Whatever Happened to My Rock and Roll? (I'd rather not have the BRMC reference, but it fits the piece, reet?)

I can’t be alone in thinking that we’re on the edge of Something Very Shit Indeed.

You know the line in Fight Club about how our generation has no great war, no great depression? That our Great War is a spiritual war, and our Great Depression is our lives?

Pretty soon we’ll see how much shit hits the fan when we experience our Great War and our Great Depression at the same time (only after we’ve explained to a generally moronic and apathetic public that we’re using ‘great’ as a pejorative). Religious nutjobs trying to outdo each other in the Rank Stupidity and Death to Innocent Civilians stakes, and inflation threatening to go through the roof. Don’t get me started on the price of chicken. (Doesn’t seem to be affecting KFC though. Bastards.)

Anyway, I digress. What annoys me is that something somewhere is clearly going quite tits up, and Boris Johnson runs our capital city.

But on my radio is some berk telling me that she’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, she’s just so fucking lovely.

We’re all aware of the proliferation of NME diet-Libertines dross in the British music scene these days, but something a little deeper, a little more worrying struck me a month or so ago: the uber-pretentious music site Pitchfork’s main problem with the new Billy Bragg album is that it’s not political enough

They lamented that he’s foregone the polemic couplets of yore and made an album that’s, well, happy. They were criticising a man who remains one of Britain’s greatest living songwriters, who has produced another solid record, for not remaining the leftwing, Red Wedge firebrand he was so regularly caricaturised as. Often lambasted as a relic of Old Labour, a broken-record champagne socialist who shunned his roots, it appears we still need him to Help Save the Youth of America, and apparently the UK too. We still need him, and people like him, to speak for us.

It’s not, in essence, this idea I have a problem with.

I don’t disagree with the idea that musicians should speak for the disenfranchised and the jaded. Rock music in particular should be a simmering bastion of political dissent. Rock music should be rocking against racism one day, then shouting ‘cunt’ on live telly the next.

What worries me is that Bragg is a 51 year old folk-singer who clearly doesn’t want to be just a political songwriter, yet for some reason we are now yearning for him to be just that.

That’s because there’s nobody else. British music is a lethargic mess of indifference that only gets its arse in gear when they can make money from a cause they, in all honesty, know nothing about. Moody teenagers find solace in rebellion. Where’s the rebellion in the homogenized radio-friendly NME twat-rock that they’re force fed now? Once they had the Clash or Nirvana. Now they have the Kooks.

And we certainly can’t rely on Luke Pritchard to point out that the only way ID cards will save us from terrorism is if they’re nine feet by seven feet and made out of Kevlar (so we can hide behind them the next time some fuckwit sets fire to his shoes on a 747).

I wonder what the Twang’s opinion on the current plight of the Burmese public is. Does anyone think they actually have one? Does anyone care?

Is the View one of the stupidest band names ever? Is there actually a single thought between whole lot of the scruffy Cornershop-raping cunts?

When this generation shows our grandchildren the popular music of our day, what will they think? Will they be inspired by a Lennon or Stummer type figure, or be too busy scratching the microchip that’s implanted in their face because we were a generation that didn’t care, and looked to Alex Turner for social commentary? A generation that failed to see the irony of watching Big Brother as everything fell apart around us?

I’m not sure if the lack of activism amongst musicians is a result of the aforementioned apathetic and moronic public, or the root of it. It’s a chicken and egg situation, but chicken is too fucking expensive and we’re looking to the Hoosiers to save us.