green and Pleasant Land” (complete with live sheep and cows) were complemented by video performances of “Londonderry Air,” “Flower of Scotland,” and “Bread of Heaven” from Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales respectively. Taking place outside of the stadium and broadcast onto big screens, these performances both called attention to a larger British identity and reinforced the defining centrality of London's England to the event as a whole.

As defined by Boyle, the project of the ceremony was to celebrate London and the heart of the Olympics in the (multicultural, working-class) East End. It was also, however, to offer an alternative celebration of Britishness by recognizing an established history of progressive expression and innovation. In so doing, it implicitly aligned itself (and its musical references) with the central concerns of those on the English left “attached to the cause of national regeneration”:

On the one hand, traditional Britishness is taken to mean imperialism, monarchism, conservatism, hierarchy, racism, masculinity, militarism and xenophobia. On the other hand, an emerging Englishness … is taken to herald multiculturalism, egalitarianism, democracy, radicalism, international (specifically European) cooperation, modernism and openness to other cultures.²⁰

Aughey and Canovan identify in English left-wing celebrations of a “modern populism” an attempt to define a modern England untainted by Empire, little Englandism, and “the distinctive conservative colonization of the patriotic mind.”²¹ The solution for many has been to identify an established Englishness that is “both authentic and radical,” to replace “Britishness (still monarchical, imperialistic, hierarchical, unequal) with a recovered Englishness (already become republican, meritocratic, egalitarian, inclusive, internationalist).”²²

In the opening ceremony, Boyle arguably attempts to translate this English project into a larger, regenerative celebration of the “isles of wonder,” redefining Britishness in terms of individual creativity and initiative, meritocracy, the NHS, multiculturalism, and an enthusiastic internationalism ensured by the Olympic context. Like Weight, Freedland, and Bragg,²³ he identifies an established and continuously progressive strain of national identity distinct from traditional institutional signifiers of “Great Britain”:

what we were doing was trying to make a story about extraordinary people who were ordinary people, really. And that the focus of our country is actually that. And you can tell the history of our country and hope for the future of our country through their eyes.

For Boyle and the ceremony's writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, this alternative, popular history is best presented within a narrative of revolution. In his programme notes, Boyle notes that most nations “experience a revolution that changes everything about them. The United ...