Where did it all go wrong

[Ryoko]

Punk Britannia on BBC3 (4?) the other night about the history of punk was pointing out valid points about the history of the movement, kids being told they will never amount to anything, falling out of schools and being told to get jobs in the local factories or rot.

It's all so familiar, mammoth unemployment, people being told they will never get anywhere in life, the belittling of the poor and the sense of no hope, yet we have no outlet today, what went wrong?.

We have no "protest" music anymore it's all been taken over and softened by the music company big wigs, no shows on TV what happened to things like The Mark Thomas Comedy Product, Brass Eye, Bremner, Bird and Fortune etc, A little bit of politics is no longer part of mainsteam TV.

Where is the outlet for our disdain other then rioting and matching down the streets?, the more I think about it the more I see a dumbing down of expressive medias and hiding of things the only place to find real critics of life today and real life comedy/satire rather then OTT stereotypes to help enforce the statues qua of divided Britain is in the Internet, and by it's nature will never be anything more then a very small sideshow enjoyed by a few and quickly forgotten.

It's easier to produce and release music today than it was in the 1970s.

I don't think kids today are told they won't get anywhere in life. They are told they can do anything they want, and then they leave school and realise they can't because they have to work hard for it and don't know how.

You say that but I think it's harder back in the day someone had to think you where good to produce a record to send into a radio station now days only you have to think you are good.

And I still think kids are told they will get no where, the schools may tell them you can be what ever you want to be but society says no.

Either way there is no outlets now no solos to take in music or TV that speaks to you on your level.

There has been a general dumbing down across the media and music in particular. I listen to Dylan, The Dead Kenedys as do my kids. I am desperate for them to take this forwards with them and actually appreciate music and art for the messages they convey. We don't have a television and we never listen to music in the charts, it's mostly inane crap. I despair of teenagers now being politically motivated and engaged, it would seem that they prefer a life of enforced arrested development and enforced infantalism, they grow up very quickly sucking up all that is wrong in the mainstream media and yet remain socially and politically stunted, unable to organise themselves, unable to fully mature into adults. Some seem totally unaware of life outside of their own heads and the Xfactor.

'Where did it all go wrong?'

A lot of people have asked that question, and the answer seems to be 'when New Labour was elected'.

Bit simplistic. New Labour were just taking on Maggie's project. Which i suppose would be when the rot started...

I'd tend to blame, among other things, use of lots of hapy drugs - ie ecstacy etc is the opium of the people to paraphrase slightly (and scarily like Brave New World); plus rising house prices and impossibility of getting a council house meaning that for most ordinary people, having a secure roof over one's head and a reasonably secure job (back in the days of jobs for life) means most people are too busy panicking about getting by to have time to step off the treadmill for long enough to coherntly protest. I know i am. Factor in people trying to pay off or at least keep head above water re debts - credit cards, etc - that were thrown at them willy nilly till 2007, and you can ensure that the hard-pressed debt slaves will not be able to rise up or protest.

Chuck in some heavy-handed police surveillance under the excuse of 'counter terrorism' (my arse) and you can be sure only the very brave or unemployed (and therefore easily discounted) minority will protest.

Sorry - I can spell and write coherent sentences in real life - clearly all those 'hapy' drugs have done it for me.

Yes, you make some good points. Often it is students and young people who challenge the status quo, but they have been given huge fees to pay, so they are no longer in a position to think and challenge the status quo. In fact, they have been tricked into being green etc., which is exactly what the system wants.

I watched Punk Britannia. But they are lying to us in pretending that punk was a protest. Punk was manufactured and was a fashion and fad which McClaren and svengalis made money out of. It was music and fashion, but it was the hippies, whom the punks despised, who were a real protest movement.

We saw the pictures of the left wing students protesting in the sixties against Vietnam etc. Punk was nothing like that. Punk was a narcissistic, nihilistic youth fashion movement which the record companies made money out of. It didn't last, it burned out like a candle blowing in the wind. Mini is right about Dylan. He lasted because his protest was real and not manufactured.

I like the Sex Pistols, but I don't fall for the lies that it was protest.

'I tell you it was all a frame
They only did it 'cos of fame
Who?

E.M.I. E.M.I. E.M.I.'

A Sid himself sang

'People said we couldn't play
The called us foul-mothed yobs
But the only notes that really count
Are the ones that come in wads

They all drowned when the air turned blue
'Cos we didn't give a toss
Filthy lucre, ain't nothing new
But we all get cash from the chaos

The time is right to do it now
The greatest rock'n'roll swindle
The time is right to do it now

E.M.I. said you're out of hand
And they gave us the boot
But they couldn't sack us, just like that
Without giving us the loot

Thank you kindly A & M
They said we were out of bounds
But that ain't bad for two weeks work
And 75,000 pounds

The time is right to do it now
The greatest rock'n'roll swindle
The time is right to do it now'

We have hundreds of TV channels today. In the 70s there were only 3. The audience size has increased, but not enough to go round all the channels comfortably. So it's a ratings battle.

And the real swindle is the rock'n'roll swindle - the swindle the TV producers preach to us that this was protest.

This was acting, it was fake, it was a rock'n'roll swindle.

Claig - I was about to say that Mclaren was the Cowell of the 70s. Sad, but true.

Yes, good point. He was a character and a clever man. But it had nothing to do with protest, everything to do with a cash nest.

Yes, exactly. But at least the music was interesting!

Yes, the Pistols were great. A lot of it was down to Johnny Rotten's voice. Fantastic, but he lost it with PIL, in my opinion.

It's great that you and your kids listen to Dead Kennedys Mini. Mine do too. Guantanamo School Of Medicine is the band fronted by the saintly Jello now.

In my opinion it all started going tits up for social mobility when the Labour Party abolished Grammar Schools. There was more social mobility in the supposedly class obsessed 50s and 60s due to Grammar Schools turning out well educated working class kids. The Tories, no matter what they say, will never vote for them to return as their hateful spawn were being bested by council house kids, and we can't have that.

The real Tories on the right, Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail etc., are in favour of grammar schools and want them back. They say that the Tory leadership is not real Tory in not bringing them back.

The leadership will never bring them back because they fear that New Labour will score an open goal with the public by playing the elitist card. I think they fear it would be like the 45% tax rate; it would be springtime for New Labour.

Or maybe the leadership agree with Clegg and the progressives and disagree with Tories like Heffer.

I didn't know Jello was up to anything these days, so off to find some Guantanamo School Of Medicine, Thanks NicholasTeakozy. I don't think the Kennedys ever really opted into commercialisation, all their music was/is radical. The kid's love cesspools in eden. Although I do fast forward through "rolling down the stairs"

It's true the student's protest but these students are mostly from middle class backgrounds, just as the hippies before them were. The punk movement really appealed to the working classes. There is nothing like that now. Working class kids are living in a sort of cultural vacuum. I don't think it's the availability of happy drugs, my generation smoked a lot of pot and we were all really opinionated and most of friends were zelots who genuinely thought they would change the world. I campaigned over animal rights mainly, started supporting various charities at 12 through fundraising and eventually started protesting and writing articles for magazines.

Youngsters are not engaged with the wider world and they are not radical, the colleges and universities have been largely clensed from any radical thinking, womens studies, marx, left wing, anti-war, in fact anything which questions fascism.

'The punk movement really appealed to the working classes.'

So did the Teddy Boys, the rockers, the mods and the skinheads. But they weren't about protest either.

A amjor reason that Marxism has little appeal is because communism has been shown to fail and the Soviet empire collapsed. Fukiyama wrote the book, 'The End of History', which partially argued that the consensus was now anti-communist, since communism had failed.

The hippy protest movements existed in times of plenty, when teh economy was booming and things were good. But teh Thatcherite consensus, followed by Blair and Brown, has changed attitudes. The class war and clause 4 were abandoned and in a time of austerity, young people want jobs not ideological class struggle.

The music movements are acts and releases, they are theatre. They act as an escape valve and a deflection, and money is made by moguls from them. Captain Sensible loved dressing up, and so did Adam Ant, just like Bowie and the rest. It was artifice, it was glam, it was panto with plastic, pins and polystyrene. They called it 'punk' to shock the pink rinse grannies and the establishment pretend that this is protest and the TV producers make programmes that maintain the myth.

The Daily Mail railed, lock the louts up in jail, make them get a job, cut their welfare if all they do is gob. And the grannies shook their heads and shook their walking sticks at the yoof, what happened to the Britain of their youth. And the svengalis and litterati and chatterati and fashion moguls rubbed their hands, they ripped up clothes and fatsened them back up with safety pins and stuck them in fashion shows. They called it "cool Britannia", they said it was a "revolution", but as always it was an establishment control solution.

There is ONE singer doing protest music Ryoko...not my cup o tea but he IS doing it and I have forgotten his bloody name! Hes very currrent...South London white rapper...can't remember! He's good...and angry too. The kids need that I think.

And from that dumbed down theatre and fake protest, they then went on to make fake art. They stuck dead sheep and cows in glass and charged mugs a pretty penny to walk past. They called it "cool Britannia", but they were having a laugh. It was "fool Britannia" and Johnny Rotten was the Joker.

They even chose panto villain names like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. It was a joke and the TV producers pretend it was real.

It was the art school continuation of panto; it was the follow up to Dame Edna and Sir Les Patterson, the proto-punks of prime time.