The Final Word: It’s all over now, baby blue

by Paul Moore

For someone who was an avid music collector and listener – and even presented music programmes for the BBC – I listen to little of anything these days. I tried to watch some of Glastonbury over the weekend and naturally knew virtually none of the acts performing except the excruciatingly embarrassing ones such as Rod Stewart or John Fogerty. Thankfully Neil Young was at his imperious best as always.

Everything I hear now seems derivative and there is little new or interesting despite my hearing constantly that so-and-so is the sound of the future. The weekend Glastonbury experience left me wondering why I fell out of love with popular music.

On reflection I think it is because I realised that, other than momentary pleasure, there is little of value socially or culturally in popular music. Of course a particular sound will reflect the period in which it was made and music like punk will define a moment in political time but that is only retrospectively and does not necessarily resonate at the moment the music is being made. I am not sure how many punks actually knew that were rebelling against the horror that was Margaret Thatcher. This revelation that music will not, and cannot, drive any kind of social change is extremely difficult for people of my generation who seriously believed that our music was going to change the world.

Mine was the generation that grew up during the 1960s cultural revolution – the Vietnam War and the student risings of the ‘70s. Our cultural benchmarks were events such as the Woodstock Festival, the first ever Glastonbury (which I attended with about four other people and a dog if I recall correctly), the Isle of Wight Festival and the electrification of Bob Dylan which threw the USA folk scene into chaos and division. Our touchstones were protest singers such as Phil Oakes, Dylan, Richie Haven, Country Joe and the Fish all of whom were railing against the politics and social conventions of the time. In another part of the forest, films such as ‘Easy Rider’ painted a picture of a society controlled by ‘squares’ who were determined to stop young people from expressing themselves and, of course, the politics of our own place provided the perfect canvas for protest and resistance through song.

Sadly, I am now old enough to know that this was all it was: protest through song which did nothing to change, or more particularly, advance society. The first time I realised this was when, despite the musical efforts of a complete generation of youth, the only moment the Vietnam War policies of the USA government were reversed was when the middle class sons and daughters started coming home in body bags and the middle class parents took to the streets. When the economic core of the country protests, then and only then, do governments listen.

This is deeply sad for anyone who believes that a different economic way is possible.

Society has also been transformed since those innocent protest days: Democracy is in tatters, social media dominates thought, economic wealth resides with a few billionaire oligarchs and youth culture is unrecognisable such is its disparate nature. All of which is why I fail to understand the furore about Kneecap. They are a pop culture rap group (and some would say not a very good rap group) and while they might energise a few young people in a field in Somerset, the notion that they will alter the course of politics, particularly global politics, is quite simply wishful thinking. Let them get on with it and in time they will go the way of all pop groups – unless of course they turn out to be Neil Young.