EMI, post-imperial reassurance and the ruling class

I loathe the idea - currently being promoted by vast swathes of the British media - that I am supposed to care about EMI, or to see any kind of moral distinction between exploitative, short-term capitalists based on which country they come from (Guy Hands' practices were arguably worse than the worst 1950s caricature of the rootless American, itself so often shorthand for anti-Semitism), or to think of pop music predominately in terms of the industry rather than the music itself, or to view pop music as predominately a tool of nationalism and the ruling class rather than a form in which the oppressed classes of the world can unite and reject petty nationalism (even more so when it comes from within their own social backgrounds than when it is promoted by elites). Let EMI be carved up between American and Russian ultra-capitalists. Wholly unlike pop music itself, EMI isn't worth saving; quite apart from anything else, the form it has taken is a threat to everything that has ever made pop music a progressive, liberating force, and a barrier to representative popular art.

The fact that EMI was the sole British survivor in its field from the era of limited capitalism within national borders to have remained a dominant force in the era of uncontrolled capitalism which knows no borders whatsoever has enabled a huge amount of sentimental mythology to surround it, which promotes pop music as something it never was (and indeed never could have been, and defined itself by not being for most of its first thirty years), and fundamentally ignores the cultural process that brought that music into being. Listen to most of the people crying crocodile tears over EMI - the same people who thought it was a moral outrage when a company producing tasteless, badly-made pseudo-"chocolate" was acquired by a set of capitalists who theoretically owed allegiance to a different country from that the previous lot theoretically owed allegiance to, but actively support the sell-off of the National Health Service - and you'd think the Beatles, without whom EMI would have been absorbed, almost unnoticed, decades ago, were a bunch of merry Olde Englishe grateful peasants, happily chirruping nonny-nonny-no and annually laying a wreath at the old squire's grave.

The reality is that not only did the Beatles represent a fundamental rejection of Little Englander nationalism and the idea that the mass of people should be subservient to the ruling class - something implicitly believed by those who have little interest in the creative arts themselves but plenty of interest in ensuring that their gatekeepers will always be exactly the same people acting in exactly the same way - but that even they might not have been enough for EMI to last this long had the British company not also owned their US label, Capitol. We all know that Decca had first refusal on the Beatles, and that had they taken up their option they might have survived until now whereas EMI might have disintegrated, unnoticed, at the dawn of the Thatcher era after years of stagnation, but the real serendipity for EMI was that they had acquired Capitol some years earlier, in a rare example of a declining power absorbing part of its usurper's business. Accordingly, the Beatles' US income - which was where their real money came from - could ultimately remain part of, and be ploughed back into, the British company that had signed them. This is a rarely-acknowledged truth for the precise reason that it points out a deeper truth that would bring the Tory distortion of pop's legacy crashing down; even half a century ago, Britain was already a ghost of a nation, which could do nothing meaningful on its own terms, and the "British Invasion" was really a momentary papering over the cracks rather than any kind of meaningful rebirth. The fact that it was the only way a Britain exiled from Europe could make any significant money or earn any significant international kudos for itself only makes the foundation stones of the modern EMI all the more retrospectively chimaeric.

Ian Gilmour was undoubtedly right when he wrote in 2003 that had the British been more nationalistic twenty or thirty years before, and prevented much of their mass media and entertainment industry falling into foreign hands, they would have been less nationalistic by then, because they would have had much more genuinely of their own and therefore much less need to fall back on kneejerk, vicious tabloid Two Minutes' Hate. This applies, if anything, even more perfectly to the role pop music has played in the creation of the current version of Toryism. Imagine if the British had not embraced the most obvious, most consumerist version of pop with such totality and fervour - demanding the impossible, but predominately, for the mass, of capitalism rather than socialism - during the quarter-century between Suez and the Falklands, and had instead shown a greater appetite than they actually did for new hybrid forms which were nonetheless more heavily rooted in earlier British culture (a Britain where Fairport would have had bigger hits than Free, perhaps). In such a world, much of the nationalism that surrounds those who would preserve EMI from the economic policies they normally cheer on wholeheartedly - Our Music, Not Like All That Nasty Foreign Muck (without which not a note of it would ever have been recorded, of course) - would not have had the chance to grow, because the British would have had enough that was unobtrusively, proudly but harmlessly their own that they wouldn't have needed it.

But even if you have a more positive view of pop's first quarter-century than displayed above - and I do myself, much of the time - few could deny that the cycle has been broken and that the EMI myth is at the heart of that process. In the last ten years, the epicentre of EMI's role at the core of the greatest nationalistic distortion of an open-minded, liberal-internationalist form since First World War flagwavers began the never-ending distortion of Elgar has been Coldplay, a phenomenon as crucial to the creation of the current form of Toryism as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies "thinking the unthinkable" were to the last reinvention of that movement. The reason why so many of us genuinely believed, for a while, that the Tories might never get back in was that after 1997 it was obvious that no government peddling an essentially pre-pop vision of Britain could ever be elected, and for a long time it looked as though the Tories would never be able to reconcile themselves with pop's legacy, which still had a residual hint of egalitarianism (even if never socialism) about it. Had it not been for the wave of ruling-class scions denuding pop of any hint of its original political meaning, and refuting any belief in the solidarity with the oppressed peoples of all countries (and against the ever-more global ruling class) which underpinned every note the Beatles played, that reconciliation might have been postponed forever.

Through enabling the creation of a whole new establishment culture - with just the right crumbs thrown at the proles just often enough to make themselves look "inclusive" (Chris Martin's regular association of himself with "urban" acts is surely the model for the Cameronite house "ethnics"), and through combining a passive, uncritical consumption of mass culture with passive-aggressive, One Of Our Own flagwaving - EMI and Coldplay, with the latter carrying the former's flag as a cypher for the Union flag itself, have effectively allowed the current government and all it stands for to develop almost from nowhere. Yes, Billboard can point out they've got Professor Green as well, but those who think EMI is some great national asset, a St Paul's for the modern secular religion, couldn't care less about (even) him. The objectively pro-ruling class - and thus anti-Beatles and, ultimately (even considering what pop meant for the Neil Sedaka or David Cassidy fans, the Photoplay Film Monthly readers, the white picket fence dreamers) anti-pop - reporting of EMI's likely defenestration is telling me that I should care about Coldplay's contract being in the hands of a part of the capitalist elite based in one part of the world rather than another, even though Coldplay's music could have been made by and for the ruling class pretty much everywhere (but not by or for the oppressed classes anywhere). What can be said about an idea of nation that has been reduced to this?

I never thought anything could be worse than old-fashioned British nationalism. I was wrong. Pop British nationalism is, and almost every word written about EMI proves it. Let it, and EMI, rot.

The apotheosis of Lindsayism

lovely to see it right down, in so many words (scroll down to the last two paragraphs, if the start makes you lose the will to live)

I fell for fogeyism partially out of sheer desperation with neoliberalism, and partially out of the natural aftereffects of my condition - the desire for certainty and rules and norms, embraced and required all the more precisely because people on the spectrum can never fit in with them, and mostly spent their lives undiagnosed and locked in homes for the "subnormal" in the world where they did apply. The condition brings on a desire to romanticise whatever you don't personally know and never personally experienced, all the more so because you know you could never be part of it; the more naturally isolated you are, the more you will fantasise how life would be if you were a natural conformist. It's the cultural politics of unrequited love, or of being unable to love at all in the standard human sense. It's why I can recall the weather and even what I was eating when I heard, at the age of 13, that Donald Swann had died, and why - after I'd turned 14 - I was reduced to tears by the music from The First of the Few. It's also why I fell in love with The Owl's Map and We Are All Pan's People (not that the Ghost Box aesthetic represents a strict and straightforward delineation of the actual past - it would have been almost unthinkable in your actual Butskellite era for anyone to be both ruralist and in favour of modernist architecture - but the point still holds). It's why I genuinely felt sympathy, for a while, for the nativist interpretation of socialism, the Daily Mail with its support for global capitalism removed - it chimed with my romantic streak, my feeling for a few lost years that all modern culture was worthless, that the only way to go was back. And in all its forms, it's invariably a mistake I regret sooner rather than later.

For time and context have changed and, if anything, I've become more radical (in the genuine sense of that term, not simply the smash-the-market-but-only-to-restore-what-once-was Lindsay sense) as my fourth decade on earth has begun. Welcome to Godalming wasn't even on the And Then There Were Three level, it was on a Camel or Barclay James Harvest level of inconsequentiality, and the Aphex Twin's "Goon Gumpas" got that schools interval sound back in the '90s far better without even trying than anyone who's ever tried to make a cultural point of it, back when it was still the day before yesterday and wasn't a hopeless dream of a cul de sac, long past crying for. I almost invented this stuff, and now I don't want to talk or think about it.

The thing is that I wouldn't keep going back to Clark/Lindsay, usually despite myself and against my own will, if part of me didn't wonder - thinking, for example, of Reynolds' description of Sarah Palin as the ultimate rock'n'roll politician - whether they may be, at least in part, correct, whether the logical conclusion of the conflict between most of what I love in terms of mass culture and most of what I believe politically is this impasse. But this denies the complexity of human life, human experiences and human responses to both culture and politics; it is possible, in the minds of most people if not in the strictly-defined autistic mind, to disconnect forms of mass entertainment from their theoretical destructive effects on tradition (odious as it is, the widespread English tendency to say, effectively, "send the foreigners home" while knowing no culture beyond that effectively owned by Murdoch is an example of this), and the neoconservative mistake of assuming that simply because Iraqis wore jeans, they would automatically support the US military uncritically, is - like almost everything else about neoconservatism - merely an inversion of the worst aspects of Marxism, and specifically of the Marxist supposition that public taste for music rooted in socialism and radicalism would equate to actual active belief in those ideologies.

In many ways, Philip Cross's suspicion that Lindsay may have the same condition that he and I both have seems the most credible response; Lindsay's politics are born of the same streak which may sometimes lead me to suggest that if you are going to oppose Tesco in a place like this then you must also oppose Cee-Lo on local radio, or that the campaign to retain public libraries in a place like this is meaningless and pointless because they may stock the odd book by Katie Price, and if you had to define my condition in two rhetorical arguments which fall down when exposed to the nature of humanity itself, those would be the ones. Lindsay's greatest achievement may, in fact, be to make the market - and the assumptions and norms of the modern world generally - seem, by comparison, far more progressive than they can really ever be.

Hell on earth

So, the USA's 90th-minute goal is the reason why England are playing Germany rather than Ghana.

Europeans being turned against each other - and specifically English people being turned against Germans - is what the powerful right-wing forces in the US dream of, as it quashes any kind of hope that the EU might be a great power in itself, no longer dependant on US backup.

The upsurge of English nationalism which would follow an England win - that may seem unlikely, but never underestimate the ability of English players to play above themselves against the country they have mostly been brought up to despise - might make it almost impossible for millions who know no other land to live in England, quite apart from the push it would undoubtedly give to Scottish separatism (already boosted by the election, of course) and the ethnic-nationalist-led chaos that would cause in England.

I would not rule out the possibility that the CIA fixed the USA game on the (as it turned out, correct) assumption that Germany would beat Ghana. Even if they didn't, I knew from the moment that goal went in that Germany would win. The USA couldn't prevent England playing Germany. It would have refuted everything they want the most.

The pre-history of ethnic cleansing in England might decisively begin today.