As for the ethnicity thing -- well, it does seem that I have a more hard-rock liking than some on ILM though I never thought of that in terms of my being of Eastern European ancestry. The only specifically ethnic sorta things rammed down my throat as a kid was classical music, particularly Chopin and piano music (though no mention was ever made of the likes of Penderecki and Górecki when I was slogging through my childhood music lessons). There are lots of young Russian immigrants where I live, and a lot of them seem to like the same sort of music other American teens like these days (Eminem, nu-metal, etc.) -- then again, as someone once said, never trust a Polack when he's talking about Russians :-)
― Tadeusz Suchodolski, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
The point is that generalising about public schools is like generalising about, say, Greek city-states. These are institutions with between two and six hundred years of history and traditions and the one thing they have in common is that they operate as separately as possible from the rest of the world, including other schools. They have different traditions, outlooks, ethoses (what is the correct plural of "ethos"?), even languages, and the effect they have on the people who go there is vastly more subtle and more profound than a simple formula of "pressure to conform".
Sorry to go on about a tangential issue to the thread but a) as you know Robin I'm wary about other people making assumptions about what is after all my personal history, b) this has been on my mind lately for various reasons.
― Tom, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― DG, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Bill
― Bill, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I'm honestly not sure that I'll ever understand public schools as well as you, which is why I value what you say on the matter. I suppose my fascination with them came from the fact that I've always opposed their existence ... and you have to get to know your enemy before you can really present an articulate argument against it.
― Robin Carmody, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Robin: "Can you fill me in on the truism (or otherwise) of the pre-punk 70s cliche of middle-class: prog /working-class: metal?" & "traditional ideas of 'high culture'" & "pressure to be on the winning side/ arrogantly "intellectual" and superior"
Useful question: I'm gonna take some of it onto Punk-Never-Happened later. But for now: punk's GREAT ACHIEVEMENT was to invent and impose strong-yet-wrong cliches on its immediate past, I think. Prior to punk there was NO winning side withinrock: it was all-of-rock vs all-the-rest (give or take Creem and Frendz and a few underground hold-outs). (UK) Punk sucked us-vs-them INTO rock. At my school — and I think this is micro-specific to where I was — the born 58/9-ers were glam kids and drop- outs; 60-61 (= me) no clear allegiance; 62/63 proggers. But the trend-making kids in the progger age-range were ALL younger brothers of glam-kids, and — I think — somewhat protesting in a proto-Thatcherite way the sense of life-wastage the glam-kids (who were v.arty, druggy and wild) projected. The punk faction arose very clearly in the unaligned age range, but was a minority (me&Chris&Phil, Anthony and Pete the Tool sorta, plus another kid whose name I've completely forgotten who had an O-level in Technical Drawing when he arrived: very exotic!! We had no idea what to make of that!!) against a majority in that range who WEREN'T MUCH BOTHERED BY MUSIC AT ALL. (The "punk faction" being incapable of solidarity by defn, I spent more time with (a) the [older] glamkids, cuz they were "dangerous", and treated me as their pet, and (b) the [younger] proggers, because one of them was totally cute and my first live pash.
Prog is/was NOT bland. Have you ever HEARD Brain Salad Surgery or Tarkus? Horrible horrible horrible noise: Merzbow for blued-up nutters. Topographic Oceans = endless acres of weird improv shit, prettiness emerging from dreary sludge. OK Barclay James Harvest were bland, and Genesis WENT bland, but the other chief median tastes were DEEP PURPLE and RAINBOW, as metal as metal gets. GENESIS and PURPLE: that was what most liked, ie one foot totally on either side of the cliche.
Prog = trad ideas of high culture? This genuinely makes no sense to me. I mean, I recognise it as a sociological distillate of punk cliche, but it just ain't there in the music. Trad High Culture = Rick Wakeman's Cans & Brahms? *Kif-style sigh..*
Middlebrow works for Barclay James Harvest and *some* Genesis: but a lot of prog is way too dotty to fit this, either.
Shrewsbury: yup, and I just about managed to bite back a remark abt did you think I was one of the ignorant oaves who only get into WELLINGTON (the only poss. local Public School alternative for me to be a day-kid at): a *very* catty-snobby kneejerk response lying dormant yet toxic somewhere in me lo! these 25 years... This being a school where no less than six of the TEACHERS ran away to join Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's in Oregon in 1979!! (And from which some 30 kids had been expelled in c.1969 for unnatural practices: ie male-on-male dorm orgies!! I had not yet arrived alas: plus was day-kid anyway...)
Tom is correct: you just can't generalise. I didn't feel under pressure to conform AT ALL: but then a Scholarship Kid is coinage for a second-rank private school. If I get a good Oxbridge place, it burnishes THEIR cv. I was just left alone, basically.
Today of course the proggers wd all swear to be have been punkers. Cz punk invetned the idea of the "winning side" in order to BE THAT WINNING SIDE. But Chris the Sabbaf fan — whose father was probably the richest parent of all the day-kids — was the one who actually bought "Oh! Bondage!" and brought it to school, and Phil and me were the ones who actually played it.
Wicked Phil = dead of drink and mayhem (most gorgeous smile I've ever known). Sabbaf Chris = farmer in Oxfordshire (well, last time I heard, which was many years ago). Me = mark s. (THIS IS TRUE!!)
― mark s, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
(Although you can't really get much further than just following Tarden's comments about institutionalisation in the band-dynamics thread, which gives a broad schema for what life in a boarding school is like.)
If I were you I wouldn't spend much time looking at those websites, too.
Well I went to an inner-city comprehensive, and during my High School years (1983 - 1989) the music of choice for those that wore their musical tastes on their sleeve was mostly Hip-Hop and Gangsta Rap.
There was quite a sizable tribal subculture going on which involved a) listening to pirate radio - in class, on a walkman hidden below the desk with one headphone stuck furtively in an ear, b) graffiti, and c) wearing designer sports clothing (this was the Eighties and labels had become extremely important to tribal conformity. God help those who turned up to school wearing "immoes' - cheap imitations of name brands, normally bought from market stalls).
"Because the leisure and ability to track down a whole sub-world of obscure vinyl was JUST NOT THERE if you lived in a world w/o a certain minimal level of disposable."
I wouldn't say so. It was a case of the harder, the nastier and the more cutting-edge the Gangsta Rap the better and therefore obviously not readily available in the major record stores. And though not your 'typical' vinyl-sniffing, alt music geek, the Hip- Hop headz still had that sense of hipper-than-thou about them. I must also say that (outwardly) ostentatious signs of wealth and one- upmanship are depressingly integral parts of working class culture.
During '88 there was a shift however. A lot of the white kids who were into Rap seemed to flock, as one, to Acid House (perhaps I should point out that the percentage of white kids was around about 65 - 70%). The rave scene, Ecstasy and that bloody 'smiley' symbol culture hit big during my last years at school. I was in the 6th form '88 - '89, and in with a tight band of Indie kids into The Smiths, New Order, My Bloody Valentine, The Wedding Present, Mighty Lemon Drops, The Sugarcubes, Pixies, Throwing Muses and The Housemartins (guilty!)etc. We were outnumbered however. That sodding Smiley face began to appear everywhere. One of my lasting impressions of the place is on one blistering hot day a load of lads, stripped to the waist, standing on the bike shed roof, 'ghetto blaster' blaring out House music with them all jabbing their hands in the air, wailing: "Aciiieeeeed! Aciiieeeeed! Aciiieeeeed!"
My girlfriend at the time went to a dead, dead posh school in Malvern. She and a lot of her school friends shared my indie-indie tastes, though they favoured the Goth-lite sounds of All About Eve and The Mission (puke!). But from what I was told and what I could make out the general musical tastes at the school seemed to be fairly mainstream: a lot of chart pop - esp boybands like Curiosity Killed the Cat and A-Ha - and soft rock: Bon Jovi and MeatLoaf seemed to be strangely popular.
Obviously I never went there, but as the sort of rigid tribalism that was so all-pervasive at my school was nowhere to be seen at the more well-to-do school my girlfreind attended, so neither was the interest in more outre forms of music. Though whether this was because it was a private school or even an all-girls school, I really don't know.
― DavidM, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Mark brings up an interesting thing re. prog (which I still know v.little about) - not aspiring to join high culture (the Beatles- Schubert thing much more an example of that, though reversed) but perhaps aspiring to replace it? Which is the attitude of the underground now, in a lot of cases: this stuff is art-in-exile, held back by its blood ties with the horrid mainstream.
OK, good point, yet this was still very far from generally so in the early 70s, at least outside what you might call the big-city "mod" and/or "clubbing" strongholds. A good way to get a sense of what most of the UKworld looked or felt like is to watch a movie like ON THE BUSES, not for Hilarious Comedy Action of foreground, but for the locations and real-time backdrops, shopfronts, ordinary clothes, the shapes of cars: just incredibly oppressive pervasive shabby blinkered dreariness. Dominant "design" colour = shit-brown. Style = nowhere. (But there *was* a wide-spread, often quite hostile street anti-style unisex uniform for "soulboys/girls": star jumpers and tanktops, high-waisters, a kind of knobby platform shoe whose actual name escapes me, except that it looked like a built-up boot for someone with a deformed foot... )
― Dr. C, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Learning to Labour by Paul Willis (waaaay out of print) Sound Effects by Simon Frith
LTL focussed on a school in the North, Frith's work is more general. Both of these are concerned with 1970's patterns, eg. working class kids did the charts; middle-class kids did LP's with lots of prog. I recall a quote from one sniffy, posh longhair who dissed T. Rex as 'commercial' compared to his beloved Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Fun bit of trivia which Mark Sinker hasn't mentioned yet: John Peel went to Shrewsbury too. He was not on a scholarship.
Kerry: I always thought the whole John Hughes movie OST and Wax Trax thing ruled Chicago, but most of the people I knew from there came from places like Lake Forest and Winnetka, so, well, duhhhh on me. In Minneapolis the only weird music coincidences I ever noticed were the Asian kids into synth/Depeche Mode-type stuff and the more working- class kids from South Mpls. who liked skate-thrash all-ages show hardcore/SST groups. *Really* rich kids tended to have shallower tastes, they'd know things like a group's most famous song but didn't care. They were sort of freaked out by an obsessive interest in anything and occasionally cast aspersions on their more dedicated peers.
But mostly I noticed what people liked had more to do with intelligence than social backgrounds. The vast bulk of those with specialised/ expert/indie taste in music tended to be honours students or what your mother would call 'artsy'. Also, I never had a dime of pocket money growing up but all earnings from jobs, etc. were plowed into expensive imports and NOBODY ever tried to diminish girls on the scene; too many strong and supportive females around to make that an option. It was also understood that the music thing was not a lifestyle, it was one's life. I think I was really lucky to grow up around those people!
― suzy, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Of course the atmosphere at Harrow, which by all accounts has never been an *intellectual* school in the sense of some other major public schools, must be very different again from Winchester.
Mark S: my knowledge of prog is too limited to really make the sort of assertion I did. I've got a feeling you're right, though: in fact I deliberately put forward a kind of distilled punk cliche to see how far from the truth it was. I think you're right about the OTT thing being more a *redefinition* of high culture than an aspiration to it.
You're right about early 70s Brit parochialism and mundanity, as well (relative to today, it might as well be 1947, as I think I said in the radio thread a while back). Wasn't there, but is it just me who, when watching old Public Information Films and the like, obsessively concentrates on the background detail, the period smell, and doesn't think for one moment about Kevin Keegan's perm or whatever? Or memorises the font on an old shopfront, or the design of the Radio 1 Roadshow truck, in a clip featured in some nostalgia show while brutally avoiding every word Maconie has to say? We're getting into Martin Parr territory now of course ...
DavidM, I think you're right about the divide in the 80s. You may not be quite as right if applying a similar scenario today, though.
Suzy: Peel *himself* was a posh longhair who dissed T.Rex blah blah blah. I can't comment on the sniffy bit, though.
Other "Old Salopians" of note: Michael Palin, Richard Ingrams, the mad anti-EU zealot Christopher Booker, Paul Foot, Willie Rushton (the last four explain the Private Eye thing I mentioned earlier).
It could have been popular then, I don't know. The period I was talking about was more late 70s, early 80s. Wax Trax didn't get big until I went to college, which, it just so happens was on the North Shore, at Northwestern. IME, NU kids didn't listen to that stuff - it was too "goth" or something, and goth kids were usually the scary "townies" who didn't have the money for NU. Is it just my imagination, or is goth / "industrial" more of a lower-middle class and working-class thing? I didn't know anyone at college who listened to that stuff. A lot of "ethnic" kids did. To run around in black leather and dyed hair at NU was just sooo uncool.
Speaking of John Hughes movies, I did go out with this guy who had bit parts in those, but he was pretty wealthy. I don't have much gossip, except that he *hated* John Cusack for some reason, and he had an infatuation with Molly Ringwald and claimed to have had some sort of fling with her, but I think he could have been full of it. I couldn't really relate to those movies, they made me feel so unglamorous. Pretty in Pink was probably closest to my life - in fact, the same guy said, after seeing it, "oh my god, this is about you and me."
― Kerry Keane, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Dave M., Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
In Britain, with a few exceptions, I think it's a very lower middle class kind of thing to be a Goth, especially when it's tinged with hippie eg. Nephilim/Mission. 'Eskimos'. Yucch.
John Hughes gossip corner: Molly Ringwald was schtupping the director 24/7, not your ex (no offence). Don't know why your friend had Cusack hatred either; he visited an Evanston pal of mine at college and was really cool, handling all the predatory rich girls asking for lights with a certain aplomb. As it happens I nearly went to NU myself (accepted to journalism school) but nixed it in favour of going somewhere in NY with no frats/sports that was offering me even more financial aid as enticement. And weirdly, the most industrial/leather girl I knew from Chi was an escaped debutante who went out with a club- promoter ex of Brix Smith's. Hmmm...
― Josh, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Actually, I've long believed that British private schools are among the main peddlers of that misperception of all things ruralist: their self-image is very often as a kind of haven in the middle of Our Own Glorious Countryside from which The Proles Are Kept Out (if you want to fucking *choke*, go to www.hanford.dorset.sch.uk). The entire sociology / psychology of people from the London area sending their children to, say, Sherborne, is *exactly* the kind of ruralism that stands diametrically opposed to mine. But my fascination with it all comes, as I said earlier, from my desire to know as much as I can about all that I dream of destroying, to help me in my task ...
Josh: my deeply conservative (in terms of musical taste) cousin went to agricultural college in 1999. For about a month. In fact, probably less. I don't really want to read anything into this.
My interview at Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall, if you must know) took place on the morning of Tuesday 9 December 1980, at which point everyone around was in a state of semi-trance induced by the news of Lennon's assassination. The first question my (Eng Lit) interviewer (no names, but someone you might have heard of) asked me was: "OK, so who's the greatest - John Lennon or John Keats (the latter being the subject of one of my entrance exam questions)?" I coolly replied, "Well, where does that leave Cole Porter?" He immediately warmed to this and we spent the rest of the happy hour debating Sinatra on Capitol vs. Sinatra on Reprise, Jenkins vs. Riddle, Miss Otis as Iago, etc. etc., and needless to say I got in.
In terms of forming attitudes to music: well, I played clarinet and occasional tenor sax for six years in the school orchestra, and on piano accompanied most of the end-of-term "house shows" when not playing inaudible keyboards for Bothwell's finest Raw Deal. But intrinsic musical leanings were probably most formulated by my parents: the MoR/bel canto interface from my Italian mum, the avant tendencies from my dad. I used the White Album and Escalator Over The Hill to join the dots.
― Marcello Carlin, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Dr. C, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I did
― David, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
How well do I know what it's like. I grew up rural and welfare class owing to the farm crisis etc., but that didn't mean I didn't hesitate to pay insane prices for Factory Records imports. My education was almost exactly as Josh described above. My biggest peeve in life is people who equate poor (or even simply middle-class) with stupid. We are as much a product of what we've reacted against as what we have instilled in us.
― X. Y. Zedd, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
There were clear divisions and snobberies before Punk though. Status Quo are the most obvious example of a group who were derided for their simplistic music (and boozy, working class outlook). Others: Black Sabbath, Edgar Broughton, Hawkwind, the Faces. Ok Hawkwind obviously weren't 'boozy' (more druggy) but their music was widely ridiculed.
At my school — and I think this is micro-specific to where I was — the born 58/9-ers were glam kids and drop- outs; 60-61 (= me) no clear allegiance; 62/63 proggers. But the trend-making kids in the progger age-range were ALL younger brothers of glam-kids, and — I think — somewhat protesting in a proto-Thatcherite way the sense of life-wastage the glam-kids (who were v.arty, druggy and wild) projected. The punk faction arose very clearly in the unaligned age range, but was a minority (mark s)
You say it was micro-specific and it sounds it. Prog (69-70), after all, pre-dated Glam (72 at the earliest). In the classic analysis, Glam kids were reacting against Prog and stolid blues-rock. I suppose what you might be identifying is a second, younger wave of Proggers who got into ELP, Yes etc only after they reached stadium status.
As to the source of Punk's troops, surely they could have come from anywhere ie no more likely to have been fans of Roxy Music than Wishbone Ash (original pioneer punks a different matter - Bromley Contingent were Roxy/Bowie fans - but by mid '77 people of all sorts were going over to Punk in droves).
― DG, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I agree that a broad-brush analysis based on the date of birth would be even more sweeping and silly, and I'm not proposing mine was the picture ANYWHERE but where I was. However geographical variation is VERY to the point: again, the sociology of ACCESS, who you got to see (here's who played Shrewsbury — ie the town not the school: the Stranglers, Penetration and the Buzzcocks... No Clash, Pistols or Damned in 77/78!!). As I've said elsewhere, it was work even to find NME/Sounds in those days....
If prog was JUST 69/70, then even MORE goofy that punk takes the credit for "killing" it (cf punk thread sometime soon for more on this probably sometime maybe sigh). But of course part of its ethos was LP- to-LP development, index of its artistic evolution over years. (Punk condensed this, kinda brilliantly, to singles, and evolution over months: at least, that's how it felt to me...)
Another element here: is that Received Sociology — an agreed-on idea of what "a hip they" said you OUGHT to be listening to — only got into the media-bloodstream at cliche level with or around punk. Yes, clearly there were always rivalries and divisions, snobberies and hostilities on the ground (mods vs rockers, for example), but I don't believe there was a GENERALLY AGREED ON street-sociology (except obviously rock vs pop, which is a different KIND of sociology, and anyway part of Rock vs Everything).
I'm being very unclear.
(Actually, 69/70 is already second-wave prog, in a way: Floyd/Crimson/Soft Machine/ Tomorrow ALREADY too big to play eg ICA/ UFO by 1968... (not stadiums yet, true).)
In Shropshire generally, Quo were BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG but, yes, kind of a lumpen joke also (tho again against cliche, the two fans I knew were both good-enough-to-be professional classical musicians: go figure that!!). Sabbath, curiously, not so big at all: I don't know if this was some intra-midlands thing, east vs west. Local boys the Strawbs were big big big also — who fell completely out of ANY version of the canon that I've ever encountered!! Local farmers' kids that I knew always had a run of three-four Strawbs albums.
― mark s, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Robin Carmody, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Back from checking AMG - "Formed in 1967 from a local bluegrass trio - The Strawberry Hill Boys by singer-guitarist Dave Cousins......."
Anyway they had lots of members - maybe there was a Shrewsbury faction too.
Oooops: I've just checked too, and I think I've been on crack re the Strawbs = local boys since c.1970!! My sister and I had a babysitter called Susan who was fan who told us she liked them because they were local. So she was on crack and we totally caught it from her, I guess! (Well, actually I shouldn't pronounce so blithely on my sister's crack- status, in this regard or any other...)
DG: this is the Second Seal!
I can certainly imagine Tory farmers' sons who *did* get the irony of "Part of the Union" finding it very smart indeed ...
Actually that raises another point re geography and access. TIMES GOES NOT AT THE SAME SPEED!! At least in the rural west midlands in the mid-70s: the metropolitan sense of cultural turnover was nothing LIKE so present. By the time my sister was a punk, a year or so after me — she was in a PRETEND PUNK BAND!! They didn't play, they just gave themselves funny punky names and decided what they WOULD have played! She was Becky Bondage!! (Another was Lin Bin!) And then that other BB, that celebrity interloper came along and stole Becky's name! She was much cooler than me... — that sense of be-here-now had landed (probably because TV had begun to pick up on being "in touch" with the kids).
My fascination comes largely from the whole idea of Time Going Not At The Same Speed back then, and I'd always imagined late 77 / early 78 as being a point where this started to break down, so it's wonderful to have it confirmed. There were other factors making pop more central and instant at that time, such as the increase in Radio 1's broadcasting hours from their neo-austerity-imposed mid-70s nadir, and I can see what you mean about TV picking up on down-with-the-kids at that point: that first wave of what would become "yoof" TV formed in the late 70s though it took C4 in 1982 to really push it on. Even watching old clips from shorlty before C4 hit, though, there's an incredible sense of "This Is What Youth Culture Is Like" explained from a paternalistic perspective which has vanished *forever*: anyone who saw the introduction to some feature on the New Romantics on "I Love 1981" (which would obv. have been much better if it were *all* old clips with NOBODY FUCKING TALKING IN BETWEEN) will know exactly what I mean. Compared to some sensationalist scare story about Eminem on Tonight With Trev, it's pure Reithiania.
― suzy, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
America had Casey Kasem in Britain we had JK. Two prize plonkers who knew/know fuck all about music. These two were living in Room101.
I did not go to public school but when the mainstream radio 1 daytime/ and JK on TV dished up utter shit in 1985/1986 it is not suprising I found an alternative with: Peel 10-12 mon-wed, Annie Nightingale request show, Peter Anthony Alternative show on Radio Luxembourg, Dave Fanning on RTE2 8-10 weekdays, The Tube, Melody Maker and Sounds etc.
― DJ Martian, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link