A couple of days ago I had Radio 4 on in the background, as you do, and there was a piece about the punk movement. One of the Sex Pistols was reminiscing about the sheer force of it all and came out with the line that they could have powered the UK with the energy they produced.
It is a cracking line. Half boast, half joke, half myth. It has that proper punk rhythm to it, and you can almost hear the grin behind it.
And to be fair, punk did have energy. Cultural energy. The kind that turns up, sneers at the furniture, kicks the door off its hinges and makes the rest of the room feel embarrassed for still wearing a tie. It was brilliant at exposing how stale everything had become. It made it acceptable to be angry, skint, and unimpressed, which is basically a British birthright.
But punk also made a virtue of not having answers. That was the aesthetic. “No future” is not a plan, it is a howl. Punk was protest as performance, disruption as identity. If you turned up with a sensible spreadsheet you’d have been ejected for witchcraft, possibly with a bootprint on your arse.
The thing is, punk didn’t just vanish. It mutated. Out of that chaos you got bands like The Smiths, who took the same anti-establishment instinct and made it sharper and more articulate. Less gobbing at the system, more describing what it feels like to be quietly crushed by it on a wet Tuesday, and somehow making it funny without pretending it was fine.
And once you start thinking about that, you realise plenty of musical movements offered more than just noise. Not “solutions” like a government programme, obviously. More like a way through. A bit of moral direction, a bit of community, a bit of relief. Something other than smashing the window and then acting surprised when it gets cold.
Take the old folk and protest tradition. Dylan didn’t just complain. He basically told people to stop being cowards. He wrote songs that made it harder to pretend you hadn’t noticed what was happening, and harder to hide behind “oh it’s all very complicated”. He didn’t offer comfort. He offered a shove.
Or look at soul and Motown. That wasn’t “burn it down”. It was dignity, excellence, aspiration. It was saying: we’re not here to beg, we’re here to win. The whole thing is built on discipline and pride, and the quiet confidence that you can’t keep ignoring people who are this good.
Reggae and roots did something else again. It didn’t just rage at oppression, it explained it. It offered solidarity and identity and a sense that the powerful aren’t automatically right just because they’ve got the uniforms and the microphones. It’s not a tantrum. It’s endurance. It’s the long game.
Even rave, for all its daftness and its occasional grim edges, did something useful. It built temporary little communities where people dropped the usual tribal nonsense for a few hours. Less judgement, less hierarchy, more togetherness. Not a manifesto, but a glimpse of what it feels like when everyone stops performing for a bit.
Britpop wasn’t trying to fix anything, and that was half the charm. It was cultural reassurance. It was saying: we’re alright, actually. We can have a laugh, we can make something out of the ordinary, we don’t have to live permanently in a state of national self-loathing. Not revolutionary. Just human.
Pink Floyd is another kind again. Not protest, not celebration, but diagnosis. The machine is grinding you down. School is turning you into a unit. Work is eating your life. War is industrial. Consumerism is anaesthetic. Their gift wasn’t a plan, it was the moment you realise the cage is real, and you’ve been helping to paint it.
And then there’s Led Zeppelin, who sit outside all of this in a useful way. They weren’t fixing the system. They were escaping it. Big riffs, big myth, big swagger, and the feeling that you are larger than whatever dreary little life you’ve been handed Monday to Friday. Not politics. Just release.
Heavy metal does that too, in its own way. It takes rage and alienation and turns them into something shared and survivable. It’s catharsis. It’s a tribe. Sometimes you don’t need a solution, you just need your feelings turned up to eleven so they stop rattling around your skull.
So yes, music can be pure protest. It can also be decency, pride, solidarity, escape, therapy, celebration, awareness. It can give you a route through, even if it’s only for three minutes at a time. It can do more than just scream at the furniture.
Which brings us back to that Radio 4 line about “powering the UK”. Because the real divide isn’t between loud music and quiet music. It’s between movements that offer something beyond disruption, and movements that treat disruption as the whole point.
And now we’ve somehow turned that into politics. We’ve taken the punk instinct, stripped out the humour and the art, and kept only the smash. No community, just enemies. No dignity, just blame. No solidarity, just scapegoats. No awareness, just slogans.
And the only thing he’s ever reliably powered is himself.
Nigel Farage.
No comments:
Post a Comment