antipopper

After having a bit of cry looking at Beirut Letters (thanks Ange), Lena and I have gone all Bay Area on your asses — we’re sitting in Starbucks with our PowerBooks open, writing collaboratively in real time with SubEthaEdit about new media, social power and Walter Benjamin.

On the iPod: Swing Out Sister’s “Breakout”.

One day I’ll have the time to work through the relationship between British soul-pop of the 1980s and an oblique articulation of “progressive”, “socialist” politics that, in a pop-cultural guise at least (and despite its tendency towards craven Labourism), still somehow appeals to me. Red Wedge, “Shout to the Top” and all that. (Again with the craven Labourism. But somehow I can overlook it.) Swing Out Sister were never identifiably political in any way that I recall, but their generic affiliations still suggest those kinds of alignments to me.

The standard analysis of Britpop, with its emphasis on the “new sunniness” in British music of the 1990s as somehow heralding the joy of… Tony Blair… seems to really erase the shininess and implicitly more radical politics of British pop of the previous decade. ’80s British soul-pop interestingly wavered between “mod nostalgia” and “modernist progression”. There was always a kind of strained element to it — were we supposed to love or hate groups like the Fine Young Cannibals? — but it was also more cross-cultural and sexually ambivalent than what followed. When Paul Weller was rehabilitated in the ’90s as a gruff dad-rock icon, did everyone suddenly forget that he’d spent the previous decade sipping cappuccinos and being a foppish soul-boy? Were his affiliations too black and too “gay” to bear thinking about? Whatever happened to us, Paul Weller? I have fantasies that his solo career never happened, and that instead he became the singer for a cover-band that did classy, soul revue versions of songs like the Spice Girls’ “Stop”. Really. Can you imagine? Mmmm…

[ tags: politics, soul, pop ]