Donald Clarke: Whether it’s Britpop, The Beatles or The Last Dinner Party, the English just can’t escape the taint of class
Donald Clarke: Whether it’s Britpop, The Beatles or The Last Dinner Party, England’s poshometer keeps bouncing in the redThe Last Dinner Party: after the band attracted attention last spring, the United Kingdom’s collective poshometer began bouncing in the red. Photograph: Universal Musicof Blur were presented in a half-remembered documentary on the Britpop years. Albarn, middle-class son of a prominent English artist, turned up in something like a pie-and-eel shop.
Hodgkinson stirred the hornet’s nest when he quoted Abigail Morris, the Dinner Party’s lead singer, as saying: “People don’t want to listen to postpunk and hear about the cost-of-living crisis any more.” He noted that, having attended, a school that charges up to £43,000 a year, she would surely not find that crisis “a huge issue”. The writer had in fact been talking to Georgia Davis, the band’s bassist, who claimed the quote had been “removed of context, tone, and intention”.
The phrase has connections with popular music’s wearing addiction to the knock-off holy grail that is “authenticity”. It doesn’t matter that Brian Epstein put The Beatles in neat suits and cut their hair. They were from ordinary bits of Liverpool, so they were real. Compare that with alleged industry plants such as Billie Eilish, Clairo, Phoebe Bridgers and the Isle of Wight rockers Wet Leg. Sense a pattern?in The Irish Times last month.
That misogyny is present in the United States and Ireland as well. But the obsession with social class in pop music is less blatant than it is in the UK. It is not worth examining here where The Last Dinner Party went to school or what they have for dinner. The point is that they are perceived to be at the upper end of the middle classes. They code thus, just as, say,code as working class. American musicians will celebrate the heartlands. They will speak to social concerns.
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