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In 1997 Radiohead headlined Glastonbury at the height of the success of the release of Ok Computer, an album widely recognised to express the disenchantment and alienation of the technology filled modern world and the disillusion of a generation towards mass culture. Mid way through the set Thom Yorke bellowed out the notes of Exit Music (For a Film), a song with such a spine tingling crescendo even the blurry 240p videos you can still find of it on YouTube are enough to give you goosebumps.
Radiohead, for all that they may have walked the narrow line between sad and depressing, were obtusely artistic. At the time they existed in a culture that still contained a divide between a world of alternative artists in which songwriting, authenticity, rebellion and subversive creativity were part of the dynamic, and ‘pop’, a world of manufactured artists miming to songs they didn’t write, sold as products because they were good looking, looked at with general derision by a still very much alive alternative culture.
Indeed a phrase existed then that has since vanished — “selling out”. Occasionally an artist might move from the alternative to the mainstream, cash in on their platform of success, hire pop producers and co-writers and go from being respected by a portion to consumed by the masses.
After the success of The Bends there was every reason for Radiohead to churn the wheel of being an alternative band, push for more radio hits, and no doubt they would have made a chunk of money and by now be doing a reunion tour. Instead they wrote Ok Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac, albums that cemented their place, even if you don’t like their at times morbid soundscapes or Yorke’s wailing voice, as perhaps one of the last sincerely creative bands in the popular mainstream.
Nearly thirty years later Dua Lipa strides onto the stage at Glastonbury, her musicians playing to a backing track as the words “ARSE OFF” flash on the screen and Lipa waggles her arse to the audience. The only instrument you can see in a shot is a guitarist, even though I’m pretty sure I can’t even hear a guitar part on the track the dancers are in formation to.
In a few decades then, “selling out” has gone from a nod of derision towards the vacuity of mass culture to something that has stifled alternative culture altogether. There is now a mainstream monoculture in which we make no differentiation between creativity and appropriation, performance and spectacle, and a huge amorphous subculture in which artists fight in the millions for crumbs in the blancmange of streaming services that dominate of our ear space.
Part of the reason Glastonbury has “gone pop” is not just because Emily Eavis seems to want to turn it into Coachella, it’s because, well, who are you going to choose? There are no modern artists with the popularity a band such as Radiohead had at their peak that could fill a headline slot at Glastonbury, you can have pop-sell outs or artists whose heyday was decades ago, that’s the choice if you want to draw crowds. That’s it, that’s culture now.
Indeed you would hardly be suprised if next year they abandoned three days of different headliners and had Taylor Swift for three consecutive nights, maybe with a guest appearance from Coldplay. I’m joking, but it would in seriousness probably draw more crowds than three days of alternative artists.
So why should you care? Well besides the poverty of choice and the vacuous effect on a younger generation, it is an unavoidable fact that culture is meaning. We like to think it doesn’t matter, and in an individualistic age you like what you like and I like what I like, who cares if I like pop?
But culture is what we are. Radiohead’s Ok Computer is considered a seminal album because it epitomised something of its era, and because those making it fought to express it as such. Dua Lipa, perhaps, also epitomises an era. But not intentionally or creatively. What it represents is one of empty headed, mindless, vacuous escapism; not artistic escapism- finger in your ears mind dulling escapism of the worst kind.
Thom Yorke once put it in an interview with Zane Lowe “you know you’re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music, because the moment they stop listening to sad music they don’t want to know anymore”. His point is not that we should be depressed, its an observation that part of the role of art is to give experience meaning, and that includes all experience. Sad music when it is done well is not depressing, instead it is uplifting because it gives negative experience meaning. So it is that people can talk about songs that might be deeply melancholic as having helped them through the hardest times in their lives.
So when all culture is is “You want me, I want you, baby My sugarboo, I’m levitating”, as Yorke put it “you know you’re in trouble”. Culture always has something to say about us and where we are, and when history records the 2020s, a world slumped mindlessly out of lockdown, what will they see except a TikTok addicted generation who “don’t want to know anymore”?
For those old enough to remember it, or interested enough to look for it, it is obvious that art is vital to making sense of the world. We should value it, see artists as prophets, respect them without idolising them, value them without worshipping them. It is possible, culture has done it and can do it again, as Shelley put it “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. They are, but unacknowledged now more than ever.
What matters is that spiritually awake people continue to create, regardless of the culture. It’s the only way culture will ever change. Humans for all their conformity are also agents of change. I remain hopeful. Thanks for your efforts to awaken the culture.