Fortunately the British school system can be incompetent, liberal and so lacking in self-belief that it lacks the conviction to crush the creativity of young people, which does, therefore, continue to flourish in the interstices of authority, in the school corridor and after four o’clock, as it were. The crucial thing is to have education that doesn’t stamp out the desire to learn, that attempts to educate while the instincts of young people — which desire to be stimulated but in very particular things, like sport, pop music and television — flower in spite of the teacher’s requirement to educate. The sort of education that Thatcherism needed as a base — hard-line, conformist, medicinal, providing soldiers for the trenches of business wars and not education for its own sake — is actually against the tone or feeling of an England that is not naturally competitive, not being desperate enough, though desperate conditions were beginning to be created.
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Since Hogg first played ‘She’s Leaving Home’, the media has expanded unimaginably, but pop music remains one area accessible to all, both for spectators and, especially, for participants. The cinema is too expensive, the novel too refined and exclusive, the theatre too poor and middle-class, and television too complicated and rigid. Music is simpler to get into. And pop musicians never have to ask themselves — in the way that writers, for instance, constantly have to — who is my audience, who am I writing for and what am I trying to say? It is art for their own sakes, and art which connects with a substantial audience hungry for a new product, an audience which is, by now, soaked in the history of pop music and is sophisticated, responsive and knowledgeable.
And so there has been in Britain since the mid-1960s a stream of fantastically accomplished music, encompassing punk and New Wave, northern soul, reggae, hip-hop, rap, acid jazz and house. The Left, in its puritanical way, has frequently dismissed pop as capitalist pap, preferring folk and other ‘traditional’ music. But it is pop that has spoken of ordinary experience with far more precision, real knowledge and wit than, say, British fiction of the equivalent period. And you can’t dance to fiction.
In the 1980s, during Thatcher’s ‘permanent revolution’, there was much talk of identity, race, nationality, history and, naturally, culture. But pop music, which has bound young people together more than anything else, was usually left out. But this tradition of joyous and lively music created by young people from state schools, kids from whom little was expected, has made a form of self-awareness, entertainment and effective criticism that deserves to be acknowledged and applauded but never institutionalised. But then that is up to the bands and doesn’t look like happening, pop music being a rebellious form in itself if it is to be any good. And the Beatles, the most likely candidates ever for institutionalisation, finally repudiated that particular death through the good sense of John Lennon, who gave back his MBE, climbed inside a white bag and wrote ‘Cold Turkey’.
The Word and the Bomb
Most of the English writers I grew up reading were fascinated by the British Empire and the colonial idea, and they didn’t hesitate to take it as their subject. E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. Ackerley, George Orwell and Anthony Burgess all tackled this area and its numerous implications in one way or another, for most of their writing lives.
As a young man, living in the London suburbs with an Indian father and English mother, I wanted to read works set in England, works that might help make sense of my own situation. Racism was real to me; the Empire was not. I liked Colin MacInnes and E. R. Braithwaite, whose To Sir with Love so moved me when I read it under the desk at school. But where were the British equivalents of the black American writers: James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison? Who was noting the profound and permanent alterations to British life which had begun with the Empire and had now, as it were, come home?
Oddly, most modern British writers have been reluctant to similarly engage with such subjects at home. Questions of race, immigration, identity, Islam — the whole range of issues which so preoccupy us these days — have been absent from the work of my white contempories, even as a new generation of British writers has developed, following the lead of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie.
Most writers would say, quite rightly, that their subjects choose them; that they are interested in whatever they are interested in for reasons they cannot explain, and that writing is an experiment which takes you where it has to. The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising. Jo Shapcott puts it nicely in her poem ‘The Mad Cow Talks Back’: ‘My brain’s like the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells/saying this is the way, this is the way to go.’
In the post-war period, race — and now religion — have become subjects around which we discuss what is most important to us as individuals and as a society, and what scares us about others. Race is a reason to think about free speech and ‘hate’ speech; about integration, or what we have to be in order for society to work, and about the notion of the ‘stranger’. We use the idea of race to think about education, and what we assume our children should know; about national identity: whether we need an identity at all, and what such an idea means; about sexuality, and the sexual attitudes and powers we ascribe to others, as well as our place in the world as a nation, and what our values are. We think, too, through the often mystifying topic of multiculturalism, about how mixed and mixed-up we are, so much so that we find it disconcerting for others to be multiple, and even worse, for us to be so, too. And because our politicians are so limited in what they can say and think, we need artists, intellectuals and academics to keep our cultural conversation going, to help us orient ourselves.
Yet a curious sort of literary apartheid has developed, with the latest ‘post-colonial’ generation exploring the racial and religious transformation of post-war Britain, while the rest leave the subject alone. When British television, cinema and theatre saw it as their duty to explore these issues — and the strangeness of the silence which often surrounded them — British writers of the generation following Graham Greene seemed scared of getting it wrong, of not understanding, even as they complained of having nothing ‘important’ to write about, envying American writers for having more compelling subjects.
Not that this apartheid was entirely innocent. Salman Rushdie, in a 1983 essay entitled ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist’, describes the attempt of the literature business to exclude certain writers, shoving them to the periphery under the patronising term ‘Commonwealth writers’. The idea here is to keep writing in English pure, to change the terms of English literature ‘into something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist’.
It isn’t as though race is a new subject in Britain. Sukhdev Sandhu, in his comprehensive study London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, quotes a correspondent for The Times in 1867: ‘There is hardly such a thing as a pure Englishman in this island. In place of the rather vulgarised and very inaccurate phrase, “Anglo-Saxon”, our national denomination, to be strictly correct, would be a composite of a dozen national titles.’