Show of Hands / Country Life / Roots - what is it to be english?

[TomPaine]

No, not really. Not if you can't back the opinion up with substance.

Well I think you are wrong, but I doubt you will agree with me and you are just expressing your opinion at the end of the day.
I believe I can back my pov on the above although I think writing essays on it on here is probably futile to be honest (and I'm supposed to be working ).

 

[kyser_soze]

The words to both those songs stirred something deep within me.

Feelings so strong I felt like crying out.
















How much they reminded me why I loathe and detest folk music/roots or whatever label you want to throw on it. Load of conservative, reactionary 'Oh what happened to the great land of ours' toss.

 

[TomPaine]

How much they reminded me why I loathe and detest folk music/roots or whatever label you want to throw on it. Load of conservative, reactionary 'Oh what happened to the great land of ours' toss.

Yaaaawwwwn.

 

[TomPaine]

Remember folks, country people shouldn't sing songs about rural poverty, CAP, the destruction of the countryside or the damage our neo-Lberal masters have done to the country.
They should quietly doff their caps to the oh so progressive types and pass quietly into the night (unless they complain about the Rain Forests, that's OK).

Trees are printing the Guardian and nothing else!

 

[kyser_soze]

Well you mention 'music our grandparents listened to'...well mine listened to a combination of classical and lounge/big band, and my great-grandparents played lots of classical music, and weren't atypical of the community they grew up in.

My roots are Essex and my native musical form, the one I feel most attachment to, is electronica - the first records I bought, the music that really caught my imagination were records like Autobahn, Are 'Friends' Electric etc.

 

[kyser_soze]

Remember folks, country people shouldn't sing songs about rural poverty, CAP, the destruction of the countryside or the damage our neo-Lberal masters have done to the country.
They should quietly doff their caps to the oh so progressive types and pass quietly into the night (unless they complain about the Rain Forests, that's OK).

Trees are printing the Guardian and nothing else!

Who is saying they can't? No one. It's only your desparate attempts to graft this into some kind of definitive Englishness, some fixed idea of 'English' culture that is the problem.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I've just read the songs now. I have no particular problem with the first one.

On the second, I have to agree with Kyser. It's the worst kind of nostalgia – harking back to a time that never existed. It's also self-pitying 'we're indigenous English' whining, really, of the kind that makes a lot of city folk glad they live in the city. Inward-looking and regressive.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Well you mention 'music our grandparents listened to'...well mine listened to a combination of classical and lounge/big band, and my great-grandparents played lots of classical music, and weren't atypical of the community they grew up in.

My roots are Essex and my native musical form, the one I feel most attachment to, is electronica - the first records I bought, the music that really caught my imagination were records like Autobahn, Are 'Friends' Electric etc.

Thing is, that second song is wrong even on its own terms. Mation and I were in a large pub in Hastings a while back. It was a Saturday night and packed, and someone put (lord fucking help us!) Queen on the duke box. Scores of people started singing along loudly.

 

[TomPaine]

Well you mention 'music our grandparents listened to'...well mine listened to a combination of classical and lounge/big band, and my great-grandparents played lots of classical music, and weren't atypical of the community they grew up in.

I think I actually responded to that. And my grandparents did listen to folk along side 40's big band etc.

Whilst of course music is down to taste, to write off folk music as:

Load of conservative, reactionary 'Oh what happened to the great land of ours' toss.

Is incredibly small minded, and no different to somebody writing of eletronica as "not music" and "a bunch of bleeps or a car alarm" etc.

That country life song for example was exactly aimed at the government as a protest against rural poverty, the Common Agricultural Policy and such like.
It's a protest song, not a song about playing golf in the Tory shires and complaining about some young scallywag kicking a ball too near your Beemer.

 

[TomPaine]

Who is saying they can't? No one. It's only your desparate attempts to graft this into some kind of definitive Englishness, some fixed idea of 'English' culture that is the problem.

I never said they couldn't. I was pointing our your sneering comment was a prime example of people just writing off folk music.
Desparate attempts, come on cut the hyperbole. I'm fully aware that "Englishness" does not fit in some sort of neat little box.

 

[kyser_soze]

Yes, and as a rule I personally find protest songs to be excruciating, including that. Sentiments like 'Our grandfathers won the war' I hear more usually grafted onto phrases like 'Why are there so many darkies?' and such a sentiment almost universally follows IME of living and growing up in 'the country'.

I grew up around farms and farming, have worked in dairies and an abbatoir, my mother (when she wasn't taking me to Reading) used to sing with a couple of Essex folk bands...sorry, but I don't simply 'write off' folk music, I write it off after years and years of listening to it and hating it.

 

[TomPaine]

Sentiments like 'Our grandfathers won the war' I hear more usually grafted onto phrases like 'Why are there so many darkies?'

You must have some rum folk round your parts then .

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You must have some rum folk round your parts then .

I can second the sentiment. Harking back to glory days that you can't even personally remember is a symptom of not liking how you think things have changed since then. What's probably been the biggest change in the UK since 1945? The development of multi-cultural cities.

IMO a well-adjusted person simply doesn't worry about such things. You get out there and find what you like in the great cultural mixer.

 

[TomPaine]

What's probably been the biggest change in the UK since 1945?

I'd say multi-cultural cities is one, however that came at a time of great change geenrally imo. Especially the rebuilding after WW2 and the slum clearences etc. and then the cultural revolution of the 60's.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

the cultural revolution of the 60's.

I would contend that the cultural revolution of the 1960s could never have happened without the large-scale immigration from the Commonwealth of the 1950s. It provided the necessary impetus of new ideas, new ways of looking at things and energy.

 

[Fruitloop]

Gradual dismantling of the post-war social consensus?

 

[TomPaine]

I would contend that the cultural revolution of the 1960s

To be honest I think it would have happened anyway. De-criminalisation of homosexuality etc. even before the immigration from the Commonwealth I think humanist ideas where starting to take hold, and people would have taken note from over seas anyway.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Gradual dismantling of the post-war social consensus?

This is something to get angry about. But is that what the songs mean? Maybe the first one.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

To be honest I think it would have happened anyway. De-criminalisation of homosexuality etc. even before the immigration from the Commonwealth I think humanist ideas where starting to take hold, and people would have taken note from over seas anyway.

Counter-factual history is always a bit futile, but the 'swinging sixties' would not have happened as it did without multicultural immigration.

 

[butchersapron]

The swinging sixties didn't happen.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

The swinging sixties didn't happen.

It certainly passed my parents by, but it did happen for some.

 

[TomPaine]

Counter-factual history is always a bit futile, but the 'swinging sixties' would not have happened as it did without multicultural immigration.

I'm not on about the swinging sixites though. I'm talking about a progress in societies attitudes towards certain subjects, that seemed to be moving in one direction regardless of immigration.
Take the NHS for example.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'm not on about the swinging sixites though. I'm talking about a progress in societies attitudes towards certain subjects, that seemed to be moving in one direction regardless of immigration.
Take the NHS for example.

Certainly the post-war social settlement did not begin because of immigration. Given the large numbers fucking off to Canada, Australia and South Africa after the war, though, the NHS, for example, could not possibly have developed without immigration from the Commonwealth.

 

[kyser_soze]

And indeed would collapse if it weren't for the huge numbers of nurses from Africa, India and the Phillipines and other clinicians from the rest of the world working in it today.

Which as much as anything else is a pretty shocking indictment of the UKs education system, but also endemic in almost every major socialised healthcare system in Europe...

 

[TomPaine]

Which as much as anything else is a pretty shocking indictment of the UKs education system, but also endemic in almost every major socialised healthcare system in Europe...

I agree it's sad. I don't think it will be helped either by increasing the cost of doing a medical degree. Especially if doctors come out with say 30,000 grand of debt and realise they can fuck off to the US and make a fortune.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

And indeed would collapse if it weren't for the huge numbers of nurses from Africa, India and the Phillipines and other clinicians from the rest of the world working in it today.

Which as much as anything else is a pretty shocking indictment of the UKs education system, but also endemic in almost every major socialised healthcare system in Europe...

Whereas in the 1950s it was emigration that necessitated immigration. People sometimes forget that more people left Britain the 50s than came here.

 

[kyser_soze]

I agree it's sad. I don't think it will be helped either by increasing the cost of doing a medical degree. Especially if doctors come out with say 30,000 grand of debt and realise they can fuck off to the US and make a fortune.

Doctors don't need to fuck off to the US to make a fortune, they can do it here by mixing state and private practice. Banks are very understanding of medical degree debt on the whole too!

Anyway, a discussion for another thread perhaps...

 

[TomPaine]

Anyway, a discussion for another thread perhaps...

Indeed .

 

[treelover]

The Northern towns such as Liverpool still have very strong local traditions, for example, John Power, Pete Hooton form the Farm and others have just brought out a Hillsborough benefit song, a rewriting of the 'The Fields of Althon Rye', entitled 'The Fields of Anfield Road' its not a very good version, but is is still a living tradition, obviously inspired by Liverpools' Irish Roots of which I am part of.

 

[butchersapron]

That's part of a very specific set of events (and connections) i think rather than an ongoing living folk-music culture.