Owning one's own culture
May. 15th, 2007 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatI've just been reading a Radio Times feature in which various people give their opinion on which is the "greatest age of rock." Malcolm McLaren (svengali of the Sex Pistols) chooses the punk era, on the grounds that it was music by the people, and thus helped usher in interactive computer games, blogs and file sharing. For the first time in history, he said, we now have a generation that owns its own culture.
Really?
I have to admit that I don't know an awful lot about modern popular culture. My ignorant outsider's impression, though, is of a generation that is being conned – or is conning itself – into thinking that it owns its own culture, but is still largely paying money to enjoy a culture created by others. Yes, perhaps there are some examples of people owning at least parts of their own culture. Fan creations, such as fanfic, are arguably an example of this, and the internet has seen an explosion of such activities. However, they have existed for decades, and, besides, only involve a small minority of the population, anyway.
When it comes to wider popular culture, a lot of the so-called interactivity seems very cosmetic. You can press the red button to get "interactive" elements to a TV programme, but this is just a tiny little extra to the fact that you are still watching a programme created by others. You can phone some premium rate number to evict someone from Big Brother, but you are hardly creating your own culture. You are having a very small say in the details of someone else's concept, according to someone else's rules.
On the BBC news website, you can "have your say" on any news item, and you can express your opinion on it on your own personal blog. However, this doesn't seem to me to be much different from sitting in the pub with your friends chatting about it. All it offers is a potentially larger audience. The medium has changed, but the process is the same. Chatting to a friend is chatting to a friend, whether you do it face to face, over the phone, or through instant messaging.
When it comes to popular music, does this generation own their own culture? People can select which tracks to download, and create their own playlists, but someone else has still created the music, and it's been issued and marketed in a commercial fashion. Putting your favourite band's latest pop video up on YouTube is not creating your own culture. People still pay massive prices to go to concerts and festivals, where they are the audience, and the band is on stage, and never the twain shall meet. Some young people still form bands and create their own music, but that's nothing new – e.g. the skiffle culture in the 50s.
But enough of that. McLaren doesn't just assert that this generation owns its own culture; he also implies that no previous generation has done so. This doesn't really match what I know of folk culture in pre-Victorian Britain. It seems fair to say that these people, in part, at least, owned their own culture. At a local level, there was a huge repertoire of customs, celebrations and festivals that went on completely independent of the ruling elite – and, frequently, very much disapproved of by them.
The common people were, of course, had to go to Church, and had quite a lot of Christianity-related culture imposed on them from above. However, most people seem to have been very good at interpreting religion in their own way. Religious themes crop up in folk song in interesting ways, that bear little resemblance to anything preached in the pulpit. You just have to look at any book on calendar customs to see the vast difference between the common man's celebrations of a religious feast, and the way the establishment wanted to celebrated. Even the theology was often rather different from anything preached in the pulpit.
Each village had their own local stories, and their own local heroes and villains and superstitions. There was no television, radio or recorded music, so they would gather in the fields or the pubs to sing their own songs.
Of course, not all folk songs were written by peasants, and transmitted orally. Many songs were transmitted through writing, through broadside ballad sheets that were bought and sold. However, the broadsides were hardly an example of the elite imposing their songs on the masses. Provincial printers often wrote their own songs – murder ballads etc. – but they also collected songs from the common people, printed them, and passed them on to wandering chapmen to sell at fair. The common people who learnt songs from printed broadsides went on to interpret them in their own way. Cecil Sharp and co. often collected dozens and dozens of very different versions of a song. Although the song was traceable back to a printed ballad popular a few generations before, each community, and each singer, had made it their own.
There was, of course, a fair amount of culture imposed by above. One of the reasons given for the rapid decline of folk song in the late nineteenth century was that mass communication was improving, so the youth were singing the "new songs" from London, and no longer wanting the old-fashioned stuff their grandfather sang. Education Acts meant that more people went to school and absorbed the sort of culture that the ruling classes wanted them to absorb. Victorian middle classes didn't like the common folk's drunken revels, and "primitive" folk song, so set up community choirs to direct their musical leaning into more respectable channels.
It may well be that today's generation "own their own culture" more than people did 20 years ago. However, I find it hard to accept that they "own their own culture" more than people did back in the days before television, recorded music and mass communication, when people made their own entertainment in their own houses and pubs.
Really?
I have to admit that I don't know an awful lot about modern popular culture. My ignorant outsider's impression, though, is of a generation that is being conned – or is conning itself – into thinking that it owns its own culture, but is still largely paying money to enjoy a culture created by others. Yes, perhaps there are some examples of people owning at least parts of their own culture. Fan creations, such as fanfic, are arguably an example of this, and the internet has seen an explosion of such activities. However, they have existed for decades, and, besides, only involve a small minority of the population, anyway.
When it comes to wider popular culture, a lot of the so-called interactivity seems very cosmetic. You can press the red button to get "interactive" elements to a TV programme, but this is just a tiny little extra to the fact that you are still watching a programme created by others. You can phone some premium rate number to evict someone from Big Brother, but you are hardly creating your own culture. You are having a very small say in the details of someone else's concept, according to someone else's rules.
On the BBC news website, you can "have your say" on any news item, and you can express your opinion on it on your own personal blog. However, this doesn't seem to me to be much different from sitting in the pub with your friends chatting about it. All it offers is a potentially larger audience. The medium has changed, but the process is the same. Chatting to a friend is chatting to a friend, whether you do it face to face, over the phone, or through instant messaging.
When it comes to popular music, does this generation own their own culture? People can select which tracks to download, and create their own playlists, but someone else has still created the music, and it's been issued and marketed in a commercial fashion. Putting your favourite band's latest pop video up on YouTube is not creating your own culture. People still pay massive prices to go to concerts and festivals, where they are the audience, and the band is on stage, and never the twain shall meet. Some young people still form bands and create their own music, but that's nothing new – e.g. the skiffle culture in the 50s.
But enough of that. McLaren doesn't just assert that this generation owns its own culture; he also implies that no previous generation has done so. This doesn't really match what I know of folk culture in pre-Victorian Britain. It seems fair to say that these people, in part, at least, owned their own culture. At a local level, there was a huge repertoire of customs, celebrations and festivals that went on completely independent of the ruling elite – and, frequently, very much disapproved of by them.
The common people were, of course, had to go to Church, and had quite a lot of Christianity-related culture imposed on them from above. However, most people seem to have been very good at interpreting religion in their own way. Religious themes crop up in folk song in interesting ways, that bear little resemblance to anything preached in the pulpit. You just have to look at any book on calendar customs to see the vast difference between the common man's celebrations of a religious feast, and the way the establishment wanted to celebrated. Even the theology was often rather different from anything preached in the pulpit.
Each village had their own local stories, and their own local heroes and villains and superstitions. There was no television, radio or recorded music, so they would gather in the fields or the pubs to sing their own songs.
Of course, not all folk songs were written by peasants, and transmitted orally. Many songs were transmitted through writing, through broadside ballad sheets that were bought and sold. However, the broadsides were hardly an example of the elite imposing their songs on the masses. Provincial printers often wrote their own songs – murder ballads etc. – but they also collected songs from the common people, printed them, and passed them on to wandering chapmen to sell at fair. The common people who learnt songs from printed broadsides went on to interpret them in their own way. Cecil Sharp and co. often collected dozens and dozens of very different versions of a song. Although the song was traceable back to a printed ballad popular a few generations before, each community, and each singer, had made it their own.
There was, of course, a fair amount of culture imposed by above. One of the reasons given for the rapid decline of folk song in the late nineteenth century was that mass communication was improving, so the youth were singing the "new songs" from London, and no longer wanting the old-fashioned stuff their grandfather sang. Education Acts meant that more people went to school and absorbed the sort of culture that the ruling classes wanted them to absorb. Victorian middle classes didn't like the common folk's drunken revels, and "primitive" folk song, so set up community choirs to direct their musical leaning into more respectable channels.
It may well be that today's generation "own their own culture" more than people did 20 years ago. However, I find it hard to accept that they "own their own culture" more than people did back in the days before television, recorded music and mass communication, when people made their own entertainment in their own houses and pubs.
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Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-16 07:27 pm (UTC)No, and that was not what I was arguing for. Any further comments I make on this topic for the time being will be in