The attendance at this year’s Burning Man festival of libertarian Republican policy wonk Grover Norquist has caused some controversy over the past few weeks. There have also been grumbles about members of the Silicon Valley elite heading out to the Nevada desert and setting up their own VIP enclaves at the festival. Names include Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and “a slew of khaki-wearing venture capitalists”.
Similar charges of gentrification have been levelled at UK festivals for many years now, becoming a staple of British summers: for increasing numbers of the British ruling class, sampling the mud at Glastonbury has become another social engagement, along with strawberries and cream at Wimbledon and top hat and tails at Ascot.
But why do we get so upset when the rich go glamping at Glastonbury, or when David Cameron visits the Salford Lads Club to claim the Smiths as his favourite band? When Cameron named the Jam’s Eton Rifles as one his favourite songs, Paul Weller spat out his response: “Which part of it doesn’t he get?”
To answer this question, we need to understand festivals as a particular expression of a trend that reigned within youth cultures over the second half of the 20th century. Mark Fisher calls this trend “popular modernism” – the attempt to construct an alternative future to that proposed by traditional elites, and to do this by claiming a better grip on the potentials of the present. It’s an example of “history from below”, of “ordinary” people taking existing ideas, technologies and resources and reworking them to better meet their own needs, desires and dreams – and thus making (their own) history. Popular modernism takes avant-garde ideas and recirculates, extends and reworks them through popular culture. It’s a kind of subaltern modernism, in which the pioneering of new desires and possible futures also serves as a form of armour against the psychological effects of entrenched inequality. “Style as armour”, in the words of Ian Penman. It’s what Bobby Gillespie, lead singer of Primal Scream, meant when he said: “We always saw music as some kind of revolutionary force … People can laugh at that all they like but we saw it as fucking psychic resistance.”
There is a fascinating photograph, taken in 1976, of John Paul Getty III standing next to Jordan in SEX, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop on London’s King’s Road. What was it about those disaffected young men and women, the originators of punk, that so attracted the scion of one of the world’s richest families, that compelled him to forgo the world he was born into in order to join theirs? Their energy, their creativity, their sense of unrest for sure. The fact that these alienated youngsters had managed to create a version of the future that perfectly fitted the present of the mid- to late-1970s. This is exactly what the British-based Situationists grasped when they named their group the Kim Philby Dining Club – the possibility that you could create and inhabit a version of the future that was so attractive that members of the ruling class would become traitors to their world. (In fact the Dining Club left an extraordinary legacy: two of its members were later jailed for their part in the Angry Brigade bombings, while Tony Wilson went on to found Factory Records and the Hacienda.)
This is not just another story about punk or the post-punk indie scene. We could give similar examples from a period spanning five or six decades – from bebop to hip-hop, from grunge to grime. Take mod itself, its name an abbreviation of modernism. Seemingly apolitical, but the epitome of style as armour, mod invented a new way to be confidently working class. Penman again: “The early mods were navigators, Magellans of the postwar field of leisure time, which had to be imagined, cast in this or that shape. Everything was up for grabs: music and clothes, sex and sexuality; the speech and language of put-down and put-on and pop fandom; transport and travel; nights out and nights in. Everything, in fact, we now take for granted as ‘youth culture’. It was a heady time of redefinition.”
It may be hard to remember now, but for much of the second half of the 20th century working-class (and lower-middle-class) kids directly influenced the future direction of society by pioneering both culture and styles of living. Energetic, creative and restless (those qualities that attracted John Paul Getty III), these youthful innovators weren’t content with inhabiting the world – they wanted to remake it. And, at times, their influence was so great that the UK experienced several overlapping cultural revolutions from below, all leaving the elite’s traditional style-setters floundering and representing only the past.
Today, by contrast, culture is dominated by pop moguls and the rich, “celebrity culture” is held up as one model of the “good life”, while the cultural elite display open bigotry and hatred of the contemporary working class (“chavs”). Popular-music culture, which once felt so dangerous and full of potential, is now just a mirror held up to society.
In this climate of stultifying top-down sameness and a lack of confidence from below, festivals still hold out the promise of something more edgy, more left-field. At their best, festivals epitomise that popular modernist trend of offering people the chance to create and inhabit alternate futures in the here and now, however momentarily. These potentialities still exist at Glastonbury and other festivals, even if only as an echo. This is why people are still drawn to them. They’re seeking out that spirit of radical experimentation, of trying out new ways of living in the world. As one participant at this year’s Burning Man put it: “This is a great experiment in self-actualisation.” For many of us they also offer a moment of “psychic resistance” – an opportunity to dream of something different.
It is precisely this history of psychic resistance which seems violated by the domestication of music festivals and “alternative culture”. When Conservative MPs and similar types are seen in the VIP areas at Glastonbury, it feels like an establishment attempt to claim that alternative history – that history which contains its own alternative future – as its own, and to wipe out the history of popular modernism in UK pop culture. What else was Cameron doing when he blithely stated: “I don’t see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs”?
It’s easy to dismiss all this as bad-tempered nostalgia for another time when music mattered. But that would be wrong on two counts. First, this isn’t just about music, because pop culture encompasses so much more: fashion, art, writing, design, attitude, ways of being. Second, even more importantly, this isn’t about the past. For all its talk of creativity and innovation, the future that neoliberalism offers is one-dimensional: tomorrow will be the same as today, except with more shiny commodities. This profound cultural conservatism has gone hand in hand with the privatisation and enclosure of resources previously used to produce the new.
If we want a different tomorrow, we need to look elsewhere. Over the past five decades pop culture has been central to production of the future. When people resent the rich attending festivals or the elite colonising our culture, they’re not mourning the past – they’re raging about the cancellation of the future.
• Based on an article in bamn, an unofficial magazine of Plan C
