From The Archive: Elitist, My Arse

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Elitist, My Arse - Date: 23/08/2005

I've recently finished reading Ian Hamilton's Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth Century Poets (an excellent book, and - I would think - a very good introduction to the subject for the neophyte) in one of the essays (I Forget which, but I think it was on one of the beats, or post-beats) he says 'we must stop flattering the young.'

Yes, I do think that it is time we stepped away from the blind worship that has resulted in the adultescent, binge drinking and a high proportion of the stuff that blights our modern world. So much of it seems to involve pandering to the young and aping the (inevitable) simplicities of their wordview.

Then there is this in the Grauniad about The music that dare not speak its name. and how

the perceived classical music market (grey, old) and the Observer's (and Guardian's) target readership - the assumption being that anyone aged 25 to 45 regards classical music as an entirely closed book.

I'm 46 (a month or so ago), so - apparently - I now fall outside that demographic, but I have been 'into' classical for a long, long time.

The author Meurig Bowen states that 'I certainly don't regard popular music as junk food', but it is slowly - and somewhat reluctantly - what I'm beginning to believe, and not just pop music, but the entirety of popular culture these days. There was a time - the late 60s/early 70s - when it seemed as though popular culture could offer something beyond mere entertainment, but those days are long gone now.

One of my strongest memories of my first hesitant steps into the strangely beguiling world of classical music is of one day in a record shop (back when there were record shops, and when those shops sold classical recordings). I remember listening to two almost archetypal Black Country working men (both in flat caps, but sans whippets) vigorously and knowledgeably discussing the relative merits of the available versions of a Brahms symphony. So… elitist, my arse.

What those two blokes knew, and what we seem to have forgotten of late, is that there is stuff out there that does have a greater value than other stuff. That it is not all relative, and that most insidiously anti-human, anti-freedom, anti-rational, anti-intelligence, almost fascistic notion - that it is all a matter of taste and nothing more is a complete load of relativistic bollocks.

There used to be evening classes, night school, worker's colleges and so on. There used to be a BBC that took seriously the idea that it was there to educate, entertain and inform and was not frightened of showing the difficult stuff to the masses.

But, nowadays, as Bowen says, if chips and Turkey Twizzlers are all that's served up, that's the taste and preference created. And it is us that are the poorer for it. We have thrown away so much, wasted so much time, chasing after an illusion of egalitarianism that has - instead of embiggening us all - has taken away so much possibility, leaving us with so much unfulfilled human potential wasting away to nothing.