Where is our music?

I just watched a BBC documentary on reggae because my parents lived through that era - they were at the heart of it, the 1970s in Handsworth, the reggae capital of Britain. Handsworth is an area of inner city Birmingham. Back in the 70s and to this day, it has been a centre for immigration, a place where the white students and working class were thrown together with black and Asian second generation kids, where police racism found its counter-pole in mixed-race bands and gangs, one of the episodes in history where the oppressive state managed to unite potential enemies in the complicity of rebellion. The programme followed reggae from its roots to its later commercialisation - from Bob Marley and Steel Pulse to UB40.


It is obviously in the nature of a retrospective documentary to simplify a complex era, make everything seem black and white as such. The forces of conservatism and liberalism are the perpetual intertwined threads, and documentaries make it their aim to show the two clear sides of the argument - in this case, the anti-reggae mainstream and the pioneering young groups of the time, the former the voice of the past, and the latter progression. For this reason, it's easy to come to the conclusion that those grainy videos and dancing 80s teenagers with dreadlocks were not actually representative of the time - they're just one movement in a much wider social context, and the opposition were not united against them: what most programmes like that miss is the general sense of apathy felt by the majority. I doubt many housewives or farmers in 1981 really cared about Bob Marley's death.

Even then, the videos and the ideas do seem momentous: the 1980s Handworth riots happened, they represented genuine social unrest, and the music was a by-product of sentiments in the communities.

Where is our music? That's what I want to know. Where is this millenium's movement? We have social unrest - but what were the student protesters listening to? Was it really Radio 1? Where has the niche gone?

My first idea is that it's all just me. There are lots of niches that will be remembered and turned into documentaries in 20 years' time, it's just that I'm either ignorant of them or apathetic towards them. I don't care about mockney rapping or dubstep so I'm out of the loop when it comes to what will be defined as the sound of the early 21st century. Others would claim the 'scene' to be our niche, but it's pretty much one of the two mainstream options these days: as a teen, you either watch the X Factor or you dye your hair black and listen to My Chemical Romance. 'Emo' and 'scene' are as popular as many other genres.

So, I could just be blind to the decent niche that I fit into. To solve my ego-centric question of why I have to go looking abroad or into the past for music I like, I tried to think of what people of my 'sort' listen to - my age, my gender, my peergroup. I'm usually underwhelmed - it's a mixture, often, of the mainstream. Not necessarily lacking in talent, but certainly not a musical 'movement', carrying political affiliations or messages or diverging from what's gone before. For example, what Beyoncé offers isn't bad, but it isn't a way of life, it's good pop. And in my view, pop is a slowly drifting ship tied to the commercial docks, with niche genres the rowboats that sometimes find themselves on the open sea. The thrills don't come from being on board the cruise liner; that's a smooth, dull ride.

Another thought: maybe the internet is killing that kind of niche movement. Perhaps by being able to find what's going on in Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, my generation is breaking the mould; we no longer have to swarm around one genre at a time, we can stick our proboscises into all sorts across the world, and use the net to contact other lovers of our favourite genres, which is a kind of musical blood letting - it loses its charge and intensity at a particular moment because its communities are so geographically unconcentrated, and have no need to seek out peers in vivo; they have them in vitro, online.

Also, of course, there is the issue of illegal downloading: our new global method of music transmission doesn't get noticed because niche music loved by tech-literate young people is more likely to be siphoned into our Music folders from Torrentz.com than bought legitimately, so it doesn't make the charts or the bands don't sell enough to get promotion. We are killing our future documentaries, people. Do you want to be on TV or not? Stop it!

But yes. The whole thrust of today's post is this: I reckon my socio-cultural segment of this generation are the first middle-class young adults in a long time not to have a united front, musically. I have no idea if my peers are listening, en masse, to anything that the population isn't. That's at the core of it: is there any music unique to the group that I call 'us', or is it all being universalised by capitalism? We want to be original in at least a superficial way, find ourselves united as a collective (but an exclusive one, and one that listens to music we like personally). A more personal question - does that 'we' even exist? Is society losing its sharp edges, its social definition? Do I have a peer group, or am I just me?

The larger the audience, the more music has to cater for everyone to keep its fans, and so often becomes bland and the lyrics vague. I'd like to discover some music that isn't bland, something that's happening in my country, with lyrics which I can relate to, like reggae and two-tone spoke to my parents and their friends - like beat music or punk spoke to others.

What Makes Us Love Stealing Music?

Walking through a crowd of people a few weeks ago, my friend and I were discussing illegal downloading. "It is a crime!" she cried, far too loudly, and a couple of gatherings of people turned to eye us curiously. "You may not like it, but it's stealing, like going into a shop and taking a CD, but people don't care because there aren't the same consequences."

I nodded despondently. Faced with such an argument, it's very hard to disagree that illegal downloading is a bad thing. And for most of us, it isn't just about consequences: there is a moral framework in place in most of our minds which tells us stealing is wrong, according to principles of property ownership that we live by. So why does downloading music for free not feel particularly wrong?



Maybe it's because it counts to us among the many services that the internet offers: we can read The Guardian online without paying for a hard copy, same with most newspapers; we can watch music on Youtube, so what's the difference between that and having it on our hard drive? It's a blurry line, definitely. Especially when we go on to love the music, to listen to it all the time: we have a feeling of warmth towards the artist, and respect them, which feels like a kind of payment for the albums.

Then there's the idea that most of an artist's money comes from the gigs anyway. I'm sure it's true that they're one of the most profitable sections of a big band's income, but it would be wrong to think that this renders paying for albums and singles obsolete.

Of course, we also see bands like Radiohead distributing digital copies of their albums for free and we think, "see, it can't be that important for artists to get paid for MP3s!" But Radiohead have, as it stands, 259,682,938 plays on Last.fm - they're one of the most listened to bands in the world. The story is not the same for smaller artists.

"But I don't have the money," we whine. Or, "HMV doesn't stock it." "My iTunes is playing up!" "I can't be arsed to go out and get it." "Oh, I'll go and get it next week, after I've sampled it... by downloading it..."

We can all see from the shrinking music sections of what are, traditionally, CD shops, and the vast numbers of torrent and free MP3 sites that music isn't dying, it's just moved. It's not a shrinking business, it's just a failing one: what would happen if a huge free chocolate stall set up shop outside Thornton's? Music is getting freer, easier to access, and that's amazing - but in the end, it might just kill itself, because that band that sell half the number of albums they could have can't afford to make their next album. Reuben are a brilliant example - "dropped by their label 'cause they can't pay it back".

Reuben - 'Return of the Jedi'

"I'd like a job in which I'm able,
To put shoes on my feet, and food on my table,
Those nine-to-fivers, they look pretty stable,
But I get my wages from my record label."



One final aside: someone is benefitting from all this illegal downloading. The illegal downloading sites' owners, who get paid for advertising and some even for subscriptions. So, not only are you 'stealing', as my friend would insist, you're also funding criminals.

It would be great if music, as a source of joy and passion, could be free. But it isn't. And until then, the onus is on us to pay for it, or feel guilty - I think I can predict which one most of us will choose.