Embarrassed to be middle class

In contemporary rock music circles it has become increasingly unfashionable to be seen as white, educated and middle class.

During the 1970s and 1980s there were plenty of successful that bands combined high standards of musicianship with intelligent lyrics and a white, mostly middle class image, examples include: Steely Dan, Yes, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Kate Bush, XTC, Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys, Talking Heads, the Stranglers and the Police.

It first become fashionable to criticise “arty” middle class bands in the late 1970s when Maxist music critics like Lester Bangs got stuck into the “serious and pretentious” progressive rock groups of the early ‘70s.

Today there is a dearth of rock bands with high standards of musicianship, good lyrics and interesting arrangements. Among the only examples that come to mind are a few competent warblers like Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, heavy art rock groups like Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater, and post modern prog rockers like Muse and Radiohead.

The Mars Volta stand as a surprisingly successful band with art rock leanings, but having Hispanic members, they are probably less likely to be labelled as “pretentious” by left- liberal music critics.

To be successful, contemporary bands have to narrowly market themselves as hedonistic, anti-intellectual, instrumentally mediocre and fashionably self-effacing.

Instrumental virtuosity and the use of keyboards are frowned upon, as is deviating from an ideologically approved range of influences such as the Rolling Stones, the Ramones and the Small Faces.

The country which has suffered the most from this anti-middle class ideology has been class conscious Britain, which has gone from being a leader in popular music in the early’70s, to a mass producer of diazepam substitutes like Travis and Coldplay.

If you are looking for interesting popular music you are probably better off checking out obscure stuff from Continental countries like Sweden and Hungary, where the egalitarian fashion police aren’t so pervasive (as least in music circles anyway).