Be Here Now: Pop Music and the Heritage Industry
Intro: The Scene Is Set
For a decade or more, Britain's status, vitality and future course have been highly contentious issues. One of the fiercest debates has been around the notion that Britain is a nation in decline and that to compensate for this the British have become a backward-looking people, afraid of change and desperate to hold on to relics and memories of our former glory. This argument was put forward first and most
forcefully by Robert Hewison in his 1987 polemic, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline, a work which provoked a plethora of responses both for and against Hewison's position. I intend in this thesis to add my own two penn'orth to the debate and examine the assertion that we are living in a "heritage culture" (Hewison) by focusing on the health, good or ill, of one particular strand of contemporary culture: pop music. To do this comprehensively a consideration of wider social, cultural and economic developments is as important as an analysis of trends within the field of pop music. Hence, the interconnectedness of these different spheres is taken as axiomatic, for, as Chanan indicates in summarising Bakhtin's "dialogic principle", "all cultural production is part of a social dialogue unfolding in a particular historical moment, and therefore it is shaped by and immersed in the social and historical context." (Chanan, 1994, page 39).
The sense that, as Will Hutton bluntly puts it, "the British are failing" (Hutton, 1996, page 2) has perhaps been prompted more than anything else by the fact that our once proud boast of being the workshop of the world has become a nagging reproach to a nation whose manufacturing base has disintegrated to the extend that "in 1983 United Kingdom trade in manufacturing went into deficity for the first time since the Industrial Revolution; in 1990 the United Kingdom was the only European state with a trade deficit in merchandise". (Hutton, 1996, page 8). Compare this state of affairs with the fact that "in 1913 Britain produced 30.2 percent of the world's exported manufactures, in 1958 29.3 percent" (Hewison, 1987, page 89) and the steepness of the slippery slope the United Kingdom found itself on becomes clear. If de-industrialisation is regarded as a significant component of a climate of decline it is clearly worth investigating the origins of this situation.
The decimation of Britain's manufacturing sector largely occurred in the early 1980s. Robert Hewison indicated in 1987 "as much as a sixth of Britain's manufacturing capability has been that scrapped and not replaced during the 1980s", whilst pointing out that "excluding the self-employed, ninety-four percent of the job losses between 1979 and 1986 were in the Midlands and the North." (Hewison, 1987, pages 89/91). The savaging of the United Kingdom's productive capacity can be attributed to a combination of factors both national and international. In order to deal with its inherent tendency towards over-accumulation, capitalism was turning to "flexible and more mobile systems of accumulation" (e.g. services rather than goods) in an increasingly global economy (Harvey, 1990, page 184//page 296).
Long-term weaknesses of British industry (lack of investment, limited research and development, management/workforce confrontation) made it especially vulnerable at this time, a situation exacerbated by the Conservative government's adherence to free market dogma (which prompted both the scrapping of exchange controls and the decision not to help the ailing firms crippled by the strong pound which resulted). (Hutton, 1996, pages 62/66).
The ensuing carnage begged two important and related questions: how to revive Britain's flagging fortunes and what to do with the derelict land and buildings resulting from the closure of manufacturing concerns? One solution that was increasingly applied during the 1980s was to turn the idle plants and wasteground into tourist attractions. Both the government (which supplied funding for such urban
regeneration schemes as 1984's International Garden Festival in Liverpool) and local authorities who began to take a more active role in developing the economy, "saw in tourism a way of generating jobs directly and through more general publicity about their area." (Urry, 1990, page 108). Superficially, this seemed like a good idea since, after all, "by the year 2000 it is expected that tourism will be the world's biggest employer" (Collins, 1996, page 7). However, as Urry points out, within the global tourist economy "Britain has come to specialise in holidays that emphasise the historical and the quaint." (Urry, 1990, page 108). Hence, it is the "historical" and "quaint" features of places which have been emphasised in order to attract visitors and revenue.
The greatest repositories of historical artefacts are undoubtedly museums, and, as Hewison notes, recent years have seen an explosion in their numbers, as evinced by the fact that of 1,750 such institutions that responded to a Museums Association questionnaire in 1987, half had been founded in the previous sixteen years. (Hewison, 1987, page 24). For Hewison, rather than being a means to national renewal the growth in the number of museums paints "a picture of a country obsessed with its past, and unable to face its future." (Hewison, 1987, page 9). The problem is that "instead of manufacturing goods, we are manufacturing heritage" (Hewison, 1987, page 9). Hewison sees heritage as a very problematic concept since he feels it to be a
presentation of the past that is qualitatively different from (and inferior to) history. The difference between history and heritage, suggests Hewison, is the difference between "a critical (and) a closed culture" (Hewison, 1987, page 146). Thus, whilst for many years museums have had a beneficial social role as "an educational resource or a repository of memory" with large-scale de-industrialisation their primary function now appears to be as "an employer and economic asset as a tourist attraction". (Hewison, 1987, page 95).
From Hewison's perspective this worrying shift is exemplified by the rash of new museums, often styled "heritage centres", which sprung up in the 1980s in the hope that they would lead to urban renewal and economic regeneration (eg Wigan Pier Heritage Centre - opened 1984).
According to Hewison, "a heritage centre is not a museum … The main point is to present a theme, not to display a collection of objects". (Hewison, 1987, page 21).
In Hewison's eyes, heritage attractions are aiming to provide "a symbolic recovery of the way we were" (Hewison, 1987, page 21), something he sees as spurious and dangerous: spurious because, rather than history's sense of an ongoing, constantly shifting "future-orientated project" (Wright, 1985, page 255) that is open to interpretation, heritage offers a nostalgic, complete, singular vision of the past which substitutes consolation for creation and critical engagement. As Sir Roy Strong indicates:
The heritage represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged. (Strong in Hewison, 1987, pages 46/47).
The growth of a "heritage industry" which is promulgating a manifestly inauthentic version of history in order to exploit the widespread "nostalgia … for a lost sense of authenticity that has resulted from "the twin disruptions of modernisation and recession since 1945" is, says Hewison, deeply dangerous. (Hewison, 1987, page 29//page 10).
Hewison believes that the heritage industry has "led not only to a distortion of the past but to a stifling of the culture of the present" (1987, page 10) and that whilst:
The urge to preserve as much as we can of the past is understandable … in the end our current obsessions are entrophic: that is to say, as the past solidifies around us, all creative energies are lost. (Hewison, 1987, page 10).
I shall be examining the accuracy (or otherwise) of these contentious claims in some detail, but if, for the moment, we accept Hewison's suggestion that the heritage industry transforms creativity into cultural entropy then it is worth comparing the creative energy of contemporary British culture with that of the era preceding the alleged climate of decline.
For the historian Alan Sked (whom Hewison quotes) this malaise has been with us for decades as "since 1967 the British seem to have lived in an era of perpetual economic crisis, fearing that growth will never permanently return and that absolute decline may be just around the corner." (Sked in Hewison, 1987, page 42). This age commenced with the devaluation of the pound in November 1967 which brought to an end the "youth-led consumer boom" of the period known as the Swinging Sixties. (MacDonald, 1996, page 12). A large slice of what was being consumed was popular culture and, in particular, pop music, a field in which British quality and creativity seemed unmatched as, "spearheaded by The Beatles, the two-year 'British Invasion' of the American top ten established the United Kingdom as the centre of the pop world." (MacDonald, 1994, page 12). The catalyst for this success, The Beatles, are even now widely acknowledged as standing at the summit of pop music achievement. Before explaining why, I feel it is necessary to clarify what I mean by the term "pop music".
For the purposes of this argument, "pop music" should be taken to mean Western (primarily Anglo-American) popular music from the mid-1950s (rock 'n' roll) onwards, including Rock (a small band music concerned with notions of community and authenticity - see Carducci, 1994; Frith, 1983) and POP (capitals required to distinguish this particular form of the general genus - a song/ performer/ producer-centred music concerned more with artifice than authenticity, or in Heideggerian terms with becoming (who do I want to be) rather than with being (who am I, what is our music) - see Carducci, 1994; Savage, 1996; Reynolds, 1990).
These and a myriad of other pop genres (soul, rap, ska, etc) should be thought of as overlapping and interrelated, rather than rigidly separated. Pop music should be heard as the soundtrack to the channelling of youth desires into mass consumption, an ambiguous process because the desires freed in order to satisfy the demands of the market cannot always be satisfied by the market. Hence pop is marked by a dialectic of liberation and control as the freedoms it promises sometimes threaten the social order and must be kept within bounds (eg rock 'n' roll riots, mods and rockers' battles, hippy values, punk, etc). Yet, equally, a youth that is not "misspent" is commonly believed to have been wasted.
As I have mentioned, the greatest figures in the field of pop are commonly held to be The Beatles, a belief I share for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there is the sheer popularity of the group, both during its lifetime and in the years since (more records sold than any other performers - over one million; composers (Lennon & McCartney) of Yesterday (The Beatles, Yesterday) the most recorded song in history - sources: Guinness Book of Records 1998, page 154; Tobler, 1993, page 76). Of course, popularity along is no guarantee of greatness, but the longevity of The Beatles' appeal speaks volumes. Thus, the 1967 LP "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (The Beatles, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band") is not only the biggest-selling album ever in the United Kingdom (in excess of 4 million copies sold), but adds 50,000 sales to that figure every year, and was recently voted the greatest album of all time in a poll of the British public (Music of the Millennium, United Kingdom 24 January 1998, Channel 4), (record breaking data: Guinness Book of Records 1998, page 157). Even amongst critics it is the case, as MacDonald states, that "agreement on (The Beatles) is all but universal: they were far and away the best ever pop group and their music enriched the lives of millions." (MacDonald, 1994, page 1). Both popular and critical acclaim could be said to stem from The Beatles' uncanny knack of combining instant accessibility with artistic innovation. Pioneers who expanded the formal boundaries of pop music (eg on Tomorrow Never Knows, Eleanor Rigby (both from "Revolver", 1966), Norwegian Wood (Rubber Soul, 1965) and numerous other tracks (The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows/The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby/The Beatles, Norwegian Wood), in doing so The Beatles seemed to provide a near perfect reflection of "the psychic atmosphere of the time". (MacDonald, 1994, page 199).
To my mind what sets The Beatles apart from other pop acts and offers the clearest indication of their greatness is the extent to which they have become a part of people's everyday lives, part of what Habermas calls the "life-world", that realm of freedom where individuals escape the demands of "system" (economy and state), ie the purely "technical" demands of "economic and administrative rationality" and instead are at liberty to:
Obey the independent logic of moral-practical and aesthetic practical rationality … expressive and communicative possibilities … that enable individuals to find themselves, to deal with their personal conflicts, and to solve their common problems communally by means of collective will-formation. (Habermas, 1979, in Habermas (ed), 1984, page 20).
Evidence to support this assertion includes the adoption of Yellow Submarine and Octopuses Garden as children's songs, of All Together Now as a terrace chant (MacDonald, 1994, page 207) and especially the popularity of Beatles songs at communal gatherings (see chapters two and three; Savage, 1996, pages 143/149; The Beatles, Yellow Submarine/The Beatles, Octopuses Garden/The Beatles, All Together Now).
If The Beatles stand at the pinnacle of pop's achievement, logically, everything since must be viewed as a decline, although as Beadle (1993) observes, pop goes through fallow and fertile spells meaning that there are degrees of decline. Yet, by the early 1990s there was a strong sense that a terminal malaise had set in: sales of pop music had fallen dramatically "and at various moments the single looked to be completely out for the count. It was said that Right Said Fred's Deeply Dippy (Right Said Fred, Deeply Dippy) managed to arrive at number one in April (1992) on a weekly sale of less than 30,000 …" (Beadle, 1993, page 240). That this instance was symptomatic of a general condition is evinced by the BPI's decision in 1989 to lower
the requirements for the award of silver, gold and platinum discs (Beadle, 1993, page 179). It was not only the decline in sales that was giving cause for alarm, but also the fact that most of what sold was old (as Beadle indicates, of the ten best-selling singles in the United Kingdom in 1988, five were original or cover versions of old songs, whilst the top-seller was the schmaltzy Mistletoe and Wine (Cliff Richard, Mistletoe and Wine) by the veteran Cliff (now Sir Cliff) Richard, whose "ageless" appearance suggested that he might have been "preserved in aspic" himself (see chapter two) (Beadle, 1993, pages 185/186). The extent of pop's reliance on the past was revealed in the statistic that "back catalogue accounts for 70 percent of record company earnings in the United Kingdom" (Sweeting, The Guardian, 15 December 1993, G2T, page 4).
For a number of respected pop commentators these developments were a sign of "rock's degeneration into something to collect, something to document, rather than an ongoing cultural project" (Reynolds, The Guardian, 11 October 1990, Features, page 29). The expansion of the pop memorabilia market (see chapter two), the growth of pop music tourism (The Beatles Story, Rock Circus, Cavern City Tours - see chapter one), and the emergence of "tributes" to celebrated (usually dead or defunct) pop performers (ie attempts to replicate the look and sound of the originals, eg The Australian Doors Show - see chapter two) seemed like further evidence that a troubling new sensibility was abroad, a feeling most memorably articulated by Tony Parsons who,
writing in 1992, suggested that "all around, pop culture is dying on its feet. And where it is not expiring it is mutating into something else, something so much older and tamer that it is no longer recognisable as pop culture" (Parsons, The Times, 21 November 1992, S/R 4).
That pop should seem older and tamer is perhaps unsurprising given both the age of the artform (extant for over 40 years) and the rising age of the United Kingdom population) whilst the number of people over pensionable age climbed by nearly 3 million between 1961 and 1995, and there were 2 million more 30-44 year olds in 1995 than in 1961, over the same period the number of 15-19 year olds fell from 3,748,000 to 3,463,000 - Office for National Statistics, 1997, Annual Abstract of Statistics, page 10). Yet, if increasing leisure options and the fact that pop music is as important to middle-aged men like Tony Parsons as it is to teenagers has led to it ceasing to be "the touchstone of what it (means) to be young in the western world", does it necessarily follow that the form is in its death throes (Parsons, The Times, 21 November 1992, S/R 4)?
Actually, there are strong indications to the contrary, most notably the health of the United Kingdom music business in the mid-1990s, which, rather than being in terminal decline, was booming. According to the trade journal Music Week, 1996 was the fourth year of consistently high growth for Britain's music industry (Music Week, 25 October 1997, page 4). Jonathan Green, the General Manager and Marketing Director of Mercury Records attributes this reversal of fortunes to the influence of a new genre - Britpop - which "has revitalised the United Kingdom music scene with its success crossing over into other genres" (quoted by Williams and Ashton in Music Week, 8 November 1997, page 1).
What are we to make of this rock renaissance given the commonly held view that Britpop is "a kind of heritage pop" (Bracewell, 1997, page 229)? Does the British pop revival indicate that heritage solutions actually inspire renewal, or are those critics who deride Britpop groups such as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Elastica for being in thrall to the past misrecognising creative engagement with history for a sterile replay of England's former glory? Was Britpop really the catalyst for this boom or should the upturn in fortunes simply be attributed to the regular economic cycles of the pop world (the tendency for a "rotten" period to be followed by a "ripe" one (see Beadle, 1993)? Furthermore, is this pop renaissance only registering at the level of the checkout till, or are contemporary favourites matching their forebears for innovativeness, and the ability to connect with the life-world? The answers to these and further questions will be revealed by my in-depth analysis of Britpop in chapter three, but if one thing is certain it is that as Savage states, "Although it exists to heighten the present, pop is now saturated in the past" (Savage, pages 4/5). This is as true of Britpop as it is of phenomena like tribute performers, pop tourism and the pop memorabilia industry.
A detailed examination of each of these aspects of contemporary pop is required in order to uncover whether or not this presence of the past is an inherently bad thing, whether uses of the past which conform to the heritage model (treating it as a source of consolation rather than a site of contestation and inspiration) have pernicious consequences, or whether both these suggestions are unfounded. This examination begins with a close look at the links between pop music and the tourist trade.
Chapter One
All you need is cash?
Pop music and tourism in the United Kingdom1
With the decline of manufacturing and heavy industry the service sector has become increasingly important economically, and, as I pointed out in the introduction, tourism is considered to be a potentially very lucrative aspect of this sector. Of course, what tourists are coming to see is Britain's past, our "heritage". Having played a significant part in the development and dissemination of pop music globally (particularly through the achievements of The Beatles), the United Kingdom may be said to have a cultural heritage of international interest. The existence of two major sites of pop music-related tourism (Rock Circus in London, and the constellation of attractions in The Beatles' home city of Liverpool - The Beatles Story at Albert Dock and the numerous activities of Cavern City Tours Ltd) would seem to support this view.
I shall be examining whether the very existence of such attractions is a sign of galloping entropy in pop music, or alternatively, whether, whilst pop "museums" are fine in principle, the practice of these sites leaves a lot to be desired. Before so doing, I wish to point out the very different circumstances in which these attractions operate, circumstances which illustrate a flow in Hewison's arguments.
Hewison states that "the heritage industry is an attempt to dispel (the) climate of decline by exploiting the economic potential of our culture" (Hewison, 1987, page 9), yet this assertion doesn't ring true as regards Rock Circus (part of the Pearson-owned Tussauds Group), which is situated in Piccadilly Circus in the heart of London's always affluent West End. However, if the fact that Rock Circus is not intended to replace traditional industries or spark urban renewal reveals that the heritage industry is a more complex phenomenon than Hewison suggests, the role of pop tourism in Liverpool indicates that there is more than a germ of truth in his claims.
No British city has been harder hit by the decline of heavy industry than Liverpool, a situation which can be attributed to the fact that "the history of Liverpool is intrinsically linked to the fortunes of the city as a port." (MTCB, 1997, page 7). Hence, when Liverpool was one of the world's busiest ports (thanks mainly to its involvement in the slave trade) wealth poured into the hands of its shipping magnates and merchants, enabling the building of such architectural treats as Mount Pleasant's Georgian terraces.
Conversely, de-industrialisation and a reduction in trade with the Commonwealth in favour of closer links with our EU partners have taken their toll on a city on Britain's western seaboard reliant upon its docks, shipbuilding (in Birkenhead) and (to a lesser degree) other heavy manufacturing. High unemployment (see Hewison, 1987, pages 99/101) and depopulation have been the consequence (from 610,113 residents in 1971 to 449,560 in 1991 - OPCS, 1993, CEN 91 CR 28, page 17), with the added problem that Liverpool's old industries have left the legacy of a largely unskilled workforce, with a reputation for volatility that is off-putting to new investors. (MTCB, 1997, page 9).
In order to reverse this precipitous decline, government intervention (the establishment of the Merseyside Development Corporation) and EC assistance (the granting of European Objective 1 status) have been enlisted with the aims of improving Liverpool's image and infrastructure, and of attracting new employers to the region.
According to the Merseyside Tourism and Conference Bureau, "tourism being very much a growth industry is obviously an area targeted for expansion with Objective 1 assistance" (MTCB, 1997, page 9). Being the birthplace of The Beatles, who, along with Gerry and the Pacemakers have immortalised the Liverpool landscape in song, the city has a pop heritage ripe for picking by the tourist trade (The Beatles, Penny Lane/The Beatles, Polythene Pam/The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever/Gerry and the Pacemakers, Ferry Across the Mersey). Just a couple of decades ago, however: "a plan to erect a life-size statue of The Beatles was rejected by a Liverpool City Council committee on the grounds that the group could not sing, paid no real contribution to the city and took drugs" (The Guardian, 19 October 1996, The Guide, page 64).
The new, more Beatle-friendly outlook can be attributed to a number of factors, namely the length and severity of Liverpool's woes, and the absence of alternative means of renewal and the ageing of pop music and the pop audience (see Introduction) which has meant that fans and peers of The Beatles are now in positions of authority (most vividly illustrated by Sir Paul McCartney's knighthood). I shall be exploring whether Liverpool's pop heritage industry has had the desired effect of improving the city's image and economy in the Outro to this thesis, but, for the rest of this chapter I intend to analyse the effect ofpop tourism (at Rock Circus as well as in Liverpool) on those tourists and on pop music as a whole. Are these attractions simply exploiting nostalgia, presenting a false view of history and transforming the creativity of pop culture into sterility, damaging pop for good in the process? Time for some content analysis.
Cavern City Tours Ltd is a company which provides a plethora of services and sites for tourists attracted to Liverpool by the city's connection to The Beatles (including a Magical Mystery Tour by coach; maps and guides which enable visitors to "Discover Beatles' Liverpool" (sic); the renovated Cavern Club and Cavern pub in the gentrified "Cavern Quarter" of the city centre; and an International Beatle Week of events held each August). Lack of space precludes a detailed analysis of every aspect of Cavern City Tours' operations, so I will focus my attentions on their Magical Mystery Tour and some aspects of the International Beatle Week.
The Magical Mystery Tour Is a two hour coach journey around Liverpool taking in sights associated with the band: birthplaces, former homes, meeting places, old haunts, and so on. A guide explains the significance of the sites we are seeing and encourages passengers to sing along to The Beatles songs that punctuate the gaps between commentary (unfortunately no one did on my tour). The coach stops at a number of points to allow tourists to take photos and drink in the atmosphere (most noticeably at the Penny Lane street sign and the gates of Strawberry Fields). Included in the price of the tour (£8.50 in January 1997) is a souvenir poster and either a drink at the Cavern Club (where the tour ends) or a programme left over from the last International Beatle Week (the joys of synergy!). The key considerations from a critical perspective are 'does this commercial imperative have a detrimental influence on the tour's scholarship', and 'are The Beatles recognised as a site of struggle' (is there an opportunity to contest the account that is given)?
The first point I would like to make is that the Magical Mystery Tour is very informative and that there are many snippets of knowledge to be gleaned from it, furthermore, the fact that it offers the chance to see actual historical sites rather than simulations immediately lends it a certain validity. Whilst the (necessarily) monological nature of the tour guide's commentary limits opportunities for debate to those few moments when the coach is not in motion, that commentary reveals a degree of conflict over The Beatles' legacy. For instance, the guide acknowledges the oft-heard criticism that The Beatles have done nothing for Liverpool before challenging this view by pointing to Sir Paul McCartney's involvement in LIPA (Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts) and George Harrison's contribution to the refurbishment of Sefton Park's Palm House. This defence of The Beatles also reveals a truth about the tour as a whole: the fact that it strongly emphasises the notion that the group were part of a wider community (reference is made to friends and family of the band, to the influence of the city's Irish immigrants and the importance of religion in Liverpool, explaining how these factors affected the lives
and music of the fab four). The encouragement to tourists to sing along to The Beatles' songs on the coach can be viewed as an attempt to include them in this community, for, as Tomlinson notes, "a sense of communal identity must depend on opportunity at some point to engage in a dialogue - to have a sense of others as dialogue partners" (Tomlinson, 1993, page 25).
Whilst this all seems highly laudable, there are some unpalatable consequences of allowing people to buy into a "community", as the cordoning off of Matthew Street (site of the Cavern Club) during International Beatle Week amply illustrates. Whilst tourists from all four corners of the world are able to enjoy the many bands performing the music of The Beatles) locals who do not have the wherewithal to pay for the privilege find themselves outcasts in their own city, excluded from the communal celebration of the band's success, a triumph which (according to Cavern City Tours) the Liverpudlian community did so much to foster. Scousers should get in free or Cavern City tours are full of shit! This privatisation of public space undermines the communal spirit which the company's activities exploit, lending weight to Hewison's belief that the heritage industry reasserts the undemocratic values of the class system (Hewison, 1987, page 10; page 29, page 53).
Another vociferous critic of heritage culture, Neal Ascherson, makes similar noises when accusing "heritage" of being right-wing on the grounds that it "is the story of how we came to rule you and anything else is sedition" (Ascherson, The Observer, 8 November 1987, np). Whilst my analysis of the Magical Mystery Tour indicates a recognition that the meaning of The Beatles is up for grabs, the version of the group that is presented is tailored to fit in with dominant social values. In practice this means that The Beatles' laddishness (a genuine characteristic) is emphasised, whilst their androgyny (boys with long hair), bohemianism, politics and drug use go unmentioned. There is also a vigorous denunciation of the "lies" of the film The Hours and Times (1991, Christopher Münch, US, 60 minutes) (which suggested that John Lennon and The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, had an affair). Whether or not the film's scenario has any basis in reality (and the evidence is inconclusive - see MacDonald, 1994), the strength of the condemnation suggests a desire to sanitise The
Beatles' lives for mass consumption, even though if they had been as straight (in every sense) as the Magical Mystery Tour makes out, there would be no magic, no mystery, and ultimately no tour. (In fact, The Beatles frequently challenged conventional attitudes: consider the anti-materialism of Within You, Without You, and All You Need Is Love or the empathy with outcasts of Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles, Within You, Without You/The Beatles, All You Need Is Love/The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby).
A similarly bogus "normalisation" of The Beatles takes place at The Beatles Story, but before I explain how and why, a little background detail about this attraction seems necessary. The Beatles Story opened in 1990, at Albert Dock, home to Britain's largest group of Grade 1 listed buildings and a site with a range of entertainments (including many shops) that regularly draws over 5 million visitors a year (MTCB, 1997, np). This location suggests that The Beatles Story is an archetypal heritage industry development, an impression given credence by the site's promotional blurb which promises "a nostalgic journey" and a "multi-media experience" and encourages visitors to "experience the magic" (The Beatles Story, 1997, np). That this attempt to journey through the past begins and ends in a large gift shop and readily advertises its availability for corporate hospitality and private parties simply confirms Hewison's impression that, for the heritage industry, the past is valued primarily as a source of profit, "a resource, sometimes the last resource" (Hewison, 1987, page 99/The Beatles Story, 1997, np). Of course, for Hewison this economic
function encourages the presentation of "a passified, pastoralised, commodified version of history" that is in truth a "fantasy of a world that never was" (Hewison, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996/Hewison, 1987, page 10).
That there is some justification for this argument is evident from the inaccuracies and historical elisions on display at The Beatles Story. A notable example of this is the attribution of the band's use of LSD to the fact that "they were going through a very traumatic period in their lives" (The Beatles Story, Room 14, 1997). This assertion obscures the truth that The Beatles freely chose to take LSD for the creative insights it offered them: for instance, Strawberry Fields Forever (The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever), described by this attraction as "one of the greatest pop songs of all time" (The Beatles Story, Room 14, 1997) was, as MacDonald rightly observes, "another of Lennon's hallucinogenic ventures into the mental interior" (MacDonald, 1994, page 172). That The Beatles Story needs to find no excuse other than that they needed to keep awake for The Beatles' use of pep pills
during their time in Hamburg illustrates Shapiro's observation that amphetamines are "working drugs" (Shapiro, 1988, page 107), hence unthreatening to the core values of our society, whereas the mind-altering potential of LSD can lead to a rejection of those values ("Turn on, tune in, drop out": Timothy Leary - see Shapiro, 1988, page 132).
Alongside this "normalisation" of The Beatles one can also observe an attempt to sanctify the murdered John Lennon, as evinced by the final tableau telling The Beatles Story, a replica of Lennon and Ono's "white room" which, filled with the strains of Imagine (John Lennon, Imagine), running on an endless loop, attempts "to capture John Lennon's legacy to us of his music, lyrics, emotions and his quest for
peace" (The Beatles Story, Room 18, 1997).
To my mind, to reduce Lennon's legacy to this single song, image and intention is to do him and us a disservice since it elides the "cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic" side of his personality manifest in songs like I Am The Walrus and Good Morning, Good Morning (Bangs, 1991, page 299/The Beatles, I am
The Walrus/The Beatles, Good Morning, Good Morning).
John Lennon was no saint, so his Beatlification by The Beatles Story is a trite and sentimental gesture and a gross simplification of a complex character. According to Stuart Smith who, in 1987, was Director of Ironbridge Gorge Museum, visitors to museums should be inspired, they should be able to "actually look at what other people have done in the past, and go away and do similar things themselves"
(Hewison, 1987, page 143). It should be argued that The Beatles Story's treatment of John Lennon precludes such a possibility since he ceases to be a human being acting in a particular social and historical context, instead he is god-like (hence his "resurrection" for Free As A Bird (The Beatles, Free As A Bird), an event celebrated by a new wall display at The Beatles Story). Certainly, there is no sense of how The Beatles have shaped and altered pop music, nor of how they are a source of inspiration to current acts.
In the light of these criticisms it may seem surprising that The Beatles Story consistently garner between 110,000 and 126,000 visitors a year (MTCB, 1997, np). For Hewison, this is no surprise, it is symptomatic of the grip of the heritage industry, on the popular imagination, even though "heritage, for all its seductive delights, is bogus history" (Hewison, 1987, page 144). Indeed, echoing Fred Davis, Hewison asserts that the nostalgia which marks the heritage industry is less a nostalgia "for a personal past" than "for the media events of the music and popular press of a period" (Hewison, 1987, page 135). This nostalgia for "pseudo-events" rather than "real experiences" is, says Hewison, a feature not only of the heritage industry but also of the post-modern aesthetics in the arts. According to Hewison:
Post-modernism and the heritage industry are linked, in that they both conspire to create a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives, and our history. We have no understanding of history in depth, but instead are offered a contemporary creation, more costume drama and re-enactment than critical discourse (Hewison, 1987, page 135).
It is somewhat noticeable that both The Beatles Story and Rock Circus can be said to be definitively post-modern as that overdetermined term is understood by Hewison, for whom "the post-modernist format is the collage, an assembly of fragments without ruling pattern or perspective" (Hewison, 1987, page 133). In the case of Rock Circus this is apparent from the way that its collection of waxwork likeness of rock and pop icons are not placed in any chronological or genealogical order, instead one observes such bizarre juxtapositions as a carousel featuring "Little Richard", "Elton John" and "Stevie Wonder", from the centre of which "Elvis Presley" emerges singing "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!" This historical pick 'n' mix (where, as Hewison says of the heritage industry, the past "becomes simply 'yesteryear'" - Hewison, 1987, page 137) is also evident in the mingling of 1950s jukeboxes and iconic images (James Dean, Oldsmobiles, Elvis, Coca-Cola bottle tops, etc) with psychedelic posters from the mid/late 1960s.
This loose attitude towards chronological coherence indicates a slipshod attitude to scholarship which is reflected elsewhere in factual inaccuracies such as a Supremes song being credited to Diana Ross, a mistake which, like the synecdochal reduction of Punk to a likeness of Johnny Rotten, serves to propagate the lie: "that popular music is created by supremely talented individuals who owe nothing to any other human being, let alone to a complex web of historical, socio-economic circumstances, for their success" (McCarron, 1995, page 167).
In fact, the last of Rock Circus's three floors, home of the "Coca-Cola Music Revolution Show" does attempt to place pop music in context, but, like Paul Gambaccini's commentary on the first two floors it is marked by historical elisions and inaccuracies and an overall sense of narrative incoherence. Staged in a revolving auditorium (you're meant to feel like you're sitting on a giant record deck), the show begins with archive footage of jazz and blues performers intercut with shots of plantation workers before shifting to a cityscape peopled by factory workers, a sequence designed to suggest that rock 'n' roll was an urban, electric blues, a fallacy which obscures the crucial influence of country and western music (R & B legend Rufus Thomas illustrates this point when he states that "My family and I were raised on Grand Ole Opry" - Carducci, 1994, page 196). As Carducci notes, "whites in the early years of rock 'n' roll noticed primarily the blackness of the music. Blacks noticed the whiteness of it. But blacks don't write the history of rock 'n' roll" (Carducci, 1994, page 53).
Following this film sequence, a series of animatronic likenesses of pop alumni give some rather lifeless performances, which, rather than capturing the music's revolutionary spirit inspired not a word of dialogue (not even about the chronological inaccuracies such as bands from the late 1970s performing prior to acts around earlier in the decade). On my visit, we tourists simply traipsed silently into the gift shop in which the attraction (itself located in a shopping mall) fetches up.
The Beatles Story takes a different approach, but one which can equally well be considered post-modern. The installation is comprised of aseries of tableaux, each of which recreates a moment in The Beatles' career (eg on stage at The Cavern, flying to America), alongside which wall-mounted displays provide a chronological account of the band's activities. For Hewison, the notion that one can journey through the past in this way is both dubious and dangerous, since:
The "realism" of so many heritage displays in fact serves to block that potential individual act of the imagination.
In the case of displays of the recent past, it erases individual memories and substitutes a simulacrum - a perfect copy of an original that never existed. (Hewison, Museums Journal, April 1991, page 25).
In spite of my earlier criticisms of the content of The Beatles Story I wish to contradict this view since, from my own experience, rather than being "hypnotised by images of the past" (Hewison, 1987, page 100) the behaviour of many visitors indicated that they were interpreting that story in the light of their own unique experience. Adrian Mellor's observation that at heritage sites "families are engaged in a kind of informal pedagogy" was borne out by the sight of parents explaining to their offspring how their lives were altered by The Beatles (Mellor, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996).
Hewison has suggested that the heritage industry cannot sustain interest "because (its) version of the past is so shallow, so sanitised, that having been once people do not want to go again" (Hewison, Museums Journal, April 1991, page 26). I would argue that the sustained popularity of The Beatles Story suggests otherwise, and indeed, that part of its appeal lies in its shallowness since it is this attribute which enables visitors to make their own sense of the "experience". Rather than creating "a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives, and our history", in The Beatles Story a bank of shallow screens (reminiscent of a Nam June Paik installation - see Jameson, 1991) which showed footage of screaming Beatlemaniacs brought home to me how much the group meant to people, and how odd it must at times have felt to be in their shoes (Hewison, 1987, page 135).
The flaw in Hewison's reasoning arises from the rigid dichotomy he establishes between the negative correlates heritage and post-modernism and their positive polar opposites history and modernism. Before presenting evidence to destabilise this dichotomy I wish to point out the weaknesses in Hewison's conceptualisation of post-modernism.
Hewison takes his definition of post-modernism from Fredric Jameson's "Post-modernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (Jameson,New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984). A key tenet of Jameson's theory is that post-modern culture is marked by "the abolition of critical distance", a circumstance which means that opponents of multinational capital "are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well by considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it" (Jameson, New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984, page 85/page 87).
While opportunities for critical comment and oppositional behaviour may have diminished, Jameson's argument itself contradicts the idea that there is no longer any critical distance; to suggest otherwise is to make the classic error or collapsing the subject/object distinction. My own reactions and those of other visitors to The Beatles Story and Rock Circus (including the eminent critic Jon Savage who found the former "bizarre but affecting" - Savage, 1996, page 298) point to the fact that there is a good deal of critical analysis going on. If people come away from these attractions with a bogus impression of pop history it is perhaps most of all due to the nature of knowledge in the modern world. As Giddens indicates, one of the key components of modernity is the need to trust in experts: "trust brackets the limited technical knowledge which most people possess about coded information which routinely affects their lives" (Giddens, 1991, page 19).
This need for experts in whom one can trust explains why Paul Gambaccini, the respected pop historian and DJ (now for Classic FM - a sign of pop's maturity), provides a commentary at Rock Circus. However, as Giddens indicates, the problem with experts is that they can be wrong and, in fact, it is expected that they will be since knowledge in modernity is inherently unstable being subject to a "reflexivity" which makes "most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature (subject) to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge" (Giddens, 1991, page 20).
Since, according to Giddens, modernity is ongoing (a more trustworthy proposition than Jameson's inadequately theorised claim that we are living in the post-modern era - Jameson, New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984) the obvious inference is that modernism and post-modernism are less rigidly separated than Hewison suggests since the "reflexivity" of knowledge is a feature of both these distinct (but overlapping) cultural movements (even if the degree of reflexivity is more pronounced in the latter).
Bearing this in mind it comes as no shock to learn that museums have "even before the line about the heritage industry … always done hands-on, we've always had showmanship, we've always had scholarship, they've gone together" (Tim Shadler-Hall (Leicestershire Museums Chief), Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996). Indeed, as Lowenthal notes:
Britain has a long tradition of fanciful re-enactment. In Elizabethan times allegories of the Faerie Queene were acted in mock-fortified castles like Bolsover, and mock-medieval battles were waged alongside the real war against Spain. The mid nineteenth century saw the spectacular medieval tournament at Eglington (and) the Buckingham Palace masked ball to which Victorians came as their Elizabethan counterparts … (Lowenthal, 1985, page 299).
If, as my observations testify, heritage attractions tip the balance more towards showmanship than scholarship perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of the fact that "the integral relation between modernity and radical doubt ... is not only disturbing to philosophers but is existentially troubling for ordinary individuals" (Giddens, 1991, page 20). When you cannot wholly trust "facts" or "experts" you can at least trust in the "emotional truth" of a performance or performer. This explains why the elusions of the "white room" tableau at The Beatles Story seem insignificant next to the emotional power of the song Imagine (a commodity whose "Imagine no possessions" message of peace and universal brotherhood illustrates pop's dialectic of liberation and control perfectly - John Lennon, Imagine). Perhaps the main reason why such a commodified culture has also been the most potent "parallel communications system" of the last four decades is that pop music is in one sense ahistorical: "it provides a refuge from chronology, if only in its concentration on the moment … when played a recording remains as much in the present as it was in the moment it
was recorded." (Savage 1996, page 391/page 8).
The effect of this is inherently democratic since it means that no prior knowledge is required to make an expert judgement on the value of a recording (revealing the logic behind Marcus's assertion that pop is "an argument where anyone can join in2 - Marcus in Kureishi, Savage (eds), 1995, page xix). Yet, as pop (like The Rolling Stones) gathers more and more moss, it becomes more and more a subject of expert knowledge (hence Paul Gambaccini narrating for Rock Circus, or indeed this thesis). This could be interpreted as a dangerous development if one were to believe Baudrillard's argument that "information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary to total entropy" (Baudrillard, 1983a, page 100). Whilst many people are likely to (rightly) dismiss this claim as an exaggeration, fears about pop's increasing reliance on its past (see Introduction) suggest it does contain a germ of truth2. These fears stem from the fact that, as Savage notes, pop music is generally perceived "as a modernist medium - forever new, forever moving forwards. Its reliance on the past is seen to indicate a lack of emotional authenticity, a loss of cultural power" (Savage, 1996, page 5).
Savage (1991) traces the origins of post-modernism in pop to 1972 and David Bowie and Roxy Music. Since The Beatles (and Lennon's Imagine - John Lennon, Imagine) pre-date this development, the suggestion is, that their "emotional truth" is somehow tied to their modernism. As Savage indicates above (1996, page 5), one of the cornerstones of a modernist aesthetic is "newness", originality, yet two of the most significant "new" developments in pop music in recent years have been tributes and the memorabilia trade. In the next chapter I shall be exploring whether or not these phenomena are symptoms and/or causes of galloping entropy in pop, or whether those critics who hanker after the return of a culture with the power and authenticity of modernism (e.g. Tony Parsons, Robert Hewison) are themselves simply wallowing in nostalgia.
Notes
1. The Rutles, All You Need Is Cash, d. Gary Weis & Eric Idle, 1978, UK, 72 minutes, Broadway Video, VHS.
2. It is difficult to conceive of music per se as entropic since, as Herder observed, it is "an 'energetic' (energische) art (meaning) that it is essentially activity (energeia) and not a product or piece of work (ergon)" (Chanan, 1994, page 73). Nevertheless, because the act of recording transforms activity into product (record/tape/cd/score), music can succumb to entropic forces even as it retains its vitality.
For a decade or more, Britain's status, vitality and future course have been highly contentious issues. One of the fiercest debates has been around the notion that Britain is a nation in decline and that to compensate for this the British have become a backward-looking people, afraid of change and desperate to hold on to relics and memories of our former glory. This argument was put forward first and most
forcefully by Robert Hewison in his 1987 polemic, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline, a work which provoked a plethora of responses both for and against Hewison's position. I intend in this thesis to add my own two penn'orth to the debate and examine the assertion that we are living in a "heritage culture" (Hewison) by focusing on the health, good or ill, of one particular strand of contemporary culture: pop music. To do this comprehensively a consideration of wider social, cultural and economic developments is as important as an analysis of trends within the field of pop music. Hence, the interconnectedness of these different spheres is taken as axiomatic, for, as Chanan indicates in summarising Bakhtin's "dialogic principle", "all cultural production is part of a social dialogue unfolding in a particular historical moment, and therefore it is shaped by and immersed in the social and historical context." (Chanan, 1994, page 39).
The sense that, as Will Hutton bluntly puts it, "the British are failing" (Hutton, 1996, page 2) has perhaps been prompted more than anything else by the fact that our once proud boast of being the workshop of the world has become a nagging reproach to a nation whose manufacturing base has disintegrated to the extend that "in 1983 United Kingdom trade in manufacturing went into deficity for the first time since the Industrial Revolution; in 1990 the United Kingdom was the only European state with a trade deficit in merchandise". (Hutton, 1996, page 8). Compare this state of affairs with the fact that "in 1913 Britain produced 30.2 percent of the world's exported manufactures, in 1958 29.3 percent" (Hewison, 1987, page 89) and the steepness of the slippery slope the United Kingdom found itself on becomes clear. If de-industrialisation is regarded as a significant component of a climate of decline it is clearly worth investigating the origins of this situation.
The decimation of Britain's manufacturing sector largely occurred in the early 1980s. Robert Hewison indicated in 1987 "as much as a sixth of Britain's manufacturing capability has been that scrapped and not replaced during the 1980s", whilst pointing out that "excluding the self-employed, ninety-four percent of the job losses between 1979 and 1986 were in the Midlands and the North." (Hewison, 1987, pages 89/91). The savaging of the United Kingdom's productive capacity can be attributed to a combination of factors both national and international. In order to deal with its inherent tendency towards over-accumulation, capitalism was turning to "flexible and more mobile systems of accumulation" (e.g. services rather than goods) in an increasingly global economy (Harvey, 1990, page 184//page 296).
Long-term weaknesses of British industry (lack of investment, limited research and development, management/workforce confrontation) made it especially vulnerable at this time, a situation exacerbated by the Conservative government's adherence to free market dogma (which prompted both the scrapping of exchange controls and the decision not to help the ailing firms crippled by the strong pound which resulted). (Hutton, 1996, pages 62/66).
The ensuing carnage begged two important and related questions: how to revive Britain's flagging fortunes and what to do with the derelict land and buildings resulting from the closure of manufacturing concerns? One solution that was increasingly applied during the 1980s was to turn the idle plants and wasteground into tourist attractions. Both the government (which supplied funding for such urban
regeneration schemes as 1984's International Garden Festival in Liverpool) and local authorities who began to take a more active role in developing the economy, "saw in tourism a way of generating jobs directly and through more general publicity about their area." (Urry, 1990, page 108). Superficially, this seemed like a good idea since, after all, "by the year 2000 it is expected that tourism will be the world's biggest employer" (Collins, 1996, page 7). However, as Urry points out, within the global tourist economy "Britain has come to specialise in holidays that emphasise the historical and the quaint." (Urry, 1990, page 108). Hence, it is the "historical" and "quaint" features of places which have been emphasised in order to attract visitors and revenue.
The greatest repositories of historical artefacts are undoubtedly museums, and, as Hewison notes, recent years have seen an explosion in their numbers, as evinced by the fact that of 1,750 such institutions that responded to a Museums Association questionnaire in 1987, half had been founded in the previous sixteen years. (Hewison, 1987, page 24). For Hewison, rather than being a means to national renewal the growth in the number of museums paints "a picture of a country obsessed with its past, and unable to face its future." (Hewison, 1987, page 9). The problem is that "instead of manufacturing goods, we are manufacturing heritage" (Hewison, 1987, page 9). Hewison sees heritage as a very problematic concept since he feels it to be a
presentation of the past that is qualitatively different from (and inferior to) history. The difference between history and heritage, suggests Hewison, is the difference between "a critical (and) a closed culture" (Hewison, 1987, page 146). Thus, whilst for many years museums have had a beneficial social role as "an educational resource or a repository of memory" with large-scale de-industrialisation their primary function now appears to be as "an employer and economic asset as a tourist attraction". (Hewison, 1987, page 95).
From Hewison's perspective this worrying shift is exemplified by the rash of new museums, often styled "heritage centres", which sprung up in the 1980s in the hope that they would lead to urban renewal and economic regeneration (eg Wigan Pier Heritage Centre - opened 1984).
According to Hewison, "a heritage centre is not a museum … The main point is to present a theme, not to display a collection of objects". (Hewison, 1987, page 21).
In Hewison's eyes, heritage attractions are aiming to provide "a symbolic recovery of the way we were" (Hewison, 1987, page 21), something he sees as spurious and dangerous: spurious because, rather than history's sense of an ongoing, constantly shifting "future-orientated project" (Wright, 1985, page 255) that is open to interpretation, heritage offers a nostalgic, complete, singular vision of the past which substitutes consolation for creation and critical engagement. As Sir Roy Strong indicates:
The heritage represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged. (Strong in Hewison, 1987, pages 46/47).
The growth of a "heritage industry" which is promulgating a manifestly inauthentic version of history in order to exploit the widespread "nostalgia … for a lost sense of authenticity that has resulted from "the twin disruptions of modernisation and recession since 1945" is, says Hewison, deeply dangerous. (Hewison, 1987, page 29//page 10).
Hewison believes that the heritage industry has "led not only to a distortion of the past but to a stifling of the culture of the present" (1987, page 10) and that whilst:
The urge to preserve as much as we can of the past is understandable … in the end our current obsessions are entrophic: that is to say, as the past solidifies around us, all creative energies are lost. (Hewison, 1987, page 10).
I shall be examining the accuracy (or otherwise) of these contentious claims in some detail, but if, for the moment, we accept Hewison's suggestion that the heritage industry transforms creativity into cultural entropy then it is worth comparing the creative energy of contemporary British culture with that of the era preceding the alleged climate of decline.
For the historian Alan Sked (whom Hewison quotes) this malaise has been with us for decades as "since 1967 the British seem to have lived in an era of perpetual economic crisis, fearing that growth will never permanently return and that absolute decline may be just around the corner." (Sked in Hewison, 1987, page 42). This age commenced with the devaluation of the pound in November 1967 which brought to an end the "youth-led consumer boom" of the period known as the Swinging Sixties. (MacDonald, 1996, page 12). A large slice of what was being consumed was popular culture and, in particular, pop music, a field in which British quality and creativity seemed unmatched as, "spearheaded by The Beatles, the two-year 'British Invasion' of the American top ten established the United Kingdom as the centre of the pop world." (MacDonald, 1994, page 12). The catalyst for this success, The Beatles, are even now widely acknowledged as standing at the summit of pop music achievement. Before explaining why, I feel it is necessary to clarify what I mean by the term "pop music".
For the purposes of this argument, "pop music" should be taken to mean Western (primarily Anglo-American) popular music from the mid-1950s (rock 'n' roll) onwards, including Rock (a small band music concerned with notions of community and authenticity - see Carducci, 1994; Frith, 1983) and POP (capitals required to distinguish this particular form of the general genus - a song/ performer/ producer-centred music concerned more with artifice than authenticity, or in Heideggerian terms with becoming (who do I want to be) rather than with being (who am I, what is our music) - see Carducci, 1994; Savage, 1996; Reynolds, 1990).
These and a myriad of other pop genres (soul, rap, ska, etc) should be thought of as overlapping and interrelated, rather than rigidly separated. Pop music should be heard as the soundtrack to the channelling of youth desires into mass consumption, an ambiguous process because the desires freed in order to satisfy the demands of the market cannot always be satisfied by the market. Hence pop is marked by a dialectic of liberation and control as the freedoms it promises sometimes threaten the social order and must be kept within bounds (eg rock 'n' roll riots, mods and rockers' battles, hippy values, punk, etc). Yet, equally, a youth that is not "misspent" is commonly believed to have been wasted.
As I have mentioned, the greatest figures in the field of pop are commonly held to be The Beatles, a belief I share for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there is the sheer popularity of the group, both during its lifetime and in the years since (more records sold than any other performers - over one million; composers (Lennon & McCartney) of Yesterday (The Beatles, Yesterday) the most recorded song in history - sources: Guinness Book of Records 1998, page 154; Tobler, 1993, page 76). Of course, popularity along is no guarantee of greatness, but the longevity of The Beatles' appeal speaks volumes. Thus, the 1967 LP "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (The Beatles, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band") is not only the biggest-selling album ever in the United Kingdom (in excess of 4 million copies sold), but adds 50,000 sales to that figure every year, and was recently voted the greatest album of all time in a poll of the British public (Music of the Millennium, United Kingdom 24 January 1998, Channel 4), (record breaking data: Guinness Book of Records 1998, page 157). Even amongst critics it is the case, as MacDonald states, that "agreement on (The Beatles) is all but universal: they were far and away the best ever pop group and their music enriched the lives of millions." (MacDonald, 1994, page 1). Both popular and critical acclaim could be said to stem from The Beatles' uncanny knack of combining instant accessibility with artistic innovation. Pioneers who expanded the formal boundaries of pop music (eg on Tomorrow Never Knows, Eleanor Rigby (both from "Revolver", 1966), Norwegian Wood (Rubber Soul, 1965) and numerous other tracks (The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows/The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby/The Beatles, Norwegian Wood), in doing so The Beatles seemed to provide a near perfect reflection of "the psychic atmosphere of the time". (MacDonald, 1994, page 199).
To my mind what sets The Beatles apart from other pop acts and offers the clearest indication of their greatness is the extent to which they have become a part of people's everyday lives, part of what Habermas calls the "life-world", that realm of freedom where individuals escape the demands of "system" (economy and state), ie the purely "technical" demands of "economic and administrative rationality" and instead are at liberty to:
Obey the independent logic of moral-practical and aesthetic practical rationality … expressive and communicative possibilities … that enable individuals to find themselves, to deal with their personal conflicts, and to solve their common problems communally by means of collective will-formation. (Habermas, 1979, in Habermas (ed), 1984, page 20).
Evidence to support this assertion includes the adoption of Yellow Submarine and Octopuses Garden as children's songs, of All Together Now as a terrace chant (MacDonald, 1994, page 207) and especially the popularity of Beatles songs at communal gatherings (see chapters two and three; Savage, 1996, pages 143/149; The Beatles, Yellow Submarine/The Beatles, Octopuses Garden/The Beatles, All Together Now).
If The Beatles stand at the pinnacle of pop's achievement, logically, everything since must be viewed as a decline, although as Beadle (1993) observes, pop goes through fallow and fertile spells meaning that there are degrees of decline. Yet, by the early 1990s there was a strong sense that a terminal malaise had set in: sales of pop music had fallen dramatically "and at various moments the single looked to be completely out for the count. It was said that Right Said Fred's Deeply Dippy (Right Said Fred, Deeply Dippy) managed to arrive at number one in April (1992) on a weekly sale of less than 30,000 …" (Beadle, 1993, page 240). That this instance was symptomatic of a general condition is evinced by the BPI's decision in 1989 to lower
the requirements for the award of silver, gold and platinum discs (Beadle, 1993, page 179). It was not only the decline in sales that was giving cause for alarm, but also the fact that most of what sold was old (as Beadle indicates, of the ten best-selling singles in the United Kingdom in 1988, five were original or cover versions of old songs, whilst the top-seller was the schmaltzy Mistletoe and Wine (Cliff Richard, Mistletoe and Wine) by the veteran Cliff (now Sir Cliff) Richard, whose "ageless" appearance suggested that he might have been "preserved in aspic" himself (see chapter two) (Beadle, 1993, pages 185/186). The extent of pop's reliance on the past was revealed in the statistic that "back catalogue accounts for 70 percent of record company earnings in the United Kingdom" (Sweeting, The Guardian, 15 December 1993, G2T, page 4).
For a number of respected pop commentators these developments were a sign of "rock's degeneration into something to collect, something to document, rather than an ongoing cultural project" (Reynolds, The Guardian, 11 October 1990, Features, page 29). The expansion of the pop memorabilia market (see chapter two), the growth of pop music tourism (The Beatles Story, Rock Circus, Cavern City Tours - see chapter one), and the emergence of "tributes" to celebrated (usually dead or defunct) pop performers (ie attempts to replicate the look and sound of the originals, eg The Australian Doors Show - see chapter two) seemed like further evidence that a troubling new sensibility was abroad, a feeling most memorably articulated by Tony Parsons who,
writing in 1992, suggested that "all around, pop culture is dying on its feet. And where it is not expiring it is mutating into something else, something so much older and tamer that it is no longer recognisable as pop culture" (Parsons, The Times, 21 November 1992, S/R 4).
That pop should seem older and tamer is perhaps unsurprising given both the age of the artform (extant for over 40 years) and the rising age of the United Kingdom population) whilst the number of people over pensionable age climbed by nearly 3 million between 1961 and 1995, and there were 2 million more 30-44 year olds in 1995 than in 1961, over the same period the number of 15-19 year olds fell from 3,748,000 to 3,463,000 - Office for National Statistics, 1997, Annual Abstract of Statistics, page 10). Yet, if increasing leisure options and the fact that pop music is as important to middle-aged men like Tony Parsons as it is to teenagers has led to it ceasing to be "the touchstone of what it (means) to be young in the western world", does it necessarily follow that the form is in its death throes (Parsons, The Times, 21 November 1992, S/R 4)?
Actually, there are strong indications to the contrary, most notably the health of the United Kingdom music business in the mid-1990s, which, rather than being in terminal decline, was booming. According to the trade journal Music Week, 1996 was the fourth year of consistently high growth for Britain's music industry (Music Week, 25 October 1997, page 4). Jonathan Green, the General Manager and Marketing Director of Mercury Records attributes this reversal of fortunes to the influence of a new genre - Britpop - which "has revitalised the United Kingdom music scene with its success crossing over into other genres" (quoted by Williams and Ashton in Music Week, 8 November 1997, page 1).
What are we to make of this rock renaissance given the commonly held view that Britpop is "a kind of heritage pop" (Bracewell, 1997, page 229)? Does the British pop revival indicate that heritage solutions actually inspire renewal, or are those critics who deride Britpop groups such as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Elastica for being in thrall to the past misrecognising creative engagement with history for a sterile replay of England's former glory? Was Britpop really the catalyst for this boom or should the upturn in fortunes simply be attributed to the regular economic cycles of the pop world (the tendency for a "rotten" period to be followed by a "ripe" one (see Beadle, 1993)? Furthermore, is this pop renaissance only registering at the level of the checkout till, or are contemporary favourites matching their forebears for innovativeness, and the ability to connect with the life-world? The answers to these and further questions will be revealed by my in-depth analysis of Britpop in chapter three, but if one thing is certain it is that as Savage states, "Although it exists to heighten the present, pop is now saturated in the past" (Savage, pages 4/5). This is as true of Britpop as it is of phenomena like tribute performers, pop tourism and the pop memorabilia industry.
A detailed examination of each of these aspects of contemporary pop is required in order to uncover whether or not this presence of the past is an inherently bad thing, whether uses of the past which conform to the heritage model (treating it as a source of consolation rather than a site of contestation and inspiration) have pernicious consequences, or whether both these suggestions are unfounded. This examination begins with a close look at the links between pop music and the tourist trade.
Chapter One
All you need is cash?
Pop music and tourism in the United Kingdom1
With the decline of manufacturing and heavy industry the service sector has become increasingly important economically, and, as I pointed out in the introduction, tourism is considered to be a potentially very lucrative aspect of this sector. Of course, what tourists are coming to see is Britain's past, our "heritage". Having played a significant part in the development and dissemination of pop music globally (particularly through the achievements of The Beatles), the United Kingdom may be said to have a cultural heritage of international interest. The existence of two major sites of pop music-related tourism (Rock Circus in London, and the constellation of attractions in The Beatles' home city of Liverpool - The Beatles Story at Albert Dock and the numerous activities of Cavern City Tours Ltd) would seem to support this view.
I shall be examining whether the very existence of such attractions is a sign of galloping entropy in pop music, or alternatively, whether, whilst pop "museums" are fine in principle, the practice of these sites leaves a lot to be desired. Before so doing, I wish to point out the very different circumstances in which these attractions operate, circumstances which illustrate a flow in Hewison's arguments.
Hewison states that "the heritage industry is an attempt to dispel (the) climate of decline by exploiting the economic potential of our culture" (Hewison, 1987, page 9), yet this assertion doesn't ring true as regards Rock Circus (part of the Pearson-owned Tussauds Group), which is situated in Piccadilly Circus in the heart of London's always affluent West End. However, if the fact that Rock Circus is not intended to replace traditional industries or spark urban renewal reveals that the heritage industry is a more complex phenomenon than Hewison suggests, the role of pop tourism in Liverpool indicates that there is more than a germ of truth in his claims.
No British city has been harder hit by the decline of heavy industry than Liverpool, a situation which can be attributed to the fact that "the history of Liverpool is intrinsically linked to the fortunes of the city as a port." (MTCB, 1997, page 7). Hence, when Liverpool was one of the world's busiest ports (thanks mainly to its involvement in the slave trade) wealth poured into the hands of its shipping magnates and merchants, enabling the building of such architectural treats as Mount Pleasant's Georgian terraces.
Conversely, de-industrialisation and a reduction in trade with the Commonwealth in favour of closer links with our EU partners have taken their toll on a city on Britain's western seaboard reliant upon its docks, shipbuilding (in Birkenhead) and (to a lesser degree) other heavy manufacturing. High unemployment (see Hewison, 1987, pages 99/101) and depopulation have been the consequence (from 610,113 residents in 1971 to 449,560 in 1991 - OPCS, 1993, CEN 91 CR 28, page 17), with the added problem that Liverpool's old industries have left the legacy of a largely unskilled workforce, with a reputation for volatility that is off-putting to new investors. (MTCB, 1997, page 9).
In order to reverse this precipitous decline, government intervention (the establishment of the Merseyside Development Corporation) and EC assistance (the granting of European Objective 1 status) have been enlisted with the aims of improving Liverpool's image and infrastructure, and of attracting new employers to the region.
According to the Merseyside Tourism and Conference Bureau, "tourism being very much a growth industry is obviously an area targeted for expansion with Objective 1 assistance" (MTCB, 1997, page 9). Being the birthplace of The Beatles, who, along with Gerry and the Pacemakers have immortalised the Liverpool landscape in song, the city has a pop heritage ripe for picking by the tourist trade (The Beatles, Penny Lane/The Beatles, Polythene Pam/The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever/Gerry and the Pacemakers, Ferry Across the Mersey). Just a couple of decades ago, however: "a plan to erect a life-size statue of The Beatles was rejected by a Liverpool City Council committee on the grounds that the group could not sing, paid no real contribution to the city and took drugs" (The Guardian, 19 October 1996, The Guide, page 64).
The new, more Beatle-friendly outlook can be attributed to a number of factors, namely the length and severity of Liverpool's woes, and the absence of alternative means of renewal and the ageing of pop music and the pop audience (see Introduction) which has meant that fans and peers of The Beatles are now in positions of authority (most vividly illustrated by Sir Paul McCartney's knighthood). I shall be exploring whether Liverpool's pop heritage industry has had the desired effect of improving the city's image and economy in the Outro to this thesis, but, for the rest of this chapter I intend to analyse the effect ofpop tourism (at Rock Circus as well as in Liverpool) on those tourists and on pop music as a whole. Are these attractions simply exploiting nostalgia, presenting a false view of history and transforming the creativity of pop culture into sterility, damaging pop for good in the process? Time for some content analysis.
Cavern City Tours Ltd is a company which provides a plethora of services and sites for tourists attracted to Liverpool by the city's connection to The Beatles (including a Magical Mystery Tour by coach; maps and guides which enable visitors to "Discover Beatles' Liverpool" (sic); the renovated Cavern Club and Cavern pub in the gentrified "Cavern Quarter" of the city centre; and an International Beatle Week of events held each August). Lack of space precludes a detailed analysis of every aspect of Cavern City Tours' operations, so I will focus my attentions on their Magical Mystery Tour and some aspects of the International Beatle Week.
The Magical Mystery Tour Is a two hour coach journey around Liverpool taking in sights associated with the band: birthplaces, former homes, meeting places, old haunts, and so on. A guide explains the significance of the sites we are seeing and encourages passengers to sing along to The Beatles songs that punctuate the gaps between commentary (unfortunately no one did on my tour). The coach stops at a number of points to allow tourists to take photos and drink in the atmosphere (most noticeably at the Penny Lane street sign and the gates of Strawberry Fields). Included in the price of the tour (£8.50 in January 1997) is a souvenir poster and either a drink at the Cavern Club (where the tour ends) or a programme left over from the last International Beatle Week (the joys of synergy!). The key considerations from a critical perspective are 'does this commercial imperative have a detrimental influence on the tour's scholarship', and 'are The Beatles recognised as a site of struggle' (is there an opportunity to contest the account that is given)?
The first point I would like to make is that the Magical Mystery Tour is very informative and that there are many snippets of knowledge to be gleaned from it, furthermore, the fact that it offers the chance to see actual historical sites rather than simulations immediately lends it a certain validity. Whilst the (necessarily) monological nature of the tour guide's commentary limits opportunities for debate to those few moments when the coach is not in motion, that commentary reveals a degree of conflict over The Beatles' legacy. For instance, the guide acknowledges the oft-heard criticism that The Beatles have done nothing for Liverpool before challenging this view by pointing to Sir Paul McCartney's involvement in LIPA (Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts) and George Harrison's contribution to the refurbishment of Sefton Park's Palm House. This defence of The Beatles also reveals a truth about the tour as a whole: the fact that it strongly emphasises the notion that the group were part of a wider community (reference is made to friends and family of the band, to the influence of the city's Irish immigrants and the importance of religion in Liverpool, explaining how these factors affected the lives
and music of the fab four). The encouragement to tourists to sing along to The Beatles' songs on the coach can be viewed as an attempt to include them in this community, for, as Tomlinson notes, "a sense of communal identity must depend on opportunity at some point to engage in a dialogue - to have a sense of others as dialogue partners" (Tomlinson, 1993, page 25).
Whilst this all seems highly laudable, there are some unpalatable consequences of allowing people to buy into a "community", as the cordoning off of Matthew Street (site of the Cavern Club) during International Beatle Week amply illustrates. Whilst tourists from all four corners of the world are able to enjoy the many bands performing the music of The Beatles) locals who do not have the wherewithal to pay for the privilege find themselves outcasts in their own city, excluded from the communal celebration of the band's success, a triumph which (according to Cavern City Tours) the Liverpudlian community did so much to foster. Scousers should get in free or Cavern City tours are full of shit! This privatisation of public space undermines the communal spirit which the company's activities exploit, lending weight to Hewison's belief that the heritage industry reasserts the undemocratic values of the class system (Hewison, 1987, page 10; page 29, page 53).
Another vociferous critic of heritage culture, Neal Ascherson, makes similar noises when accusing "heritage" of being right-wing on the grounds that it "is the story of how we came to rule you and anything else is sedition" (Ascherson, The Observer, 8 November 1987, np). Whilst my analysis of the Magical Mystery Tour indicates a recognition that the meaning of The Beatles is up for grabs, the version of the group that is presented is tailored to fit in with dominant social values. In practice this means that The Beatles' laddishness (a genuine characteristic) is emphasised, whilst their androgyny (boys with long hair), bohemianism, politics and drug use go unmentioned. There is also a vigorous denunciation of the "lies" of the film The Hours and Times (1991, Christopher Münch, US, 60 minutes) (which suggested that John Lennon and The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, had an affair). Whether or not the film's scenario has any basis in reality (and the evidence is inconclusive - see MacDonald, 1994), the strength of the condemnation suggests a desire to sanitise The
Beatles' lives for mass consumption, even though if they had been as straight (in every sense) as the Magical Mystery Tour makes out, there would be no magic, no mystery, and ultimately no tour. (In fact, The Beatles frequently challenged conventional attitudes: consider the anti-materialism of Within You, Without You, and All You Need Is Love or the empathy with outcasts of Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles, Within You, Without You/The Beatles, All You Need Is Love/The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby).
A similarly bogus "normalisation" of The Beatles takes place at The Beatles Story, but before I explain how and why, a little background detail about this attraction seems necessary. The Beatles Story opened in 1990, at Albert Dock, home to Britain's largest group of Grade 1 listed buildings and a site with a range of entertainments (including many shops) that regularly draws over 5 million visitors a year (MTCB, 1997, np). This location suggests that The Beatles Story is an archetypal heritage industry development, an impression given credence by the site's promotional blurb which promises "a nostalgic journey" and a "multi-media experience" and encourages visitors to "experience the magic" (The Beatles Story, 1997, np). That this attempt to journey through the past begins and ends in a large gift shop and readily advertises its availability for corporate hospitality and private parties simply confirms Hewison's impression that, for the heritage industry, the past is valued primarily as a source of profit, "a resource, sometimes the last resource" (Hewison, 1987, page 99/The Beatles Story, 1997, np). Of course, for Hewison this economic
function encourages the presentation of "a passified, pastoralised, commodified version of history" that is in truth a "fantasy of a world that never was" (Hewison, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996/Hewison, 1987, page 10).
That there is some justification for this argument is evident from the inaccuracies and historical elisions on display at The Beatles Story. A notable example of this is the attribution of the band's use of LSD to the fact that "they were going through a very traumatic period in their lives" (The Beatles Story, Room 14, 1997). This assertion obscures the truth that The Beatles freely chose to take LSD for the creative insights it offered them: for instance, Strawberry Fields Forever (The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever), described by this attraction as "one of the greatest pop songs of all time" (The Beatles Story, Room 14, 1997) was, as MacDonald rightly observes, "another of Lennon's hallucinogenic ventures into the mental interior" (MacDonald, 1994, page 172). That The Beatles Story needs to find no excuse other than that they needed to keep awake for The Beatles' use of pep pills
during their time in Hamburg illustrates Shapiro's observation that amphetamines are "working drugs" (Shapiro, 1988, page 107), hence unthreatening to the core values of our society, whereas the mind-altering potential of LSD can lead to a rejection of those values ("Turn on, tune in, drop out": Timothy Leary - see Shapiro, 1988, page 132).
Alongside this "normalisation" of The Beatles one can also observe an attempt to sanctify the murdered John Lennon, as evinced by the final tableau telling The Beatles Story, a replica of Lennon and Ono's "white room" which, filled with the strains of Imagine (John Lennon, Imagine), running on an endless loop, attempts "to capture John Lennon's legacy to us of his music, lyrics, emotions and his quest for
peace" (The Beatles Story, Room 18, 1997).
To my mind, to reduce Lennon's legacy to this single song, image and intention is to do him and us a disservice since it elides the "cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic" side of his personality manifest in songs like I Am The Walrus and Good Morning, Good Morning (Bangs, 1991, page 299/The Beatles, I am
The Walrus/The Beatles, Good Morning, Good Morning).
John Lennon was no saint, so his Beatlification by The Beatles Story is a trite and sentimental gesture and a gross simplification of a complex character. According to Stuart Smith who, in 1987, was Director of Ironbridge Gorge Museum, visitors to museums should be inspired, they should be able to "actually look at what other people have done in the past, and go away and do similar things themselves"
(Hewison, 1987, page 143). It should be argued that The Beatles Story's treatment of John Lennon precludes such a possibility since he ceases to be a human being acting in a particular social and historical context, instead he is god-like (hence his "resurrection" for Free As A Bird (The Beatles, Free As A Bird), an event celebrated by a new wall display at The Beatles Story). Certainly, there is no sense of how The Beatles have shaped and altered pop music, nor of how they are a source of inspiration to current acts.
In the light of these criticisms it may seem surprising that The Beatles Story consistently garner between 110,000 and 126,000 visitors a year (MTCB, 1997, np). For Hewison, this is no surprise, it is symptomatic of the grip of the heritage industry, on the popular imagination, even though "heritage, for all its seductive delights, is bogus history" (Hewison, 1987, page 144). Indeed, echoing Fred Davis, Hewison asserts that the nostalgia which marks the heritage industry is less a nostalgia "for a personal past" than "for the media events of the music and popular press of a period" (Hewison, 1987, page 135). This nostalgia for "pseudo-events" rather than "real experiences" is, says Hewison, a feature not only of the heritage industry but also of the post-modern aesthetics in the arts. According to Hewison:
Post-modernism and the heritage industry are linked, in that they both conspire to create a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives, and our history. We have no understanding of history in depth, but instead are offered a contemporary creation, more costume drama and re-enactment than critical discourse (Hewison, 1987, page 135).
It is somewhat noticeable that both The Beatles Story and Rock Circus can be said to be definitively post-modern as that overdetermined term is understood by Hewison, for whom "the post-modernist format is the collage, an assembly of fragments without ruling pattern or perspective" (Hewison, 1987, page 133). In the case of Rock Circus this is apparent from the way that its collection of waxwork likeness of rock and pop icons are not placed in any chronological or genealogical order, instead one observes such bizarre juxtapositions as a carousel featuring "Little Richard", "Elton John" and "Stevie Wonder", from the centre of which "Elvis Presley" emerges singing "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!" This historical pick 'n' mix (where, as Hewison says of the heritage industry, the past "becomes simply 'yesteryear'" - Hewison, 1987, page 137) is also evident in the mingling of 1950s jukeboxes and iconic images (James Dean, Oldsmobiles, Elvis, Coca-Cola bottle tops, etc) with psychedelic posters from the mid/late 1960s.
This loose attitude towards chronological coherence indicates a slipshod attitude to scholarship which is reflected elsewhere in factual inaccuracies such as a Supremes song being credited to Diana Ross, a mistake which, like the synecdochal reduction of Punk to a likeness of Johnny Rotten, serves to propagate the lie: "that popular music is created by supremely talented individuals who owe nothing to any other human being, let alone to a complex web of historical, socio-economic circumstances, for their success" (McCarron, 1995, page 167).
In fact, the last of Rock Circus's three floors, home of the "Coca-Cola Music Revolution Show" does attempt to place pop music in context, but, like Paul Gambaccini's commentary on the first two floors it is marked by historical elisions and inaccuracies and an overall sense of narrative incoherence. Staged in a revolving auditorium (you're meant to feel like you're sitting on a giant record deck), the show begins with archive footage of jazz and blues performers intercut with shots of plantation workers before shifting to a cityscape peopled by factory workers, a sequence designed to suggest that rock 'n' roll was an urban, electric blues, a fallacy which obscures the crucial influence of country and western music (R & B legend Rufus Thomas illustrates this point when he states that "My family and I were raised on Grand Ole Opry" - Carducci, 1994, page 196). As Carducci notes, "whites in the early years of rock 'n' roll noticed primarily the blackness of the music. Blacks noticed the whiteness of it. But blacks don't write the history of rock 'n' roll" (Carducci, 1994, page 53).
Following this film sequence, a series of animatronic likenesses of pop alumni give some rather lifeless performances, which, rather than capturing the music's revolutionary spirit inspired not a word of dialogue (not even about the chronological inaccuracies such as bands from the late 1970s performing prior to acts around earlier in the decade). On my visit, we tourists simply traipsed silently into the gift shop in which the attraction (itself located in a shopping mall) fetches up.
The Beatles Story takes a different approach, but one which can equally well be considered post-modern. The installation is comprised of aseries of tableaux, each of which recreates a moment in The Beatles' career (eg on stage at The Cavern, flying to America), alongside which wall-mounted displays provide a chronological account of the band's activities. For Hewison, the notion that one can journey through the past in this way is both dubious and dangerous, since:
The "realism" of so many heritage displays in fact serves to block that potential individual act of the imagination.
In the case of displays of the recent past, it erases individual memories and substitutes a simulacrum - a perfect copy of an original that never existed. (Hewison, Museums Journal, April 1991, page 25).
In spite of my earlier criticisms of the content of The Beatles Story I wish to contradict this view since, from my own experience, rather than being "hypnotised by images of the past" (Hewison, 1987, page 100) the behaviour of many visitors indicated that they were interpreting that story in the light of their own unique experience. Adrian Mellor's observation that at heritage sites "families are engaged in a kind of informal pedagogy" was borne out by the sight of parents explaining to their offspring how their lives were altered by The Beatles (Mellor, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996).
Hewison has suggested that the heritage industry cannot sustain interest "because (its) version of the past is so shallow, so sanitised, that having been once people do not want to go again" (Hewison, Museums Journal, April 1991, page 26). I would argue that the sustained popularity of The Beatles Story suggests otherwise, and indeed, that part of its appeal lies in its shallowness since it is this attribute which enables visitors to make their own sense of the "experience". Rather than creating "a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives, and our history", in The Beatles Story a bank of shallow screens (reminiscent of a Nam June Paik installation - see Jameson, 1991) which showed footage of screaming Beatlemaniacs brought home to me how much the group meant to people, and how odd it must at times have felt to be in their shoes (Hewison, 1987, page 135).
The flaw in Hewison's reasoning arises from the rigid dichotomy he establishes between the negative correlates heritage and post-modernism and their positive polar opposites history and modernism. Before presenting evidence to destabilise this dichotomy I wish to point out the weaknesses in Hewison's conceptualisation of post-modernism.
Hewison takes his definition of post-modernism from Fredric Jameson's "Post-modernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (Jameson,New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984). A key tenet of Jameson's theory is that post-modern culture is marked by "the abolition of critical distance", a circumstance which means that opponents of multinational capital "are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well by considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it" (Jameson, New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984, page 85/page 87).
While opportunities for critical comment and oppositional behaviour may have diminished, Jameson's argument itself contradicts the idea that there is no longer any critical distance; to suggest otherwise is to make the classic error or collapsing the subject/object distinction. My own reactions and those of other visitors to The Beatles Story and Rock Circus (including the eminent critic Jon Savage who found the former "bizarre but affecting" - Savage, 1996, page 298) point to the fact that there is a good deal of critical analysis going on. If people come away from these attractions with a bogus impression of pop history it is perhaps most of all due to the nature of knowledge in the modern world. As Giddens indicates, one of the key components of modernity is the need to trust in experts: "trust brackets the limited technical knowledge which most people possess about coded information which routinely affects their lives" (Giddens, 1991, page 19).
This need for experts in whom one can trust explains why Paul Gambaccini, the respected pop historian and DJ (now for Classic FM - a sign of pop's maturity), provides a commentary at Rock Circus. However, as Giddens indicates, the problem with experts is that they can be wrong and, in fact, it is expected that they will be since knowledge in modernity is inherently unstable being subject to a "reflexivity" which makes "most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature (subject) to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge" (Giddens, 1991, page 20).
Since, according to Giddens, modernity is ongoing (a more trustworthy proposition than Jameson's inadequately theorised claim that we are living in the post-modern era - Jameson, New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984) the obvious inference is that modernism and post-modernism are less rigidly separated than Hewison suggests since the "reflexivity" of knowledge is a feature of both these distinct (but overlapping) cultural movements (even if the degree of reflexivity is more pronounced in the latter).
Bearing this in mind it comes as no shock to learn that museums have "even before the line about the heritage industry … always done hands-on, we've always had showmanship, we've always had scholarship, they've gone together" (Tim Shadler-Hall (Leicestershire Museums Chief), Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996). Indeed, as Lowenthal notes:
Britain has a long tradition of fanciful re-enactment. In Elizabethan times allegories of the Faerie Queene were acted in mock-fortified castles like Bolsover, and mock-medieval battles were waged alongside the real war against Spain. The mid nineteenth century saw the spectacular medieval tournament at Eglington (and) the Buckingham Palace masked ball to which Victorians came as their Elizabethan counterparts … (Lowenthal, 1985, page 299).
If, as my observations testify, heritage attractions tip the balance more towards showmanship than scholarship perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of the fact that "the integral relation between modernity and radical doubt ... is not only disturbing to philosophers but is existentially troubling for ordinary individuals" (Giddens, 1991, page 20). When you cannot wholly trust "facts" or "experts" you can at least trust in the "emotional truth" of a performance or performer. This explains why the elusions of the "white room" tableau at The Beatles Story seem insignificant next to the emotional power of the song Imagine (a commodity whose "Imagine no possessions" message of peace and universal brotherhood illustrates pop's dialectic of liberation and control perfectly - John Lennon, Imagine). Perhaps the main reason why such a commodified culture has also been the most potent "parallel communications system" of the last four decades is that pop music is in one sense ahistorical: "it provides a refuge from chronology, if only in its concentration on the moment … when played a recording remains as much in the present as it was in the moment it
was recorded." (Savage 1996, page 391/page 8).
The effect of this is inherently democratic since it means that no prior knowledge is required to make an expert judgement on the value of a recording (revealing the logic behind Marcus's assertion that pop is "an argument where anyone can join in2 - Marcus in Kureishi, Savage (eds), 1995, page xix). Yet, as pop (like The Rolling Stones) gathers more and more moss, it becomes more and more a subject of expert knowledge (hence Paul Gambaccini narrating for Rock Circus, or indeed this thesis). This could be interpreted as a dangerous development if one were to believe Baudrillard's argument that "information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary to total entropy" (Baudrillard, 1983a, page 100). Whilst many people are likely to (rightly) dismiss this claim as an exaggeration, fears about pop's increasing reliance on its past (see Introduction) suggest it does contain a germ of truth2. These fears stem from the fact that, as Savage notes, pop music is generally perceived "as a modernist medium - forever new, forever moving forwards. Its reliance on the past is seen to indicate a lack of emotional authenticity, a loss of cultural power" (Savage, 1996, page 5).
Savage (1991) traces the origins of post-modernism in pop to 1972 and David Bowie and Roxy Music. Since The Beatles (and Lennon's Imagine - John Lennon, Imagine) pre-date this development, the suggestion is, that their "emotional truth" is somehow tied to their modernism. As Savage indicates above (1996, page 5), one of the cornerstones of a modernist aesthetic is "newness", originality, yet two of the most significant "new" developments in pop music in recent years have been tributes and the memorabilia trade. In the next chapter I shall be exploring whether or not these phenomena are symptoms and/or causes of galloping entropy in pop, or whether those critics who hanker after the return of a culture with the power and authenticity of modernism (e.g. Tony Parsons, Robert Hewison) are themselves simply wallowing in nostalgia.
Notes
1. The Rutles, All You Need Is Cash, d. Gary Weis & Eric Idle, 1978, UK, 72 minutes, Broadway Video, VHS.
2. It is difficult to conceive of music per se as entropic since, as Herder observed, it is "an 'energetic' (energische) art (meaning) that it is essentially activity (energeia) and not a product or piece of work (ergon)" (Chanan, 1994, page 73). Nevertheless, because the act of recording transforms activity into product (record/tape/cd/score), music can succumb to entropic forces even as it retains its vitality.
posted by Justin Toland at 8:27 pm
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