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The radical tradition in music, in its multifarious forms, has never gone away
Many theorists have studied the relationship between politics and culture, from Gramsci and Adorno to Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams. But less attention has been given to the cultural role of music than to that of literature, film or visual art. Indeed, popular music and the commercial music industry have sometimes been dismissed altogether as a distracting or corrupting aspect of mass culture.1 More sympathetic writers have discerned in both popular and subcultural forms of music a capacity to reflect, reinforce or resist hegemonic ideas and to articulate a liberatory politics. This article seeks to address some recent aspects of the dynamic between politics and popular music, and its interaction with the construction and contestation of both class and national British identity, before suggesting grounds for optimism on the prospects for a renewed relationship between these elements.
Death of the protest song?
Music can play a significant part in the consolidation of individual and collective identity, including aspects of subcultural, class and national consciousness. In recent UK history, forms of non-mainstream, alternative or 'indie' music - genres often associated with DIY methods of production and distribution, and with principles of amateurism and collectivism - have frequently been seen as an intrinsic part of wider oppositional culture, and as offering a space and platform for the development and expression of radical, particularly left-wing, perspectives. Examples of this include the post-punk experiments of the 1970s and 1980s and their links with leftlibertarianism, and the class and racial consciousness expressed in US and UK hip hop.2 The radical possibilities more broadly inherent in music have been suggested by a number of writers, who have pointed, for example, to the capacity of mass raves or disco to overcome 'the alienating individualism of capitalist culture' through promoting feelings of 'collective joy', or have seen British dance music as reflective of a multicultural and postcolonial country3
This does not, of course, mean that the political tendencies of musical subcultures are always wholly or automatically progressive. Punk music in Britain, for example, despite providing opportunities and empowerment for its female and working-class adherents, has also been read as imbued with proto-Thatcherite individualism; and the commitment of many past...