Adventures in hipsterland

A few nights ago, I attended the Hauntology debate at Cafe Oto in Dalston. It was packed with twenty-somethings wearing brogues, drinking organic cider and discussing the traumatic nature of technology. I wasn't even allowed to instantly hate everyone, because some of my friends were there, and I may have cadged some of their pomegranate seeds interesting japanese sweets and nice cigarettes.

The debate itself was excellent, for a definition of excellent that does not exclude two hours of shuffling and quiff-scratching whilst four chirpy white guys in nice shirts discussed their favourite bits of salvaged culture. Dance tracks that sample the laughter of long-dead studio audiences. The crackle and hiss of vinyl superimposed onto digitally produced music. An exhibition based on rotting photographs found in a skip. The death of futurism and the end of history. Found objects, found art, old fads and crazes resurrected and shambling in the strip-lit malls of our imaginations, looking for brains to feed on. A paranoid ontology, haunted by revenants from a past it won't shuck. Hauntology.

Adam Harper, who was persistently referred to as 'a member of a certain generation' (he's 23, like me, and you should all read his blog because it's clever and important) had the most interesting things to say. He believes that this sort of cultural reclamation can be progressive, and it can be utopian. He dared to express some genuine excitement, and was hissed at to mention the word 'hipster'. One word that stuck in the craw of the panellists and the audience, however, was 'retro'; hauntology, the reasoning goes, is not just a special strain of retro, but something else entirely - a nostalgia fostered deep in the psyches of the generation born after the end of history, a terror at the prospect of creating our own culture even as we are surrounded by an abundance of technologies with which to effect that creation.

Hauntology is a pitch-perfect orthodoxy for a new generation of smart, suspicious hipsters. Douglas Haddow said it best in 'Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilisation':

"Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it..The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks.The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion"

What Haddow and others spotted in the mid-noughties was the sharp end of a cultural phenomenon that has now diffused into the mainstream, substituting a timid irony for authenticity in political as well as creative arenas. It is this sort of thinking that allows young people with nice haircuts to remain convinced of their own alienation from the overculture whilst voting for the Conservative party.

Let's not forget that Boris Johnson rode into City Hall in 2008 on a wave of irony. LOL, Boris! Isn't he a leg-ernd? What a dude! Look at his hair! He's even on Have I got News For You! 'Lolboris' political recalcitrance goes hand in hand with contemporary British hipster culture, as does deliberate political apathy, refusing to vote as a silent, solipsistic protest at the futility of, well, everything, sort of. Most of the young people I spoke to on Thursday night were not intending to vote at all, although there were a couple of Tories in fake-fur boleros and oversized spectacles. The overwhelming impression is one of horrified intransigence, like a party held on the central reservation of a major motorway. Everything is moving so brutally fast in both directions that any movement more decisive than a small ironic shrug might knock us into the oncoming traffic.

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music. But courage is - crucially - not something that we are incapable of demonstrating. Our boldness and our innovation break through in the most curious of ways. The most important contribution of the evening came from Jesse Darling, a young artist in the audience* (as transcribed it in my best scrawly shorthand):

"I don't think we're all scared of the future. In fact, I think Generation Y is constantly looking for ways to cite itself. You talk about crackly soundtracks and mold-growing photographs, but a digital track doesn't crackle; a JPEG doesn't decay. It doesn't have the decency. Your technostalgia is nothing to do with me."


*Who was, for some reason,clutching a five-foot foam-rubber crucifix in one hand and a pregnant friend in the other, like some manic re-imagined Spirit of Easter come to eat all your branded chocolate and shout at you.

Candy and lullabies: new column for Morning Star

I have an itch in my brain. It's called 'Fireflies', it's a twinkly, inoffensive little song by a band called Owl City, and it's been squatting in the radio charts earworming any poor sod who happened to hear it for some weeks now. The song is about falling asleep and dreaming about a variety of friendly invertebrates and, bar a few lyrical contortions, that's about it. Oh, and it's brilliant.

Listening to 'Fireflies' is like wandering through a magical petting zoo made of ambient sound. It's like your higher functions have been handed a glass of warm milk and tucked under a fuzzy blanket. It goes 'plinkety'. People downloaded it in their millions; it soared to the top of the charts in a happy haze of shiny beetleish bleeping, and stayed there for five weeks, and the only thing that managed to topple it from the number one slot was a bunch of dreary, anodine pop stars covering a dreary, anodine REM song in an effort to raise money for a high-profile humanitarian disaster that everyone had seen on the telly. Modern music is a big bag of candies: sweet, addictive and cloying, failing to nourish even as it congeals into a homogenised mass of sugar.

This season's fashion is another huge sleepy faceful of candyfloss. Sugary pastel colours, drapey sportswear, flowing, 'feminine' shapes, curves and softness everywhere, except on the models themselves - if Paris, New York and London fashion week are anything to go by, the brief trend for 'plus size' (size 10) models hasn't lasted the winter. Ruffles, flounces, florals and 'fairytale' styling were all over the catwalks, trends which will soon be filtering down to the high-street; the look is sugar-sweet and high femme, with advertising spreads already begging us to buy branded blush and lipsticks in a variety of candy colours. The escapism was overpowering. Unfortunately, the tragic suicide of designer Alexander McQueen right in the middle of Fashion Week, at the height of his career, belied the sickly fairytale logic of the shows: real life, even for the young and stunningly creative, has few happy endings.

Last weekend I went to see The Indelicates, one of the last real angry, clever, poetic bands, launch their new material. The upcoming album, 'Songs for Swinging Lovers,' is a white-hot work of nihilistic lyrical brilliance with its dark, dank roots in 90s grunge and Weimar cabaret. Be Afraid of Your Parents is a glorious parade of paranoid cadences, whilst Flesh is a jangling, brutal critique of contemporary pseudo-feminism: Hey doc, can you take my skin and melt it into plastic? Beauty isn’t truth, it’s just youth, and it’s adaptive, and it’s elastic. There is no place for this type of songwriting in modern culture, because there is no place for grim, searing originality in modern culture. Anyone who tries to give the lie to bland sex and plastic romance is probably doomed to commercial failure.

Cotton-candy pop culture isn’t nourishing, but it is addictive. In the depths of winter, in the depths of a recession that shows no sign of abating for those of us who are precariously employed or unemployed, with nothing to look forward to but climate change, Strictly Come Dancing and death, there's a part of me that doesn't want to be challenged.

There’s a part of me that doesn't want fire and rebellion and words and images that terrify and energise, that doesn’t want culture to be an acid-etched reflection of a nightmare future. I want the fairytale. I want sweeties, fluffy pastel frocks and pretty, vapid songs to lull me to a sleep full of fireflies and starshine. And that frightens me more than I care to admit. When the world is grey and uncaring, it’s far too easy to find oneself complicit in the chilling, soporific impulse that's slowly strangling contemporary creativity.

[written for Morning Star, 21.02.10]

Alternative culture = fail

So back in 2007, when I started writing this blog, I worked for the flagship store of Cyberdog Industries. You know, the company that makes a lot of money selling overpriced poorly-made clothes to ravers and cyberkids and goths and metallers and the occasional indie Camden scenester who wandered in by mistake. My job was to stand around looking tiny and curvy and having a pink mohican and not complaining when tourists tried to feel me up at the information stand. I still like some of their clothes, though, only place you can get really reliable neon.

Well, anyway, Cyberdog has just launched a new t-shirt, which will no doubt shortly be glowing in every alternative club in London and Europe. It's called Tit Tetris.

No really, TIT TETRIS. The shirt, for those of you too lazy to click the link, features helpless women being flung to their deaths into a massive pile of female bodies. HOW VERY EDGY.

Ugh.

Push the button, save the world: Torchwood and the British state

In response to a few requests, I'm continuing the review theme here. Partly because there's a lot of stressful stuff going on down in the trenches and I've been ingesting a metric buggerload of fantasy/sci fi/drama to get through it, and partly because, well. I've just this second finished watching Torchwood: Children of Earth, and it had me squeeing, and then shouting at the telly, and now it's got me thinking.

This is when Torchwood finally grew up, and I've come away with about ten times more respect for Russel T Davies than I had before. He's kept the cheek-wobbling ham acting, but ensured that the sex is far less important than the politics in the series, which is how it always should have been. The gay agenda is still there, of course, but there's simply too much going on for it to get much attention - which, in an ideal world, is how everyone should respond to the sexuality of strangers. And yes, they killed one half of the main gay couple, but in an incredibly bloody moving way that validated and contextualised homosexuality within the plot, a way that was definitively non-gratuitous. It was a GOOD death, it was shiny-dead-lover narrative logic turned effortlessly queer, and that's not something I've seen on TV before, and TV is what changes the way people think. That's why I love this show. It's shiny, it's clunky and it's all about ideas.


Bastards in suits sell us out: The Panto

This series didn't even try to make anything look particularly convincing, and instead pulled out all the old lo-budget sci-fi tropes, with the horrible robotic screaming children, wiggly green oscilloscopes down in the basement of Thames House, anti-poison boiler suits, and aliens so scary that no existing TV wizardry could possibly do them justice who spent the whole show growling in a tank of fog. And like all the best sci-fi, it was political satire thinly disguised as whimsy.

Turns out that we didn't need to see the monster in the tank at all, because the real monsters were the ones who were on screen most of the time: the ones behind the desks in Thames House. It all started to look suspicious when, soon after the horrible standing-still-kids started screaming 'We Are Coming', John Frobisher - Home Office Permanent Secretary, played brilliantly by Peter Capaldi - and various frazzled people in ill-fitting suits started blundering about trying to cover up something awful we'd done in 1965, which three episodes later is revealed to have been giving some aliens twelve parentless Scottish kids to torture until they released gummy chemicals that the aliens just loved to get high off. Dodgier still, the whole world was now looking at us, with every child in the world pointing at London and speaking flawless BBC English. When the same aliens, calling themselves The 456, finally did show up on our doorstep, it wasn't long before the PM and various ministers were around a table with an assortment of serious-looking world leaders being given a talking-to by the United States, looking like a 10-year-old caught shoplifting. Which was so painfully spot-on that it hurt a little bit to watch.

The first question on everyone's lips in the show was the most important, the one that the fine tradition of British sci-fi always forgets to ask: why us? Why do all the aliens and apocalypses happen to tiny, moist little Britain? Why were the kids even speaking English when, as Torchwood was at pains to point out, English is not even the world's most common first language (that would be Mandarin). The 456's response made me cackle: we came here because you have no significance. You are middle men.

Because that's what we are, isn't it. A nation of middle men. Of go-betweens and diplomats and middle managers, frantic to cover up anything that might put a stain on our reputation: just look at the next Prime Minister. Look at the government response to the policing of the G20 protests, where we were so very ashamed of how our rowdy populace would seem to world leaders that we were prepared to send the troops in on innocent bystanders. RTD's biting backhander worked because it was true. Of course, the real reason the 456 chose to crash on British soil was darker still: we'd given them kids in the past. They knew that we'd do it again. They knew that when threatened with any sort of inconvenience, the British government will take the coward's road. Even if it causes bloodshed and suffering, we'll play the big kids' game, hoping they won't hurt us: whether that's the USA or some bloody monster from the sky making vague threats to wipe out humanity. In Torchwood: Children of Earth, the 456 don't even bother to explain how they're going to kill us all: the merest threat of danger is all that's needed for the cabinet to give the order to start loading kids onto vans, and then, as it turns out, blame it all on the USA ,who were technically in charge at the time.

Of course, they had to to work out which kids to sacrifice. And my mouth fell open as the ministers round the table calmly ensured that their own children wouldn't be at risk. They start out by siphoning off the kids noone will miss - the failed asylum seekers - before agreeing to send 'the lowest-achieving ten percent' off to the slaughter. How were they going to determine which kids were the lowest-achieving? Simple: the school league tables.

Which is also exactly what would have been done today, for a definition of 'today' involving slime-spewing aliens. Torchwood made no attempt to disguise the government's cold class logic, with a government agent telling middle-class Alice Carter and her son: 'don't worry. The nice kids are safe. They're getting rid of the ten percent they don't want - the kids on street corners'. Meanwhile, the chavs on the Cardiff estate were the only people showing the humanity to fight back and protect their own kids as the soldiers dragged them screaming out of their houses.


Can't stop the signal

New Who is all about ideas, and one of RTD's most enduring obsessions has been with citizen journalism, with ordinary people taking control and 'turning the signal back on them'. In fact, that's precisely how RTD's protagonists defeat the bad guys in three out of four Dr Who finales to date, as well as countless other episodes. And yes, it's cheesy and it's obvious, but I think it's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And in this series the concept really came into its own, with heroic amateur reporters saving the day from the sidelines, and the Torchwood team holding the entire government hostage by threatening to release details of the dodgy dealings to the public. We'll release the tapes to the public is, in fact, the number-one absolute and final worst thing you can say to a politician, in Torchwood and in real life - has been since Watergate. The only thing we can do, whether we want to defeat aliens or our more earthly overlords, is to take control of the signal - and the way that simple agenda is handled in the miniseries is elegant and moving.

Because a British state ready to abandon its own people to pain, loss and hardship is not science fiction. It's happening right now, today. In the 20th century alone, the government sacrificed not 335,000 but millions and millions of its own citizens, mostly boys, some barely more than children, when faced with an enemy armed only with machine guns and lots of mud. Right now, our government is offering subsidies to wealthy bankers whilst kicking a significant proportion of the poorest and neediest in the nethers. Right now, our government is placing us all in terrible danger by maintaining an arsenal of country-killing weaponry simply in order to make themselves feel better about our dwindling importance on the world stage. Right now, saving face and staying powerful is more important than saving the world, and there isn't even a magic button we can push to make it stop.

In You Can Panic Now's far more erudite post, the writer concludes that the bleakness of Torchwood: Children of Earth prevents it from being truly excellent television - we're deprived of that glimpse of human heroism, that glimmer of hope at the end of a harrowing show:

The everyday heroism of human life is what is truly missing from this series, and it is deliberately excluded in favour of a political message: our leaders care only for politics, and in their pursuit of political power lose touch with real life, and we the people are too apathetic and powerless to stop them. Ultimately, the storyteller is responsible for the message that his story sends. And I think that Children of Earth failed, on Day Five, to deliver a message that was useful, morally coherent and worthy. Shocking and frightening us with the potential of our own brutality was step one, but it was not followed by a step two.

I'm inclined to agree, which is why I'd make a terrible TV pundit: I like unremitting bleakness. I find it energising not to be offered easy solutions. RTD has always been a nihilist, an atheist with an eye for showing us our own most terrible potential in disarmingly silly ways. The real genius of Torchwood: Children of Earth, as well as those shit-scary screaming kids, was its effortless grasp of what is truly to be feared in this world. The series didn't need super-CGI, brilliant acting or massive fight sequences. It didn't even need to take the monster out of the fog: the actual aliens were barely on screen at all. Turns out that the monster was on the other side of the glass the whole time, in Westminster, ready to sell us all out for the promise of a quiet life. We were looking at the monster all along: we're still looking at the monster, and ultimately we are offered no easy redemption. That right there is the sort of sci-fi that scares the bejeezus out of me. Bloody brilliant stuff.

Britney and the Bedlamites: for Red Pepper

I've just got back from an internet activists' conference, which was all kinds of shiny. I shouted at Anonymous, who both looked and talked like rapists in their oh-so-scary masks, when they tried to explain me why they had a policy of using the term 'cumdumpster' to describe women. 'It's offensive. So it's funny. It's funny because it's offensive, yeah?'

Dear pointless cigar-smoking prick: you're an idiot. You ain't Rorsharch and if you were I'd still be laughing at you, not with you. Grow up, show us your bloody face and learn that bullying and activism do not equate.

Anyway. The following article was written for Red Pepper, but got elbowed out of the current issue. It's still going to be a great issue, and you should all buy it, but here, for your special Saturday night pleasure, a Penny Red exclusive: Britney and the Bedlamites.

********

The lunacy and redemption of Britney Jean Spears is a contemporary hagiography. The former teen pop sensation's appearance at the 2009 MTV awards, apparently sober, well-groomed and grinning like the waxwork which Mme Tussauds created to commemorate the event, signalled a return not only to health, but to virtue. Once again, Britney looks like all little girls are encouraged to grow up to look: pretty, compliant, obediently performative - the first signals of good mental health for women in and out of the public eye. The fact that the singer's very real and very chronic mental health problems cannot be cured with a decent spray-tan and hilights is irrelevant to the international celebrity press: in the eyes of the public, Britney Spears has been redeemed.

Two years earlier, Spears had shaved her head in an LA hairdressers’, and tabloids across the world screeched that the singer had lost her mind. The event catalysed a burgeoning fetish for feminine neurosis in Western pop culture, a fetish which seems to have achieved its squalid climax in the public ‘healing’ of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and their ilk. Open any magazine, turn on any tv station, and the message remains the same: women who are successful, or who don’t know their place, will go mad, and will require healing.

It's nothing new for women to be labelled insane if they display behaviour that diverges from received feminine norms of submissiveness, sexual and social discretion, purity and humility, and in today’s culture the trend is no different: bad-boy rockers are cool, racy ‘troublemakers’, whereas bad-girl rockers are ‘troubled’, and need to be saved from themselves. Self-destruction has always been part of rock and roll, but when it comes to male artists, their suffering is invariably portrayed as far less important than their genius, or even as an unfortunate, necessary part of it. Think of Jim Morrison. Think of Hendrix. Think of Kurt Cobain. Think of Heath Ledger, who has just got his very-much deserved posthumous Oscar for that screwy-beautiful performance in Dark Knight.

But the double standard kicks in when we remember Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Britney, Amy and Kerry for their illness more than their art. All of these women suffered or suffer from bipolar disorder (manic depression) – a very real medical problem which affects about 1% of the adult population, and a significant percentage of creative, dynamic and high-achieving people - but it is women in the public eye who are defined, ane morally judged, on the basis of their mental health.

Female artists, with or without emotional problems, are treated not as suffering geniuses but as silly little girls who aren’t bright enough or mature enough to take care of themselves. On the pages of newspapers and magazines and websites across the country, women’s minds and especially women’s bodies are poked, prodded, pinched and squeezed like livestock at a cattle market, their flesh weighed and labelled and stretched on the slab of media scrutiny – and now it’s claimed to be for their own good. A pound lost or gained from the backside of a A-list artist is taken as evidence of impending breakdown, and whatever successes they may or may not attain is deemed futile if the papers declare that they are cracking under the stress, binge-artists, secret alcoholics or, worst of all, ‘starving for attention’.

The fantasy is seductive. In a Western world that still fosters a deep suspicion of successful women, the myth of feminine neurosis gives armchair misogynists of both sexes a happy explanation for the fact that unprecedented numbers of women are reaching the top of their game in the media and the arts. It’s reassuring to be reminded that women are fragile and flawed. It’s reassuring to be reminded that girls are deranged, deviant creatures who can’t cope with pressure. But we’ve seen all this before.

In the 19th century, women were deemed highly susceptible to becoming mentally ill, as they were seen to lack the mental fortitude of men; contemporary medical theory spoke of the uterus as a sponge that wandered around the body, sucking out the juices of reason, leading to ‘hysteria’. If they dared to enjoy sex they were deemed ‘nymphomaniac’, a disease treatable by solitary confinement, leeches and clitorectomy; if they were lesbians or chose to remain unmarried, they were ‘frigid’. The risk of insanity greatly increased if any woman attempted to better herself through education, work or too many activities. Many women, especially in the upper- and upper-middle classes, learned to suppress emotions for fear of being labelled as mad and sent to an asylum or confined to their rooms, a phenomenon vividly recounted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

In today’s supposedly progressive culture, women are still threatened with the spectre of being deemed insane if their behaviour deviates from socially circumscribed norms. On the cover of every magazine, young women are reminded of what happens if we let go of self-control: we will become fat and powerless and unloved, grotesque, overconsuming, stumbling out of taxis way past our bedtimes, flashing our knickerless crotches at unsuspecting paparazzi and returning home to grind what’s left of modern morals into a fine powder and stuff it up our disintegrating post-feminist nostrils. But the spectre of young women’s imagined loss of control both as mental illness and as cipher for social degeneration is a long established and tediously familiar one, echoing Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ paintings of the 18th century. As early as 1712, the Spectator made explicit links between a number of ‘addictive’ substances and their dangerous effects on the female mind, warning its ‘fair Readers to be in a particular manner careful how they meddle with Chocolate, Novels and the like Inflamers; which I look upon as very dangerous to be made use of during this Carnival of Nature’.

Fast-forward three hundred years and success, emancipation or simple pleasure still gravely endangers the mental health of Britain’s female icons, out on the lash and the combined pill, vomiting helplessly into the gutters of modern decency as the distinction between mental illness and plain misbehaving becomes ever more irrelevant to the feminine equation.

Britney Spears’ very public breakdown in 2007-8 was a crucial flashpoint. Preened for stardom since babyhood, young Ms Spears spent a lifetime being pumped up, dolled up, sexed up and shoved onto every waiting stage: her first relationships and developing body were devoured by press attention, but despite the pressure and public scrutiny she somehow managed to produce four very fine studio albums, all of which were chart-toppers. When she finally began to show the strain, the outcry was instantaneous and horrific. The singer, who was a Rolling Stone cover girl at sixteen, began to be regularly caught out by the papparazi in the ultimate act of extreme insanity for a woman in the public eye: the consumption of a hamburger and fries. Eventually, Spears recreated with a borrowed buzz-cutter an act that has for centuries represented the supreme rejection of social feminisation, and hence the supreme demonstration of ‘insanity’. Plastic Britney dolls had been available since the singer turned seventeen; before long you could pick up bald ‘Britney Shears’ dollies, complete with tortured plastic grimaces and miniature straight-jackets.

This isn't the fourteenth century, and mental health is not a moral judgement. Britney's bipolar disorder is an ongoing medical condition - it isn't a moral lapse that can be purged as long as the sinner confesses the error of her ways to enough celebrity magazines and vows never to eat chips again. To imply otherwise is to do an extreme injustice to the millions of people across the world who are touched by mental ill health, as well as to slide into lazy misogyny: the idea that the mentally unwell and women in the public eye can be 'redeemed' with the right haircut and the right lighting is an insult on both fronts.

Women, including those of us with mental health difficulties, are socially and morally whole human beings, who do not require redeeming. What we require is respect; and we're coming to claim it. Squeal all the papers might, they cannot stop a new generation of female artists, singers, musicians, models, actors, writers and photographers hammering on the doors of privilege. These women want it all - fame, family, creative and personal fulfilment and oodles of cash - even if they have to get it whilst managing a mental health condition, as one in four of us do. Despite the bar of acceptable behaviour being set far higher for females in the arts and the media, despite flocks of paparazzi picking over their bodies like carrion birds after a battle, despite their every artistic, social and sexual transgression being seized on as evidence of blind insanity, the inheritors of 21^st century pop culture are coming up punching, in control of their lives, their minds and their message, even if the message isn’t what patriarchal society had in mind.

(image by Withiel)

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I hope you enjoyed that, my dears. Now, I'm going out to a sweaty goth club to drink cider and black and swish around like a fool. Y'all have a good one.

The day the music died.

And we all know the real song
but we won't sing along
'cause our boyfriends and girlfriends
and parents will say
Don't be a square, grow your hair and be happy
It's not god that made you this way -

So lift up your top
Lift up your top
Lift up your top, got to use what you've got
Try not to see anything but the fee
It's all tongue in cheek anyway!

'Our Daughters Will Never Be Free,' The Indelicates, 2008

We have a very short window in which to start asking some crucial questions about wealth and gender. We have a short window, whilst the FTSE and the Dow and the Nikkei buckle and collapse, to commit blasphemy. To say that the very nature of financial markets, of patriarchal capitalism itself, engenders ideological violence against women - and by association, men - everywhere.

Fact: markets will seek to maximise profits. Fact: sexism sells. The image of the cackling city boy stuffing his bonus into a hooker's disembodied garter - just the leg showing, never the face - has become one of the icons of hypercapitalist success. However you wrangle the incentives, an economic model spawned and nurtured in an atmosphere of male privilege will seek to make money by selling women's bodies back to them, by selling them to other men, by exploiting women's work and by hijacking femininity as a saleable commodity and nothing more.

I remember the first time I met Ginger Spice. It was four years ago, and I was standing at the reception desk in the acute anorexia wing of a London mental hospital. I was there because there was nobody but my receptionist to watch me and make sure I took my meds and kept my meal supplements down, wearing a floppy hat and a tracksuit that flapped on the bent coat hanger of my body, drawing slogans to keep me occupied. And Geri Halliwell walked by.

She was there to see the girl in the next room from mine, a friend and a fan. And my first thought was how very, very tiny she was – barely five feet three in massive heels, dwarfed by shopping bags and a bunch of violent pink crepe-wrapped roses. Tiny and fragile-looking, all desperate smile and thin hair bleached back to its natural pale strawberry-blonde, Geri Halliwell had been in the press all year, and still is, thanks to a much-touted recovery! from anorexia, bulima and other lapses in celeb inscrutability. Through the haze of numb, sour fear that dogged those hospital days I remember thinking: that’s Ginger Spice. That pale, frantic creature is the same girl whose posters I had on my walls, whose feisty, pumped-up pop smashes were the first singles I ever bought with my pocket money. That’s Girl Power, right there. There it goes.

How sad, and how empty it all seems now. In 1996, we were told that anything was possible. Girls were powerful! Girls were sexy! Girls were marketable! You could be anything you wannabeed! Fast forward twelve years and the record is scratched and broken, the Spice Girls themselves bleached by years of pap-dashes into wasted, desperate husks of the energetic, ballsy girls we once thought we knew. We made ourselves into products again the instant empowerment was wrenched away from the feminist movement and assaulted with price-tags, we were consumed; we consumed ourselves. Femininity was for sale, and too much of it made us sick. Sick of ourselves, sick of our lives, sick of looking forward to another twenty years of hard sell until we could no longer pretend that we were young and available and found ourselves consigned to the scrap-heap with the computer shells, splitting bin-bags and acid-leaking fridges.

The year I started eating again - really eating, not just subsisting on crackers and tea - the sub-prime mortgages broke and the markets began to deflate like a balloon at the end of a long party. Right now, a loaf of bread costs more as a percentage of the average wage than it ever has. Groceries are getting harder for everyone to afford. We can no longer stuff ourselves with impunity, but right now, right this second, I feel something I spent my whole life missing. I feel something girlishly blasphemous and slightly obscene. I feel full.
Shopping, preening, starving, serving, fucking. Five key activities for my generation of young women under capitalism. We were born in the shadow of Thatcher and taught to prepare ourselves not for productivity, but for producthood. We do not remember living through anything but boomtimes, but for us, money is still something we will not win without the trappings of servility; we came to learn that nothing sells better, or faster, than our bodies, and the better and faster we could cash in, the happier and worthier our lives would be -

There's no better example of the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism than the strange case of the 22-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, who is selling her virginity in hopes of financing her college education. She wants to be a marriage and family therapist. This transaction is "capitalism at its best," according to the manager of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada, which is brokering the deal. He made the point on a TV show last week on which we both appeared as guests. I argued this is capitalism at its worst. You've got a desperate woman (she was allegedly defrauded out of a hunk of cash by her no-good dad); virtually no safety net if you're poor; gargantuan college fees, thanks to little government assistance or regulation; and the perfect storm of circumstances that makes a young woman think it's OK to sell her body. Scary? Yeah. Does it have to be this way? No. It's about the morality of the market. - Marian Meed-Ward, Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario 25.09.2008

Maybe I'm a little biased, being accustomed to a student lifestyle and still having no job to lose- but I say let it all come down. Let the markets crash, and let the ugly arrogance of a society rent by the gashes of commodified gender come tumbling with them. So what if the glittering future that was promised to us as long as we behaved ourselves like good little girls has vanished? We may have been trained as hyper-consumers, but we don't have to live that way.

Let it all come down. Let's see the arrogance of the testosterone-stinking trading floors thwarted and the altars of deregulated markets toppled: we don't need the old gods and their archaic laws any more. Now that governments have intervened with basic financial packages to has save us from utter disaster, we can breathe a little easier - but the ideology of Western capitalism will never be the same again, and its discourses of gender are open to decimation. Bring it all down.

Who's your daddy?

In the news this week, British jockism scored a smackdown at international sports day in China, with tellies across the country sagging under a brief and terrible invasion of those kids who were popular at school. Oh, and Peaches Geldof got married to her boyfriend of one month. Hold the front page.

Can anybody tell me the point of Peaches Geldof? What is she for, exactly? She seems to dabble in all sorts of things – music, modelling, journalism, presenting – as mere facets of an amorphous party-going social entitlement born of pop-heredity. It troubles me, because I know so many brilliant, truly talented aspiring musicians and artists and writers and models who aren’t making it, who may never make it, not because they aren’t good enough but because they don’t get the breaks, because their daddy isn’t anybody important. Meanwhile, Peaches could fart and SoHo would applaud.

See also, Daisy Lowe. See also, Pixie Geldof. See also, Mark Ronson, Alice Dellal and Alfie Allen. See also, Jaimie Winstone, noted daughter of Ray, who’s currently starring in the 3rd-wave feminist retrospective,‘Donkey Punch’. See also, Coco Sumner, she of the broad shoulders, glossy tawny locks and distracting tartan mini-skirts, noted daughter of Sting. See also, every damn member of the gurning post-adolescent Hanoverian clan, grown up soured by grovelling, fawning, belly-exposing media worship. What the hell happened to meritocracy in this country?

At a recent debate at Portcullis House, David Lammy MP, Minister for Skills, noted the stalling in social mobility that has dogged the UK for the past decade and more. “Class is still very firmly on the agenda,” he said, “and we need to start thinking about what stories we can tell about class, education and social mobility.

“I think it is legitimate for the Labour party to have something to say about excess in the upper eschelons of society. It’s not the politics of envy – it’s the politics of humanity.”

Every morning, I drag myself onto the bus to work or school or my other work and am assaulted by lazy press adoration of a clutch of young people the same age as me and my mates, purely on the basis of their wealth and heredity. Was it really ever thus? The truly fascinating thing about the Geldof, Lowe, Allen and their ilk is that their parents’ generation really were, in many ways, self-made. They came from an era where celebrity actually meant something because it demonstrated that, for example, four young kids from lower-middle-class Liverpool could take on the world and win if they tried. An era where talent and ambition and charisma could win you success no matter who your daddy was. Where you could go to university and work hard and make something of yourself. But a generation later, the snivelling, forelock-tugging British obsession with lineage seems to have reverted to type, and with it, a new acceptance of social class as a measure of worth and entitlement.

Heredity is the rotten trench running through this society, and after barely two generations of social progress we are reverting to type. The sons and daughters of artists, musicians and politicians who made their names the hard way are raised for a life of privilege in which the cringing British press supports them from the moment they’re old enough to be papped. Celebrity used to be aspirational; it used to mean more than who your daddy was. We used to be better than this. Let’s hope we remember it before too long.

Comic-book politicians and the Goddamned Batman

Why is it that the big, important superhero films always hit us in times of political unease? Since the planes hit the towers we’ve sat through remake after Marvel remake, each with its own special ideology ticketed along with the tie-in merchandise.

So, it’s mid-June and the sun is fizzing in the sky like a malignant bath bomb. Crazy news season is dragging itself to a crazy zenith and everywhere we turn there’s a slick new politician who wants to be our summer fling, and batman’s in the cinemas again, and the British are in the mood for a spot of king-killing. On this inauspicious Sunday, I ask you: outside certain specialised industries, is a kinky black rubber bat-suit the workwear of a sane man?

Give Christopher Nolan his due, nobody does a better goddamned Batman. But it’s what Batman represents that fascinates me, why we come back to these particular lonesome superhero myths, and why it’s Batman in particular in Summer 2008. I wanted to see nuance, I really did. I’ve tried very hard to find the subversive gay elements in Dark Knight, for example. Yes, batman has been a camp icon and, yes, the chemistry fizzes between Christian Bale’s batman and Heath Ledger’s beautiful, doomed Joker, violent, kinky and thoroughly self-torturing. But the villain-as-warped-sexual-flipside-of-the-hero is hardly original, and Ledger’s maniacal screaming – hit me again! I like pain! – only makes this tired trope the more upsetting, a weary rehashing of a self-involved male sexual paradigm which can only ever be played out in violence.

We’re about ready to be rid of the prime minister now, it seems. In fact, we’re baying for his blood from Glasgow to Henley-on-Thames. But what has he done, precisely, to offend us so? He’s failed to be the Batman for us. We believed we were safe somewhere between neurotic mother Blair and daddy Brown, dour and puritan and firmly in charge of the purse-strings. But now mum and dad have proved themselves petty, human and fallible, what are the kids of 1997 going to do? Who can we turn to? We need a hero!

We seem to want a more charismatic, US-style politician in British tweeds. Someone with prestige. Someone like Mr Johnson, who knows he is entitled to power, who has the confidence to remake the law to suit his own ends. Someone dynamic, with heritage and perhaps a volcano lair and a butler or two around the place.
And all Labour seem to be doing about this is squealing faintly about toffs, forgetting, of course, that in times of economic instability a lot of the British fundamentally like toffs. Toffs make us feel safe.


Deep down, maybe we actually want uncomplicated, comic-book leaders, leaders who throw around words like good and bad, right and wrong. We fetishise them, quite literally. They are fictional characters given life and purpose. Batman is a fictional character; Boris Johnson is a fictional character, but with a real wanker behind the photoshoots. Batman is the living image of this, a specific entitled attitude to the world psychotically embodied in the shiny inherited keds of a millionaire playboy. Bruce Wayne has no higher mission except personal revenge wrung from a spoilt, traumatised, isolated childhood. Bruce Wayne has his privilege, which at the end of the day is all he wields in the face of forces he calls evil. Bruce Wayne wants nothing apart from his own sick, slick satisfaction, which for someone who already has their own butler and a trust fund which knows no credit crunch, means power. Sound familiar?

Why can’t progressive politicians stand up for once and say that this isn’t right? Where are the heroes on the left? We’d better come up with some of them pretty damn quickly if we don’t want another four years as henchmen to a comic-book Tory toff. Well, you know what they say. Some days you just can’t get rid of a blonde.

*grin*

Get me a hot towel, a silly costume and some pointy shoes and I'll dance all night....

Buckingham Palace and Number 10 yesterday gave assent for Margaret Thatcher to be given a state funeral. The Graun reports:

The first since Sir Winston Churchill's in 1965, the funeral would acknowledge the exceptional impact of her 11-year premiership in reversing the decline in Britain's postwar fortunes.
As such, it would be certain to prove controversial among the many people who lost their jobs during the "Thatcher revolution" which reintroduced market forces into many fields of activity and for which she has not been forgiven by some.

So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let's do it.

And whilst we're at it, let's have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I'm only 5ft tall myself, I'll lead the chorus. Let's have a party. Let's have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.

Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.

We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer - but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.

Thatcher killed British industry, warped it forever. We can never go back. We've watched our children drink and smoke and fuck in the ruins for a generation now, and it's time to give up the ghost, stop bleating and build something better. We've got reforms to make, bills to fight, protests to organise. We've got at least two years left with a nominally liberal party in power and we need to use them, to their fullest.

Let's have a party. Let's have a great, big doomsday party and, in the morning, knock back a tumbler of Resolve and start planning the next battle. We aren't beaten yet. We just lost. I see red in every possible sense when my elders and betters on the left confuse the two. There are issues still to promote and everything to win in this new post-Industrial Britain for the cause of social equality, workers' rights and reformist socialism.

'Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean—power over people, power to the State.'
Thatcher, Speech to the Conservative Council, March 15 1986

It is, of course, deeply disrespectful to speculate about someone's timely death before it happens. Which is why my comrades and I have quietly had a party-kitty going since 2003. A source said that one advantage of a state funeral would be to augment the public debate about the Thatcherite legacy. 'Doubtless there will be some people who will throw water bombs, and they will probably make themselves look very stupid in the process,' he said.

There is still a flourishing liberal conscience in Britain, and we need to deport ourselves with dignity, as more than the slathering, drooling proto-fascist reds that Maggie dismissed us as. We believe in hard work, civil rights, social responsibility and the freedom of the individual. We believe in justice and in leaving noone behind. When the Iron Lady finally goes, it'll be a moment for reflection for every young punk who promised to dance on her grave back in the 1980s. So let's send her out in style, and when the dancing's done, let's plan for what comes next.


**********

And by the way: Commie Girl is now up at Red Pepper. Enjoy. :)

They Lied To Us.

The past week in the meatspace life of Pennyred has been spent guzzling pink drinks at goth parties, rolling in my own filth and trying to get a job. I feel a sinking sense of despair at the renewed realisation that we were all hopelessly lied to in our youth. Real life isn't the thick slice of fun pie we were led to believe. For example: kick and wail at the notion though I may, I am resoundingly a spoilt Blatcherite brat by inheritance: bright, white and middle-class, scholarship to a nice school, degree from an Eminent University, lots of drive and ambition, relatively supportive parents, neither stunningly unattractive nor a pneumatic blonde fem-bot, both of which happen to matter a lot if you're young, female and looking for work. In short, I've got everything going for me on paper, bar heteronormativity, mental equability and a Y chromosome, but we'll save that little rant for another day.
And yet, to my great surprise, I have as yet failed to be head-hunted for a top job in media, government or M16; I have as yet failed, in fact, to secure any employment whatsoever since being fired from the Shop Job of Doom. And somewhere deep in the saccharine-sticky recesses of my middle-class soul, something feels that this isn't quite fair. This isn't how it was supposed to go! They told us we would be okay if only we worked hard and tried to be pretty! They told us we'd be successful if we studied for the exams, wore the right shoes and had the right parents! They LIED to us!

This city is over-run with kids like me, thousands of us, stunned by the acrid complexity of the real world, weighed down by debt, overdrawn, underpaid, poorer than we've ever been, chasing the rag-ends of dreams we've been encouraged to entertain since birth. Smoking, drinking, guzzling vile chemicals and dicking around with one another's hearts, because it numbs the anxiety, gives us a break from the cruel meritocracy grinning back at us through the curtains of our shabby living-rooms. Begging anywhere for work experience, internships, trying to polish our shiny young faces and even shinier CVs until they glisten with desperation*, paying our way with insecure minimum-wage work that saps the soul and leaves us grubbing in our battered wallets for the coppers to make up tonight's beer.

This was supposed to be the future.

We are probably going to be fine. But it won't be soon, and it won't be in the way we were made to believe. We can't expect to win by playing along, but what else can we do? After all, they're the ones with the power. They've got the money and the guns and the government and God, they sign our paycheques, mark our exams and grade our various crawling efforts to please. What have we got to challenge that?

I'll tell you what we've got.

We have Art and Beauty and Love and Truth. We have a flourishing counterculture that's more alive than anything the mainstream has produced in the last twenty years. We have semiotic sorcerers and guerilla literary theorists. We have Chaos Majick. We have sexual deviancy. We have the talent and the information-delivery media to reprogramme the minds of Young Corporate Leaders and drive them, frothing, into the sea. We have memetic attacks and the vote. Most importantly, we have much better hair.

This was written by a good friend of mine over two years ago, when we were young, stupid and indulging in wildly intellectual drunken reprobation at said Eminent University. To it I shall now add:

Unlike you, we are truly hypertextual. We have the information and communications technology to entirely re-imagine the concept of socio-political power, and we are bright enough and brave enough to use it. We are multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-talented and massively up for a fight, we are no longer frightened of your disapproval, and we have bombs.

Love and Squalour bombs.

Up yours, Mr Meritocracy. We're going to win this our own way.



NB: Pennyred is a CV-enhancing excercise written by a nice cardigan-wearing girl from Richmond who would vote Tory. If you have enjoyed the writing of Pennyred, why don't you mention this blog to your employer? Pennyred is available for children's parties, corporate events and layby buggerings, and is happy to receive payment via Visa, Switch, Sterling, Yen or Euros (no $US) although will accept services rendered, sexual favours or the blood of the innocent.

Hunter, Hellraisers and Viral Democracy...

Today is the third anniversary of the suicide of Hunter S Thompson. Rest in peace, you mad old bastard, and thanks for the dream. A brief digest of the press this week is enough to prove that this world was never meant for a rule stomping genius like you. ....

****

It's not often I'm driven to a book review by sheer annoyance. Oliver James' Affluenza, however - currently number three in the bestseller lists and rising - is such a staggering load of abysmal, dangerous rubbish that it was review or risk self-poisoning by paper sludge in an attempt to vent senseless rage at the book by chewing and eating it. Affluenza is a muddle of trite social 'observations' strung together by no more than a series of carefully chosen anecdotes, under-researched or unsupported at best, casually racist, misogynist, classist and breathtakingly anodine at worst.

To give James his due, he starts off with a fairly sound piece of reasoning - human beings in the west have come to see themselves as 'personality commodities', and behave accordingly, resulting in massive increases in depression, anxiety and emotional ill-health. This is all keyed in to what James, in a stunning feat of tautology, terms 'Selfish Capitalism'. From there, however, it's all downhill: the first chapter is used to introduce the weary underlying metaphor of the entire 546 page tome, namely that one can become 'infected' by Selfish Capitalism and by personal commodification, henceforth referred to, in almost every churning paragraph of the
book, as the 'Affluenza Virus', or simply 'The Virus'.

This, to me, smacks of an author who liked 'The Matrix' trilogy a little too much (even 'Revolutions'). James' reasoning, however, fails to reach even the limited levels of subtlety commanded by the Wachowski brothers, not to mention that the fight scenes aren't half so cool. The sizzling hero, moreover, leaves much to be desired: James himself is an obtrusive prescence, cropping up everywhere, 'like an itinerant Marie Curie...triumphantly clutching vaccines which immunise us against the Virus, phials of tactics for making the best of the very bad job the world has become'. Oh yes, Oliver, thrust those tactic-phials deep into our sick and trembling 21st-century souls: only you can save us.

Within the first few pages, James comes out with such gems as:

'Whilst poverty fosters survival materialism, it does not result in illness'. (Been to Africa at all, Oliver?)

'women are more materialistic in their preferences when choosing a partner'. (Not explained, not supported, just plonked there as the given background to a series of paragraphs on how the grabbiness of the girls on Sex and the City can be put down to physiology).

Comparing a New York Banker to Chet, the amiable Nigerian taxi driver who had driven James to the meeting -'his apartment was big enough to fit a whole family of Chets'. Yes, because all African descendants like to live in huge, tribe like families, and can be reduced to the same cheery, poverty-stricken archetype. Of course.

I'm really not making this stuff up. All of James 'evidence' is anecdotal. Some unsourced statistics are peppered around the place, but in vague and generalised terms, such as when he declares that, at one Oxford college, one in three female students claims to have been seriously eating disordered at one point in her life, and one in ten is currently suffering. The college, Mr James, was University College, Oxford, and I know exactly how easy that statistic is to find, because I myself used it in a last-minute addendum to an article for my student paper about 6 months before your book went to press. Must try harder.

Now let's talk more about what James thinks about women:

'Do not deceive yourself about the reasons you are returning to work. Do you really need the money? Can you not live in a cheaper house or cut down on your outgoings? The authenticity, vivacity and playfulness of small children is hugely rewarding, a much greater boon than any number of promotions or pay rises...'

'Women who divorce or separate are often more depressed after doing so, even if they were with a truly vile man...before you divorce the father of your child, see a therapist and check what you are bringing to the feast.'

'If you have a daughter who is already showing signs of being a high-flyer, discourage academic prize-hunting and engage with her authentic interests'

[Susan is a talented, high-flying and wealthy advertising executive, interviewed about her self-starting skills]. 'When I made the obvious point, that a relationship in which she might find herself depending on a man must have been rather daunting....' - yes, because all successful women will come to depend on one man eventually, if they want to be truly fulfilled, won't they? Ta for clearing that one up.


What sets the teeth on edge about Oliver James' absurd generalisations on the state of feminism today isn't his casual dismissal, nor the way in which, in a book whose premise is to stop people seeing themselves as commodities, he persists in treating women as base-line baking-tins whose primary purpose is to squeeze out babies. No, it's simply the way he spouts all this humourless, gender-reductionist rubbish so patronisingly and self-importantly, as if he were the first person ever to have thought of this, and wouldn't we all be so much happier if we just listened to him?

Homosexual men and women do not exist in James' fantasy world, and nor do bisexuals, poly- or trans-sexuals, or, indeed, anyone who doesn't see marriage as the ultimate goal in life -his 'four types of marriage', which takes up much of Affluenza's 'women and relationships' section, is good for a giggle. Just don't let it stick between your teeth. When not being casually misogynist in a roundabout advocation of a return to fifties' gender-stratification, James' solutions are primitivist, reductivist, and based purely on observations of one set of people: the white, monied middle-classes. How this book is meant to be the 'sizzling reality check' claimed by its promotional material remains arcane.

What's even worse is that Affluenza is remarkably easy to read, which means that this banal piece of social propaganda will be gobbled up by commuters and stressed middle-class homemakers across the country. Apparently, James is already planning a sequel. Yes, that sound of rumbling, squelching and distant blasphemy is Hunter Thompson turning in his grave.


*****

Elsewhere in the travesty that was once the British press, the Guardian, in a move that was either sheer PR genius, tit-itching stupidity or some sick hybrid of the two, saw fit to launch a blog by the clueless son of an in-house travel writer, detailing his plans for his gap-year trip to the colonies the young, dumb middle-class swilling fields of India and Thailand, for booze, birds and other horizon-expanding pursuits. 'Cliches', declares Max Gogarty, 'exist for a reason.' The comments make excellent reading, and, much to my gurning delight, the poor boy has already made it into the Wikipedia entry on nepotism. Great to see that press hypocrisy is alive and well upon this most auspicious of Wednesday afternoons, even though other Guardian employees have risibly tried to defend the kid by comparing his situation to the Cultural Revolution. I'd feel a little more sorry for darling Maxie if he had anything to say, or enough wit and self-effacing panache to say nothing with style. But this is bland, content-free garbage, and fair play to the CiF commentators who brought this shocking editorial decision to book. Max Gogarty has justifiably become an internet 'virus'.

Daddy has stepped in now, of course, but too late to stop the wave of mostly reasoned vituperation from commentators within the Guardian network and beyond. Rafael Behr bewails, in response to poor Maxie's plight (according to his father, 'he has said that he doesn't like the media world now. He doesn't want to go into it any more.'):

'The web is no community. It is brilliant for some things. It does information, misinformation, entertainment and commerce. It does freedom. But one thing it doesn't do is democracy'

In fact, this is a perfect of example of hyper-democracy in its purest form: the power of the people in an age where the mainstream free press is anything but. Barely twenty-four hours after this 19 year old's self-satisfied Great Sneer diary is launched, hyperspace is ablaze with voices of denunciation, and the piece is pulled.

Forget 'affluenza', this is real modern Viral politics at work: the potential of the internet to spread information and and rouse response to hypocrisy, nepotism and patent class privilege. The press may not be free, but between us we've got the power to bring truth and reason to the offices and boardrooms of the rich and privileged. There's magic in that. Perhaps Saint Hunter would have been proud, after all.

Imagination and the overculture: yes, it's fucking political.

There has been a lot of debate following the last post, most of which can be boiled down to the following issue: should subcultures be political? Do all 'alternatives' have a duty to engage? Do we really want to create a better world or do we - as one commentator put it so beautifully - just want to fuck in the ruins?

Let's first define the term 'subculture', which is a filthy slut-word that often flings itself around where it shouldn't, and is generally no better than it ought to be. I here define a subculture as 'a group of people who identify as outside the mainstream (however they choose to define that mainstream) and variously the habits, social mechanisms, musical, fashion-and aesthetic- preferences common to members of that group.' Or, less prissily, a subculture is a bunch of people with strange ideas ganging up against the overculture, creating a behavioural enclave that walls them off from the big, scary world outside. On one end of the scale are Hippies, Goths in all their various guises, Ravers, Emo-kids, Metalheads, Cyber-kids, Indie Rockers, Geeks, Nerds, Roleplayers, sexual deviants, Fan boys- and girls-, Fetish-pros and lifestylers; on the other end are cultures that literally ghetto themselves (more prevalent in the US than over here), political factions and organisations, cultists and anarchists. Because 'chav'(/pikey/townie depending on your location) is a specific class-identifier, I do not include it here; it is worth noting, however, that most members of the above-named subcultures tend to have the disposable income and leisure time particular to a life lived above the poverty line. Which does not mean that they are dismissable, merely that many 'subculture' lifestyles - even the self-professed asceticism of the Hippy movement - indicate at least a lower-middle-class background.

So let's ask ourselves again. Do subculture kids have a duty to engage politically?

I believe, passionately and unequivocally, that they do. Let me tell you why.

What differentiates subcultures from the overculture is no more nor less than the facility of imagination. We have the ability to imagine lives for ourselves which are different, however subtly, from the range of options prescribed to us by the overculture in which we have been raised (unless we have been lucky enough to be raised by hippies). Yes, mainstream capitalist culture tries to hitch us back into the mainframe with varying levels of success, by providing us with shiny toys and clothes to buy and things to do which defuse our political energy. At base level, though, most of us continue to see ourselves as 'other'. And that otherness, combined with the causal imaginative faculties common to most 'alternative' people, is also the starting point of most liberal political energy.

The political Left, too, is differentiated from the Right in that it can imagine possible futures and make the mental leaps necessary in order not to be afraid of change. Political, social and systemic change is exactly what terrifies the Right.

The problem with subcultures is this: they encourage imaginative people, many of whom are by default distressed with the way the world works, to use that power of imagination for escapism rather than for action. Fundamentally, it's easier to create fantasy worlds and elaborate cliques into which to disappear than to change the world that you've got. It's easier to hang out in an exclusively queer-, kink-friendly and fabulous subculture and spend all day arguing about hair extensions than to campaign for gay rights. It's easier to join a roleplaying organisation where you can spend all day pretending to be a world-destroying psychotic wizard/prophet-monk with healing powers/master-thief and heir to a ruined kingdom, than to engage in the long and sometimes arduous process of actually getting involved in the actual power processes that are actually extant in the actual country actually now.


Do we have a duty to engage politically? Damn straight we do. And does that duty fall heaviest on those 'lost' members of the Left who have turned their energies elsewhere? Absolutely. It must be stressed that asking people to engage politically - much like asking them to vote - is not the same as asking them to conform. Making a choice to disempower oneself politically is not just a personal choice - it is harmful to others on your political wavelength, it deepens the divide between the powerful and the disenfranchised in modern apolitical youth culture. Encouraging you to be political is not fascist, conformist or collectivist: it's the difference between urging you strongly to turn up on voting day and holding a gun to your head and telling you to vote for me. Fascist; liberal pro-personal empowerment. One of these things is not like the other.

Not that I'm against subculture escapism per se. In fact, subculture is, by definition, subversive - so long as one doesn't become blinkered. I think there are a good few MPs for whom an afternoon of Dungeons and Dragons would do wonders, or an evening in lurid pink spandex, dreadfalls and goggles. I would personally relish thr opportunity to take David Cameron to Slimelight and buy him a cider and black, possibly watered down with gin. The only politically distasteful elements of the socio-cultural underground are those which choose to deal with a hostile, unsympathetic world by refusing to acknowledge its existence.Not turning up to vote because you're 'not interested' or because 'they're all the same' isn't alternative, or wacky, or cool. It's just plain thick. This is how the bastards gain power. Put down that lollygoth, I'm talking to you.

No. Membership of a subculture does not necessarily mean alternative politics, and I never pretended to believe that it did. I just happen to believe that it should. The progress of liberal agendas is suffering because too many liberal, creative, imaginative people choose to escape entirely into alternative self-reflexive worlds. I believe that we can choose to retain our unique identities whilst not allowing ourslves to be fobbed off with trinkets. I believe that we can be revolutionary and politically switched-on and still have time to put on our make up and head to the crustiest local pub to pick up something multiply pierced and willing. I believe that subculture kids can and should be political.

Cyber without punk?

It's not often I get really, properly angry about alternative fashion and culture, but lately I've been working in a flagship cyber- store in Camden market, and to cap it all I've just started reading Gibson's Pattern Recognition. All of this has got me thinking again about cyberpunk, cyber-culture, and what the subculture signifies. So shall we cyber-?

Right. Cyber-culture is, at baseline, both ridiculously inoffensive and disarmingly radical - despite the fact that a good swathe of participants manage to miss the point entirely. It's a bizarre neon synthesis of goth-, punk-, emo-, rave- and 'urban' cultures that looks hyperbolically towards some arcane design-political paradigm known as 'the future'. The aesthetic is sleek, different, chrome-tinted with an edge of grunge, and the lifestyle attracts scenesters and wannabe kids from every walk of hip London life. Which is great. Or, rather, which would be great if the lifestyle wasn't founded on a basis of conspicuous consumption, taking stimulants and going to clubs.
Hanging around the back of Cyberdog one dark Wednesday night in January, chatting to its body of staff - of assorted ethnicities, gender-and-sexual orientations, all hard-working scene kids under 24, and all completely bonkers - one comes to realise that 'cyber' culture, rather than the break from the mainstream it claims to be, is in fact a crystallisation of UK youth culture. Here we all are: young, mental, working too hard, over-spending on ridiculous clothes and odd, high-maintenance hairstyles, listening to repetitive music , dicking around with each other's hearts. Here we are, cool, stupid, impulsively jacking off to some half-cocked vision of the future dreamed up by roleplayers and scene-savvy designers in loft apartments. Fucked up on booze and boring drugs. Waiting for our futures to start.

That's my problem with cyberculture: it doesn't have a project anymore. Ever since the abandonment of the suffix '-punk' by the cyber- scene, cyberkids have lost their way. We've been caught up in dancing, shopping and the cutting edge facade of the 'future' obsession, blindly hopeful with only a thin layer of really imagining what the future could be like if we put our minds to it, beyond neon pink and sparkly. Even though neon pink and sparkly isn't a bad place to start.

Cyber is no longer really punk, and it's no longer really political. No, it's not enough to yell 'fuck the system', swallow a handful of pills and watch Velvet Goldmine. Again. No, it's not enough to be gay, or bisexual, or to have interesting hair - being a minority does not make one politically aware by default, even if it should. No, it's not enough to be firmly of the opinion that drugs should be legalised and prepared to expound on the topic at parties: the legal status and criminal knock-on effects of illicit substances are important topics, but not compared to, say, the issue of a living minimum wage, or immigration, or how to stop our society turning into the achingly corrupt surveillance state that Gibson and Sterling themselves were warning us about back in the nineties.
Just because something is fun and sexy doesn't necessarily mean it's important, and it's high time we got it through our buzzed-out little heads that this stuff is sexy too- a different kind of sexy, because it's about power, privilege and state-creation. We should be able to rock with that, and if we can't, and if we're too munted or comedowny or spend so much time on our hair and make up on the next General Election day that we don't have time to vote, it's not the system that's got it wrong - it's us, and our tiny attention spans. It doesn't have to be like this.

Cyber can be punk, and it should.

Ultimately, the strange, shy kids who make pilgrimages to Cyberdog on a Saturday come there because they want a better world. Because they're disappointed with the one they've been born intoand want to re-make it. The problem only arises when, distracted by the flashing lights and thumping chords, so many of them stop there. Too many become distracted by the flashy, fashion-conscious elements of the scene forgetting that future-building is not a product, but a process. There is nothing wrong with imagining a future that's cleaner, faster, deeper, weirder, where people can remake their lives and their bodies at whim, one that's more accepting and more exciting than the proto-fascist US hegemony we're being fobbed off with. But you can't buy it online, and you can't reserve entrance tickets, and you won't find it at the bottom of a baggie.


The Revolution is Just a T-Shirt Away


Training the young to imagine possible futures is vital; it was and remains the most important element of cyberpunk as a literary, musical and fashion movement. But creatively imagining a future and working to build it must not stop when one has achieved the look. It's now perfectly normal for cyber-scene kids trotting around Camden never even to have heard of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker, and that's not forgiveable. By all means save up for those dread falls, by all means try the pink pills, but for god's sake read the literature. The world is now leaning more and more towards the nightmare universes imagined by the godpersons of cyberpunk literature - internet access is near-universal in the western world, resources are becoming scarcer, global corporations are gaining power and influence beyond the dreams of some countries. If we want to survive this new world order, then we've got to be ready - not just look ready. If we want to take down systems, if we want to be hackers and independent tech contractors and urban warriors, it's not enough just to recreate the look and gobble MDMA. We've got to put the punk back into cyberpunk.

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And now I've caught myself humming Billy Bragg's Waiting for the Great Leap Forward, so it's time to sign off. More coming later about cyber-culture and gender, which I think deserves a whole separate post.

Behave? No, no, no!

Even considering that she's been splashed over the front pages of 'Metro' and 'London Lite' pretty much constantly since January, it's been quite the week for Amy Winehouse. The Wino party bus rolled into Birmingham amid the aftermath of husband Blake Fielder Civil's imprisonment for trial-fixing; that the subsequent tour dates have been 'shambolic' is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the fact that Amy's crowds are still surprised by her on-stage breakdowns, fits of tears and shouting, drugged-up mania and stagey strops such as, lately, hurling away the microphone and walking out in the middle of a cover of the Zutons' 'Valerie'. Guys -it's Amy Winehouse. You pays your money, you makes your choice.

Let me make a confession: I'm a huge fan. Never mind her bizarre hairdo and manic, self-destructive fits. Never mind her drug-use, her obvious eating disorders, her boozy, floozy, shambolic nicotine-diva behaviour. Never mind the fact that she's a glorious trainwreck. I think Amy's great.

The simple fact is that Amy Winehouse is breaking new ground. Never before has a female rock star -and Amy is unmistakeably a rock star, despite her sultry jazz-pop numbers - been so badly behaved, so publicly. From Jagger to the Doors to Nirvana to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to the Libertines, male stars and groups have used drugs, turned up on-stage drunk or not at all, got into fights, trashed hotel rooms, had ill-considered, public love-affairs, and made a great deal of mess for their well-paid managers to sort out. This trend has rarely extended to female stars - in fact, 'messiness' of this sort has routinely spelt career death for any starlet with an eye on her own perfume label. Not so with Amy's, whose lifestyle and cleverly constructed lyrical manifesto are all about hard-drinking, drugs, crazy men and glorious emotional anarchy, served up on a platter of ice-cold cynicism with a vodka chaser. I hardly dare to imagine what an Amy Winehouse perfume would smell like, but I, for one, wouldn't let it anywhere near my pressure-points.

Stunts like, say, stepping out in blood-soaked ballet slippers are perfectly pitched to subvert the 'sweet and innocent' paradigm perpetuated by singers like Britney Spears in the late nineties. Alright, so Amy's not exactly taking care of herself. She's openly admitted to having 'a bit of bulimia, a bit of anorexia', and seems to be living on a diet of booze, fags and attention. Her car-crash of a marriage, up to and including the latest jail debacle, hasn't exactly struck punches for female independence; the extravagant, passionate way Winehouse and Fielder-Civil have conducted their love-affair, however, is framed on more than an equal footing: Amy very much wears the trousers (or should that be the ballet slippers?) in this relationship.

She's clever, non-conformist, and has a wonderful, cynical sense of self-deprecation. I can't help it. I think she's fantastic. Winehouse's summer anthem, 'Rehab,' was a rallying-call against the forces of conformity and behavioural pathologisation. 'They tried to make me go to rehab,' she belts out with the force and passion of a woman three times her physical size, 'but I said, no, no, no.' Strange, then, that 'go to rehab' is exactly what newspapers and feedsites across the world seem to be suggesting that Amy do - the press have leapt, drooling, upon every drugged-up appearance, every instance of diva-like behaviour, as a sign that the singer should lie down and line up for institutionalisation like a good little girl.


Catastrophe Princess?

Funnily enough, noone has yet tried to suggest that Mick Jagger - or any other male musical icon you care to mention - is clinically insane and should be institutionalised for his own good. Amy's self-destructive non-conformity is much more threatening to a social paradigm that has always been able to cope with wild young men, but still can't quite handle wild young women, except as charity cases or warning stories. Across the pond, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan have jumped on the Catastrophe Princess bandwagon, falling out of nightclubs without their knickers on and being locked up for drunk driving. Winehouse, though, refuses to fit neatly into the box the media have drawn up for female stars gone feral.

For one thing, she's still very much on her feet. For another, she's a phenomenal talent: Back To Black, her latest album, was this week confirmed as the top-selling record of 2007. Her music has even made me - me! - hum along to blue-eyed soul, and I normally like my noise with three chords and a man from Belfast shouting. Her lyrics are powerfully raw, emotionally honest; her compositions demonstrate a musical range and a depth of feeling remarkable for a 24-year old from Enfield. 'Rehab' ends with a confession that brings an unanticipated lump to the throat of anyone who's ever tried to self-medicate for depression:

They said, I just think you're depressed
I said, yeah, baby, and the rest...
It's not just my pride
It's just till these tears have dried.

She's been justifiably lauded as the most important British musical talent to emerge in the past few years. Alright - so Amy Winehouse isn't a good girl. She's probably mad, certainly bad and quite possibly dangerous to know. She's emotionally anarchic, self-destructive and an unashamedly bad role model for clean-knickered young people everywhere. And I, for one, hope that she never starts to behave.