clue me in, hipsters pt I
The Guardian newspaper website has run an article about how a pop single has been at the top of the UK pop charts for a record breaking 19 weeks, yet a large contingent of people in the UK claim not to have heard it.
The single in question is called "Rein Me In" by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean. Its lack of impact on the UK public conbsciousness was noted in the Guardian article which reported how a "swathe" of social media commenters were expressing ignorance of both the track and artists' existence. The "monoculture" that those of us growing up in the 60s to the 90s experienced no longer exists, it posits.
In those decades, exposure to new music was via magazines/music papers, radio and television shows, or going to random gigs. So a lot of music was subject to gatekeeping by these, uh, gatekeeping institutions. Music papers like The NME, Sounds and Melody Maker would relentlessly champion certain bands and completely ignore others. TV and radio were at the whim of the record company A&R men who would push their selected artists onto the playlists. In the days when independent local radio wasn't really a thing, the BBC basically had a monopoly on what music we got to hear. The only BBC radio DJs who would regularly play stuff that wasn't on the station's playlist were John Peel, Steve Lamacq, Johnny Walker and Bob Harris.
So this "monoculture" basically consisted of stuff that was fed to us by people with power. I remember too well the chart rundown every week where an hour would be dedicated on BBC Radio One to the latest singles chart positions. The DJ would read out the positions and play the occasional record. Acts that had the major labels' huge marketing budgets behind them would get their singles played despite the song not moving in the charts, whereas new entries or chart risers would be ignored because they didn't fit the chart show vibe.
Top of the Pops every Thursday night would be a similarly frustrating experience as they would show the charts for that week, including new entries and risers, yet we would see yet another repeat of a performance from two episodes ago by an act that were obviously getting pushed hard by the record label.
So this idea of a naturally evolving and occurring Monoculture in regards to music is a load of bollocks, really. The Monoculture was shoved down our throats to some extent and the entities that did so no longer hold that power (or in regards to the weekly music "inkies" don't exist anymore).
In some regards this is quite sad, in an Old Man Yells At Cloud way. Watching the Top of the Pops repeats that are shown on the BBC in Fridays, it's startling to see the difference between the audiences of the mid 1970s and 1990s compared to those of the 1980s. The 70s and 90s kids were in the kind of attire that you would see people wearing on a Saturday around town, just normal stuff. The 1980s was an explosion in mad hairstyles, weird fashion and bright colours; people wanting to dress more like their outlandishly garbed idols. The 1970s audiences are bereft of Glam Rock looking fellas or sparkly Disco Queens, the 90s audience are just dressed in t-shirts and jeans. The homogeny is really striking. The monoculture brought us a peacockingly audacious 1980s, something which you just don't see today, youth movements don't really seem to visibly exist - not to my ancient eyes, anyway.
So yeah, Guardian article; the Monoculture is over; but it's because the institutions that inflicted it are also over. Music is as brilliant and inventive and alive and vibrant as ever. We just have to go and seek it out for ourselves instead of being spoon fed by vested interests.