Outlaw Blues

As Guessedworker says in the comments on Notes and Comments No. 10, I didn’t do a very good job of explaining my thinking behind this:

The romance of the outlaw: Robin Hood, Jesse James, and so on. Now Delano Brown and Donnel Carty? I suppose the existence of those earlier figures does show that the fascination with the outlaw figure and ‘lifestyle’ has a long history. Since the invention of the ‘rebellious’ teenager in the 50s and the social liberalisation of the post-60s there is a feeling that something more fundamental has changed in this sort of attitude.

At the time I was rather under the weather with a quite bad cold, so what was originally intended as a note to myself for a longer piece became the entire comment above.

Here I hope to make a little clearer what I first intended.

There has always been a fascination with outlaws, criminals, in stories myths and legends. With some, like Robin Hood, they have become a sort of folk hero. However, these stories have somewhat ‘glamourised’ what is often a sordid and nasty business, undertaken by often deeply unpleasant people for not very endearing motives.

Romanticism created the notion of the romantic outsider, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – like Byron. Sometime later the morally-ambiguous anti-hero appeared.

Later on, rock ‘n’ roll mythologized the romantic outsider as the teenage rebel, on the outside of society and its rules. These days this is especially true of the over-stylised sub-genres like rap, heavy metal and so on which become almost pantomime-like in their immersion into the romanticised mythologies of the rock culture*.

While, at the same time, film and TV too have made much of the ‘good’ villain as somehow more ‘honest’ than a corrupt and flawed society.

I am not saying any of this is wrong per se. in many ways a certain moral ambiguity is a good thing, much better than a bland acceptance of the status quo, for example. Nothing should be beyond question.

Since rock and its romanticised mores have moved into the mainstream, the pseudo-romantic hero of the rock star outsider has - to a large extent - moved from being an outlaw stance to a near conventional mainstream attitude.

For example, the drugs, excess drink, sexual experimentation and general ‘bad boy’ behaviour of the archetypal rock star are no longer at the very margins but right in the mainstream.

This is especially true in the way that drug taking has moved from the outside of society into the centre, where for a lot of young – and now not quite so young – people, it is an almost normal fact of life. However, because the illegal nature of the drugs and the way drug scene intersects with the criminal world, it again puts them on the outlaw side of the fence.

I would, therefore, ague that this cultural climate of romanticising the outlaw does play a major part in what seems to be an increase in certain forms of criminal activity. This goes someway towards the current seemingly ambivalent attitude to crime, especially, among the young.

The recent survey referred to in Deborah Orr’s article says that many of those currently engaged in crime do it for the kicks, rather than from economic necessity.

In interviews with 120 offenders serving sentences for violent offences in prisons and young offenders institutions in England and Wales, it was found that many committed their crimes simply because they enjoyed them. "It weren't even for money. I had money. It was more like the buzz you get from doing things," one robber said. "I was more addicted to robbing than I was to drugs. Just get a funny feeling when I go out robbing."

As I said in the original comment, I felt as though something has changed. Before this post-romantic sea-change, the good man made bad by a corrupt world was taken to apply only in a very limited number of cases, e.g. the Robin Hood tale. However, these days, in a sort of sub-Rousseau-like way, it seems every criminal is seen as made bad by this inherently corrupt world. So much so, that being an outlaw is taken as just as valid a career choice as being a good guy. This is – I believe – different from the derided ‘society is to blame’ attitude of not so long ago.

The current attitude believes society nowadays is not forcing people into crime because they have no choice, rather society is, through its seeming ambivalence towards, if not secret love of, the outlaw outsider, offering this equally valid lifestyle choice. It seems therefore that the tragic untimely and unnecessary death of Tom ap Rhys Price was a result of this form of relativism.

* I am – of course - using ‘rock’ here as a kind of shorthand for a whole host of things including fashion, attitude, ‘philosophy’ and so on as a way of conveniently describing a major part of contemporary popular culture. It is a simplification, for example many of these same attitudes can be found in pre-rock ‘lifestyles’ like in Jazz, blues. ‘spiv’ culture and so on.