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The internet revolution has been as much a catalyst for change in culture and class as it has commerce and communication. With Britain’s former industrial clout deflated and the communities that factory life supported gone, other aspects that previously defined the working class in the UK have vanished. The pits are shut and everyone works in an office or a shop. Everyone has an iPhone. To paraphrase McCarthy (the band and not the Senator), we are all middle class.
It’s this backdrop and the last 20 years that Rhian Jones’ Clampdown arrives. It focuses chiefly on representations of the working class in the media with a particular emphasis on women, but it also zeroes in on Britpop and the parallel rise of New Labour and the cultural heritage of that duopoly in the form of the Libertines (plus the attendant New Rock Revolution) and the Coalition. Keep Calm and Carry On is the successor to Things Can Only Get Better.
At just under 100 pages, it’s a short, refreshing shot in the arm. It’s less of a tome for the ages, more of a touchpaper for a wider debate that Jones argues is not happening in the mainstream media.
We caught up with Jones to discuss her motivations in writing the book and to talk about the 21st Century working class situation.
You argue fairly early on in the book that feminism in the liberal media has an unwillingness or a tendency not to talk about class in its analysis of women in the media.
I’ve never been quite sure if it’s wilful ignorance and I don’t think that it’s a conspiracy to exclude working class women. But it just seems like a massive oversight that when feminist issues are debated in the media it’s almost always how much are female directors and CEOs getting paid and are they getting paid as much as men? Yes, it is a feminist issue, but that’s a very small, elite group of society. There doesn’t seem to be any willingness to look at material issues and things that impact on the majority of working women. By and large these are quite boring, deeply unsexy issues.
Besides analysis of gender what were your other reasons for writing this book and how does Britpop relate to this?
I guess I wanted to get a lot of irritation out of my system. I didn’t know how much resonance what I said would have. I have no idea if anyone would agree or if it would start any kind of debate. But I very much felt that a lot of the experiences I’d had when growing up had not really been represented in any kind of public forum – not in the past 10-20 years. Things like the weird development and trajectory that indie music went through in the 1990s. There was no reflection and no analysis. I haven’t seen anyone tie Britpop and everything that came after into the fact that “indie” music now is generic, bland and de-politicised.
The odd thing about Britpop is that it seemed to mark British pop culture running out of things that were distinctly new or different – so much was predicated on 1960s revivalism. Artistic development seemed to snap somewhere along the line. All the big bands that happened after Oasis, whether it was the Strokes or the Libertines have, or had, a retro slant. The Libertines and almost all the bands who followed after seemed like a pastiche of what had come before.
A postmodernist would say that this is bound to happen, we’ll just continue to get ever-narrowing variations of what’s gone before. Towards the end you talk about grime and dubstep.
I think at that point in the book I was casting around looking for any semblance in counter-culture or any sense of political opposition that’s expressed through music. Movements have come out of a few hardcore scenes, as far as I can tell they’re all London-based and very atomised. The places where you used to look for counter-cultural stimulus all seem to have gone or are being shored up.
It’s been strange to see in some of the responses to the book that people have picked up on the ‘90s angle as if it’s a kind of 1990s cultural studies Bible. Which is terrifying because the ‘90s was a very short time ago! I think that’s because we’ve maybe stopped breaking new ground culturally. There hasn’t been any now to exist in.
Do you think its fair to say that we live in a more comfortable time now? When you talk about hardcore scenes and oppositional music you might think of punk rock and perhaps thanks to Julien Temple, images of bin-bag mountains on the streets of London …
It didn’t seem like Britain really recovered from the Second World War until the 1980s. In the 1990s living standards were increasing and it certainly felt like an age of conspicuous consumption. People were a lot more relaxed. I do however think that’s almost gone entirely into reverse over the past two or three years. It’s a documented fact that austerity has contributed to unemployment and rising levels of child poverty.
“No DHSS” is a common sight on property listings now.
Right. It’s almost impossible to squat as well. Not that I’d want to get into the argument that this is a fantastic way to live, in the 1970s you’d have this abundance of bomb-damaged family housing for artists and bands to live in which isn’t available now.
Do you think that one of the reasons it’s hard to define “the working class” today is that most people work in the office, a traditionally white collar, non-intensive environment?
I agree that it’s a factor. It’s a massively unfashionable view so I’m always pleased to hear it expressed.
Because people’s work environments are places where you’re not in as much immediate physical danger and we’re relatively more comfortable, are we all middle class now?
I think this has been happening over the past 20 years. You don’t have the same model of class development that could be applied in the 20th century. I think it’s fairly unarguable that you still have class relations in place. You still have social inequality that is basically tethered to what job you do and how much you earn. How the classes relate also depends on where you are in the country. There are more shades of grey now, it seems.
by Thomas Newton
Clampdown by Rhian Jones is available now from Zero Books in ebook form (£4.99) or paperback (£9.99).
Images copyright: Glass/Sofia Hericson/Geeked Magazine.