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Democracies of Culture and Cultural Democracies
The Failure of Evolution in UK Arts Policy
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Submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, The University of Amsterdam
As required for the degree
Master of Arts in Musicology
July 2018
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Contents
1. Introduction
i.
The Problem of a Democracy of Culture
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ii.
Defining a Cultural Democracy
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2. Chapter Two
i.
The Attitude of Hegemony
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ii.
Attempts and Resistance to Alternativity in Governance
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3. Chapter Three
i.
The Failure to Embrace Cultural Difference
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ii.
Aswad and the Rise of Commercial Black British Music
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4. Conclusion: A Call for Scepticism
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Introduction
The Problem of a Democracy of Culture
‘I want our work to be part of the solution not the problem [...] Maybe that way artists will help bind together our fractured society [...] Well maybe. But only if we get up off our arses, get out of our ghetto where we’re protected by our excellence, our artistic integrity, our outreach and education departments, our annual reports and go out to find the new world, embrace the future and help build a world we want to live in - not hide away fiddling while Rome burns.’1
- Graham Vick, 2016
When Graham Vick, the maverick and acclaimed opera director, finished the last line of his key note speech at the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Awards in 2016, he was met with deeply earnest applause. His audience made up the cream of the crop of British classical music. Opera directors and singers, soloists, the heads of great cultural institutions, conductors and young talent all gathered to keep this great tradition of classical music alive in the country. If Vick was right about our fractured society, his audience may have been ready to reach across the divide, but they were lying firmly to one side of the societal fissure. Few – if even Vick himself – would have fully grasped the weight of his words. From his view on the podium, Vick may have been trying to add a hint of self-deprecating irony when talking about the gathered group’s protection, but his words consolidated his view of a world in chaos. There was not a hint that if the group began dismantling their self-constructed ghetto walls of artistic excellence and integrity, they might find revealed to them a Rome that was, in fact, thriving.
1 Graham Vick, 2016. Transcript can be found at
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/10/graham-vick-opera-rps-awards-keynote-speech. Accessed 10th June 2018.
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Vick holds the position of Artistic Director of the Birmingham Opera Company, using his passionate drive for access to take opera to a diverse set of communities in Birmingham. A noble pursuit, and one that has been lauded and supported by the establishment; he was awarded a CBE for his services to opera in 2009, and he set up the company with the support of public funding from the Arts Council England.2 But Vick’s desire to release his beloved opera out to those from socio-economically diverse backgrounds in order to ‘bind together our fractured society’ is not an embrace of the ‘new world’ that he describes. In the grand scheme of cultural policy there is nothing ‘new’ about Vick’s position at all. Rather, he espouses an attitude taken towards diversity in the arts that has defined cultural governance in most of Europe since the responsibility for patronage of the arts moved largely from private benefactors to the state. In short, public governance of culture has itself been defined by its definition of the culture around it. It has assessed the arts on such ideologically loaded and nebulous terms as ‘excellence’ and ‘integrity’ and strived to equalise access to the forms and genres of art that come out at the top of this valuation. The latest report from the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport began with the understated, yet representative breakdown of its data of those participating in the arts, showing that '[t]he proportion of adults engaging with the arts was higher among certain groups including […] white adults, people in the upper socioeconomic group, people without a long-standing illness or disability and people living in less deprived areas.'3 Reports
from the institutions governing the arts have not shied away from transparency about those being left out of the system, and Graham Vick is not the only one to passionately argue for their inclusion. What has been left out of the conversation (whether in its vociferously passionate or most bureaucratic form) is a fundamental scepticism of the system itself. Not a scepticism that necessarily finds fault with the details of the processes and institutions that keep the arts governed, but a deep and inherent questioning of the ideological basis on which they are controlled.
It is through the field of cultural studies that this position has come to be most officially recognized, as the ‘democratisation of culture’ position – a phrase only occasionally used in policy reports around the world, whether or not they are advocating for this position.4 Though not the first to define the phrase, Yves Evrard has offered a very succinct definition of the democratisation of culture position as it plays out in policy:
Government cultural policies, notably in Europe […] are mainly steered toward the democratization of culture. They aim to disseminate major cultural works to an
2 Official notice of his CBE award can be found at The London Gazette, supplement 59090, published 13th
June 2009. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/59090/supplement/8.
3 Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, ‘Taking Part Focus on: Arts’ (Department of Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport, 2018).
4 See, for example of use in policy rather than strictly academic cultural studies, François Matarasso and
Charles Landry, ‘Balancing Act: Twenty-One Strategic Dilemmas in Cultural Policy,’ (Belgium: Council of Europe Publishing, 1999) and Monica Gattinger, ‘Democratization of Culture, Cultural Democracy and Governance’ (2011) – presented at the Canadian Public Arts Funders (CPAF) Annual General Meeting, ‘Future Directions in Public Arts Funding: What are the Shifts Required?’
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audience that does not have ready access to them, for lack of financial means or knowledge derived from education.5
In the UK, the most recent Arts Council England figures show that 62% of its public funding in the music sector has been promised to opera over the next four years, with a further 23% going to classical music – a total of 85% of funding going towards the most traditional ‘highbrow’ forms of music, with aims to disseminate these artistic products and activities to diverse audiences who have not traditionally had ready access to them.
But this attitude towards arts funding in the UK is surprising if one considers the strength of the commitment in arts policy to increasing involvement in terms of socio-economic diversity. In the latest of many reports on the matter from the Arts Council England, its director Sir Nicholas Serota affirmed that '[d]iversity is crucial to the connection between the arts and society; it represents a commitment to the wider world, and forms a two-way channel along which people can travel and find a platform to tell their stories.'6 It would perhaps be easier to accept the seemingly entrenched position towards the democratisation of culture position if Serota's words, which represent an aim to open up the arts through public policy and funding to all sectors of society, was a relatively recent one. Few policies should be too hastily judged, and certainly any policy which is aimed toward such lasting change as engaging different communities in the arts must be given substantial time to take effect. But if one looks back to the origins of the Arts Council England as it stands today, the funding body that disseminates the vast proportion of public funding to the arts in England (with counterparts in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), the use of its funds to increase diversity in the involvement with the arts (I define involvement here to cover both the production and consumption of culture) have been engrained since its inception.
Though one can trace a long history of arts patronage in the UK, the 'beginning of the modern period in official British cultural policy', as Robert Hewison puts it, began in 1940 with the formation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts - a body that later developed into the arts councils of the UK. 7 Just over twenty years later, in her seminal white paper ‘A Policy for the Arts –
First Steps,’8 the Labour MP Jennie Lee forcefully sought to create a new place for the arts in British life – radically rethinking arts policy not just to make way for a major increase in funding from the government (an increase of 45% in the first year of its inception),9 but to officially recognise the
responsibility of arts policy to reach to all sectors of the population. What is surprising, however, is
5 Yves Evrard, ‘Democratizing Culture or Cultural Democracy?’ The Journal of Arts Management, Law,
and Society 27:3, 1997, 167.
6 Arts Council England, Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case: A Data Report, 2016-2017, January
2018.
7 Robert Hewison, Cultural Consensus: England, art and politics since 1940, (Great Britain: Methuen,
1995), xv.
8 Jennie Lee, A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps (White Paper) 1965, 16. 9 Hewison, Culture and Consensus, 140.
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that in this seminal and much revered paper written over fifty years ago Lee not just called for a more inclusive and far reaching arts policy, but actually laid out the first steps to challenge the hegemony of a national policy defined by the democratisation of culture position. She writes:
It is partly a question of bridging the gap between what have come to be called the ‘higher’ forms of entertainment and the traditional sources – the brass band, the amateur concert party, the entertainer, the music hall and pop group – and to challenge the fact that a gap exists. In the world of jazz the process has already happened: highbrow and lowbrow have met.10
Considering the latest Arts Council figures which are so vastly skewed to a funding of ‘highbrow’, classical music it is clear that, though Lee never specifies what ‘gap’ she is talking about, in funding terms, no gap between highbrow and lowbrow musical genre has been effectively challenged to the point of change in the fifty years since Lee proposed this then-original viewpoint. To ask why, over the decades since a call to challenge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow was so pointedly made, this change has not been implemented in UK arts policy is one of the primary aims of this thesis.
This is not a question that can be tackled by a singular focus on culture itself, policy or cultural theory. It is through tracing a triple narrative, around the intertwining strands of intellectual, institutional and cultural history that one can begin to answer some of the questions around the decisions made for so long around arts policy. It does not immediately follow that through a changing period in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, of individuals in positions of power and influence, with varying governments from both the political right and left that such a consensus towards arts policy, and particularly the democratisation of culture position should have endured. Politics and culture exist in a complex web of interactions between one and the other, and it is partly through an understanding of the culture that has fallen outside of the direct policy of
governance that one can begin to understand the fallibility of that policy. It is through looking at examples of how culture, particularly that stemming from communities who are not well supported by arts governance, challenges the legitimacy of cultural policy that one can begin to understand not only the fallibility of the enduring democracy of culture position in the UK, but the difficulty in
implementing an alternative position.
Defining a Cultural Democracy
The dominance of the democratisation of culture position begs, arguably, not for a primary
interrogation of the position itself, but a questioning of its alternatives. To even begin to discuss the democratisation of culture as one side of a binary option opens the door to a plethora of academic
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tensions. The questions as to how one is to define ‘high’ culture, what is meant by ‘access’
(particularly as to whether one focuses on access to consume or access to produce) or how one is to ‘disseminate’ these major cultural works only begin to scratch the surface of the blurry line that this policy direction lies to one end of.
When one begins to consider an alternative position, it should be thought of not antithetical to the democratising culture position, but as residing at the opposite end of a spectrum – a spectrum on which lie uncountable philosophical and aesthetic as well as political disputes. One can acknowledge a contrasting position at the other side of the range, embodied in a model that has come to be called the ‘cultural democracy’ position, championed particularly by community artists and some academics from the 1960s and early 1970s.11 Of course, owing to the tensions and disputes along the continuum,
‘cultural democracy’ becomes a harder term to define than its supposed antonym. To return to Evrard, he offers the following definition:
By contrast, a model of ‘cultural democracy’ may be defined as one founded on free individual choice, in which the role of a cultural policy is not to interfere with the preferences expressed by citizen-consumers but to support the choices made by individuals or social groups through a regulatory policy applied to the distribution of information or the structures of supply, as happens in other types of markets.12
Evrard’s closely free-market oriented model, however, arguably falsely equates the notion of cultural involvement with other types of products. In doing so, he subscribes to the idea that by removing the problematic evaluative culture that must by nature come with the ‘democratisation of culture’ model (in order to define the notion of ‘high’ art, or ‘major cultural works’) one enters a market that allows for and entirely supports free individual choice. This immediately enters into dangerous territory in which perfect theoretical models are problematically supposed to fit the reality of a sociological situation. As soon as one begins to delve into the sociology of culture, definitive works such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s explanations of the ‘Culture Industry’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive research on the repercussions of cultural capital – as well as the myriad of works they instigated – immediately problematise the notion of a culture industry in which the value of culture in its many forms is defined entirely at the free will of consumers.13
11 In addition to those discussed, for particular examples of community campaigners during the 1970s see
Su Braden, Artists and People (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978).
12 Evrard, ‘Democratizing Culture’, 168.
13 The term ‘Culture Industry’ was first used in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by J. Cummings (London: Verso Editions, 1979). First published as Philosophische Fragmente, (New York: Social Studies Association Inc., 1944). Bourdieu’s most extensive research into cultural capital can be found in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984). First published as La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
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It is for this reason that I choose to move away from a definition of ‘cultural democracy’ that is so closely defined by a quasi-economic outline. Rather, as I shall be using the term as a working philosophical and political concept to evaluate policy, I prefer to conceive a definition of cultural democracy that centers around a position derived more closely from the field of aesthetics. Using ‘cultural democracy’ as a hybrid term which both problematises the definitions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as well as understanding the ways in which it interacts with n economic model of consumer and choice leads to a more illuminating use of the term. To shape this definition, one can find roots of the modern definitions of ‘cultural democracy’, in the concept of ‘cultural pluralism’ as it was defined at the turn of the twentieth century. Notably, Horace M. Kallen looked at the relationship between culture and democracy in the USA, and the unique racial history and diversity of the country, but his theories can be drawn upon to understand the notion of cultural democracy in the 21st century. 14
Central to Kallen’s conception of cultural pluralism in the USA is the idea of difference. Underpinning my definition of cultural democracy is the resistance against a singular, dominant form of culture in the UK - traditionally decided by the socially elite, and in practice generally comprising of European art music – against which the idea of cultural difference questions its validity. This unerring dominance is something that has been particularly taken up by scholars in the 20th century
and will be discussed in the context of their work. Though Horace Kallen’s early work ‘Culture and Democracy in the United States’ should not be taken as a blueprint for cultural democracy in the late 20th and 21st century, he was one of the first to note certain crucial pillars of thought that helped to
shape its later definitions. To take the following quote:
[W]hat troubles […] many […] American citizens of British stock is not really inequality; what troubles them is difference. Only things that are alike in fact and not abstractly, and only men that are alike in origin and in feeling and not abstractly, can possess the equality which maintains that inward unanimity of sentiment and outlook which make a homogenous national culture. 15
This excerpt is taken from Kallen’s discussions of democracy versus ‘the melting-pot’ – the term he uses to discuss the assimilation of the plethora of nationalities making up the United States – and is thus particularly focused on how dominance of certain nationalities, through their habits and culture, can triumph over others to create a national culture that is supposedly representative of that nations inhabitants. This pre-empts Anthony D. Smith’s seminal volume on the subject of nationalism, in which he characterizes it as ‘one of the most popular and ubiquitous myths of modern times,’ – challenging the primordialist notion that there is a sense of nationalism inherent in and binding together certain groups of people. 16 But what is most telling about Kallen’s statements is that he
14 Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States, (New York: Arno Press and The New
York Times, reprint edition 1970). Originally published 1924.
15 Ibid., 115.
16 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity: Ethnonationalism in Comparative Perspective (London: Penguin,
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brings up the threatening anxiety that groups of people can feel about difference and how evaluations of value are made upon the distance it supposedly engenders. This is summed up in his statement that ‘only things that are alike […] can possess the equality which maintains that inward unanimity of sentiment and outlook which make a homogenous national culture.'17 Kallen's focus on nationalism
may be a little outdated in the context of late twentieth- and twenty-first century Britain but the anxieties he describes arguably remains.
Decades later, in the work of his 1990s post-colonial theory Homi Bhabha explicitly focused in on this idea of cultural difference, in its articulation from the concept of cultural diversity. Writing on Bhabha’s distinction of the two ideas, Peter Childs understands the following:
Post-structuralism, he [Bhabha] maintains, must be re-historicized, its demands relocated in the field of difference. Here it is important to note that Bhabha places cultural difference in contradistinction to cultural diversity […]. Cultural diversity, like multiculturalism, is a containing term that for Bhabha denies contestation and hybridity through its assertion of simple plurality and the existence of pre-given cultural forms. By contrast, cultural difference focuses on the one hand the demand for a cultural tradition and community, and on the other the political need to negate this homogeneity in the negotiation of new cultural demands.18
Bhabha’s rejection of ‘cultural diversity’ as an all-inclusive term, instead pointing out the importance of ‘cultural difference’ is a distinction I see of being of core importance to a modern definition of cultural democracy. Contained in the notion of difference, in relation to the governance of arts and culture, is the central paradox that the problem governance through a democracy of culture is not just that there are other forms of art that have not been and should be equally valued and supported to those which are seen as ‘highbrow’. Rather, the idea of difference points to a subversion, a challenge to the process of valuation which demarcates what is worthy and not worthy, what is Culture and what is culture, what is art and what is entertainment. And perhaps more importantly it may well point to a challenge to those who make those decisions. It disputes the idea that with a plurality of culture, all that culture can exist in harmony with each other.
It is because of this difficulty (provided by the idea of difference rather than plurality) that cultural difference must be explicitly included in discussions of cultural democracy. The anxieties that surround the notion of difference, rather than the more equalising term of 'plurality', must be
recognised in order to be addressed. They bring up the idea that those in positions of power may not be able or, indeed, willing to introduce a true policy of cultural democracy. It problematises the top down structure that defines the democratisation of culture model as it stands.
17 Kallen, Culture and Democracy, 115.
18 Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, ‘Bhabha’s Hybridity,’ in An Introduction to Post-colonial Theory
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Chapter 2
The Attitude of Hegemony
In one of the most important books to come out of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Paul Corrigan and Simon Frith made the following proposal. ‘What we want to suggest,’ they wrote, ‘is that the mistakes made by the analysts of youth in particular are related to the mistakes made by the analysts of British working class culture in general.’19 This was written in the 1970s but
in the fundamental underpinning of their argument, in their description of the ‘mistakes’ that are made, lies a hegemonic attitude toward culture that has persisted over generations and is a key factor in reinforcing the democracy of culture position. In the broadest sense, Frith and Corrigan are criticising both politically left and right viewpoints in their treatment of ‘the working class as the passive recipients of their culture’, arguing that there is a general theme of ‘the corruption of the innocent’ which denies working class people their active role and participation in their culture.20 This
position corresponds to notions of cultural capital which help to define certain genres or works of art as 'legitimate'. As this section will argue, it is the fundamental view of certain types of culture as involving 'passive' participation that reinforces the value of culture defined as 'highbrow' according to acknowledged learned and inherited cultural capital.
Since Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work on cultural capital and its relationship to class, it has long played a part in discussions over how to increase diversity in the arts – often leading to ideas about how to promote access to high art through the education system. To briefly summarise his ideas, Bourdieu alludes to the idea of cultural capital in terms of its use as a code that one uncovers through cultural access and upbringing. It is implied in Bourdieu’s work that this code grants the listener with the ability to ‘understand’ the work, writing that ‘a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.’21
19 Paul Corrigan and Simon Frith, ‘The Politics of Youth Culture,’ in Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Post-War Britain, eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (Great Britain: The Anchor Press Ltd., 1975), 231.
20 Ibid.
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He further clarifies that this ‘cultural code’ is clearly and directly related to socio-economic status and upbringing:
Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation sows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.22
It is surprising that, despite Bourdieu’s assertion that cultural taste is defined not as a ‘gift of nature’ but as the product of upbringing and education, it is not that ‘taste’ itself that has been largely questioned over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but how to increase access to it. In one of the most recent reports on diversity in the arts commissioned by Arts Council England in 2014, the researchers wrote the following:
Advanced statistical analysis of key surveys datasets about arts and cultural engagement have consistently shown that two of the most important factors influencing whether somebody attends or participants in arts and cultural activities are educational attainment and socio-economic background. Although some of the barriers to attendance and participation are practical and institutional, researchers suggest that barriers also appear to be psychological and driven by an individual’s concept of identity and differing tastes and preferences for culture.23
The researchers even go so far as to mention Bourdieu specifically, noting that 'key academic theorists such as Bourdieu associate different cultural activities with gradations of status.'24 Yet, despite the
acknowledgement of the role of cultural capital in dictating taste, the recommendations of the report (which were designed to specifically to 'help the Arts Council shape its investment process for 2015-2018') shied away from specifically recommending a re-evaluation of the ideology behind the policy.
25 There was no proposal to question what culture is valued as 'legitimate' culture, with the view that
this could be fundamental to increasing diversity in involvement in the arts. Instead it proposed that 'efforts to raise educational attainment across society’ will be crucial to the Arts Council's success going forward.26
There is a substantial body of work noting the hegemonic nature of cultural capital, particularly from Marxist cultural theorists.27 I use the word 'hegemony' here in its characteristic
22 Ibid., 1.
23 Consilium Research and Consultancy, Equality and Diversity Within the Arts and Cultural Sector in
England: Evidence and Literature Review Final Report, (UK: Arts Council England, 2013), 4.
24 Ibid., 8.
25 Arts Council England website.
https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/equality-and-diversity-within-arts-and-cultural-sector-england. Accessed 10th June 2018.
26 Consilium Research and Consultancy, Equality and Diversity, 9.
27 For instance see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International (London: Routledge, 1994). Originally published as Spectres de Marx, (France: Éditions Galilée, 1993).
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twentieth-century identity – with a specifically Gramscian application. That is to say, the notion of 'hegemony' describes a ruling class whose dominant ideology is produced and maintained across generations. 28 This projects onto the arts in terms of the specific characteristics of 'high art' being
maintained over time through the process of gaining and maintaining cultural capital as defined through Bourdieu's studies. Antonio Gramsci describes how in order to maintain power through consent rather than force, the dominant faction of society must make certain concessions to other groups or classes. One can see how in this way, the dominance of 'high culture' in arts policy is maintained and becomes an ideological rather than political problem; those in power respond to accusations of elitism by attempting to open up the space at the top of the cultural measure to a wider spectrum of society whilst keeping that cultural scale firmly in place. Robert Hewison sums up the process by which a dominant culture is maintained:
For the dominant group, culture will become a means of authority, and a source of authority for those who attach themselves to its values […] Control of the resources that support cultural activity will in itself be a form of authority. The intelligentsia will be employed in servicing and policing culture. It has the crucial task of disseminating it to those beyond the immediate group in power, for one way of maintaining consent is to ensure that the culture of the dominant class is not enjoyed exclusively by that class, but that its values permeate the whole of society.29
Hewison is discussing 'culture' in the broadest sense of the word, but his overarching idea of the control of culture directly maps onto the ways in which arts governance is maintained. The UK government 'Department for Culture, Media and Sport' (DCMS), in collaboration with the Arts Council England have commissioned a yearly 'Taking Part' survey every year since 2005 to gather socio-economic data on engagement in the arts.30 This is one of the most recent and prominent
example of awareness in arts governance shown towards diversity that exemplifies Gramsci's
'concessions' which maintain the power of the system itself. So great is the strength of the ideological commitment to the current system, that these ‘concessions’ are even promoted alongside an
acknowledgement of the system’s flaws. In a crucial study commissioned by the DCMS in 2008, Sir Brian McMaster came to the following – arguably paradoxical – conclusion:
One of the barriers to audience engagement is the notion held by many that the arts are simply not for them. The 'it's not for me' syndrome is endemic and conspires to exclude people from experiences that could transform their lives. To help overcome this and building on the experience of free admission to museums and galleries, all admission prices should be removed from publicly funded cultural organisations for one week.31
28 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1971).
29 Hewison, Culture and Consensus, 16.
30 To access the reports, see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/taking-part-survey. Accessed 4th June 2018. 31 Sir Brian McMaster, Supporting Excellence in the Arts: From Measurement to Judgement (UK:
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There have been numerous studies that show it is primarily psychological, not practical, barriers that produce and maintain the 'it's not for me' syndrome. Yet the solution suggested by - and welcomed by the government - is to make small practical 'concessions' to persuade people into a hegemonic cultural system that creates the 'it's not for me' syndrome in the first place.32
As seen in the policy report above, a focus on cultural capital can often be misused to challenge the fact that this ideology is passed through one group of people (or Gramsci's 'ruling classes'), combatting this by attempting to widen the socio-economic make up of this pool of people by increasing access to it. Rarely is the problem approached from the other side, by challenging the ideological attitude of that group rather than than the participants of the group itself. Both sides involve a degree of hegemony; the attitude of the ‘ruling classes’ is passed on through the same factions of society, but so too does the attitude remain the same as it is done so. Or, to take the notion from its academic bubble, the 'hegemonic attitude' that I describe could be understood as a lasting 'consensus' - both political and social – over time towards the way in which the arts should be governed. As Dennis Kavanagh and Peter Morris argue, '[c]onsensus politics are inextricably linked with policy-making as an elite process (carried out by senior ministers, civil servants, producer interest groups and communicators) and with the existence of a government that possesses
authority.’33 It is the view of 'low' culture that has been passed on through generation on generation of
consensus politics (of the 'passive' consumers that Corrigan and Frith bring up) that has most
prominently affected arts funding and governance. In turn its effects are felt through the development of culture that falls outside the limited scope defined as ‘valuable’ or ‘legitimate’ in governance.
It is not a new idea to challenge the divide between 'high' and 'low' art that became such a feature of, in particular, the Frankfurt School theorists work on culture.34 In describing the
re-evaluation of popular culture after its damaged reputation, Jim McGuigan has noted how views of popular culture came to be celebrated somewhat in academia as a 'mass-popular culture'. He writes:
Popular culture, in the folkish sense, was seen as produced by 'the people', as actively made by them and expressing their distinctive social experiences, attitudes and values. In contrast, the pejorative conception of mass culture, in Left, Right and Centrist versions, stressed media manipulation of popular taste and the passive consumption of commodified culture. This was quite rightly challenged as a form of cultural elitism during the early phase of cultural studies in Britain, a phase which was characterized by a politics of popular culture, particularly rooted in the working class and youth […] The unsatisfactory binary opposition between popular and mass culture was more fully deconstructed later, however, by a re-evaluation of the subordinate term, 'consumption'. From this point of view, consumption was no longer to be seen as the 'passive' moment
32 For studies to show the psychological rather than practical barriers to arts engagement, see Bunting, C.,
Chan, T. W. Goldthorpe, J. Keaney, E., and Oskala, A., From Indifference to Enthusiasm: Patterns of Arts Attendance in England (UK: Arts Council England, 2009). For government support for the Supporting Excellence in the Arts study see its foreword by James Purnell, 4.
33 Dennis Kavanagh and Peter Morris, Consensus Politics from Attlee to Major, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
14.
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in cultural circulation but, instead, 'active' and nodal, involving popular appropriation of commodities and differential interpretation of texts.35
McGuigan's analysis of the deconstruction of cultural elitism and the re-evaluation of 'consumption' as active certainly gives more value to the process of consumption of a certain type of culture. But, the repercussions of this are to widen the perception of 'culture' itself – to involve such activities as watching television, reading magazines and listening to popular music; in short to give more importance to commercially involved forms of culture. But in terms of changing arts policies the consequence of this view is to remove the responsibility of arts funding for catering to the groups of people who engage in these forms of culture to the commercial market forces, allowing public funding to remain heavily geared towards traditional forms of 'high' culture – even if the notion of it being valued as 'high' is supposedly contested.
Attempts and Resistance to Alternativity in Governance
This paper does not wish to suggest that it is arts policy that controlled the development of forms of art and culture in a prescriptive sense that can be fully understood by looking solely at policy. Rather, one must look to examples of culture itself to understand the relationship between its development and its governance – or, indeed, lack thereof. If a primary objection to the system of cultural
governance rests on the fallible nature of its valuation-system (which decides what is ‘legitimate’ art), then it is too the culture and artistic production that falls outside of that systems reach that one can find the strongest challenge to its legitimacy. The case studies of musical production I have chosen, for this reason, lie far outside of that music which is, and has been, supported by public funding and governance. I have already described how the relationship between cultural capital and socio-economic status maps onto the identities of those producing and consuming culture in or outside of the system of public governance. It is for this reason that I shall be focusing on the artistic output of the Black working class musicians, who have faced (and do face) some of the strongest
preconceptions about their cultural involvement. Preconceptions, it will be argued, that have been pivotal in their cultural exclusion from public cultural governance. To return briefly to Corrigan and Frith's analysis of the attitude towards working class culture, they summarise the theoretical output supporting it as follows:
Whatever the differences in their language, the logic of right and left theorists is remarkably similar: problem – the British working class is politically revolutionary/quiet/passive; reason – working class culture is rooted in
35 Jim McGuihan, ‘Cultural Populism revisited' in Cultural Studies in Question, eds. Marjorie Ferguson
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revolutionary/quiet/passive values; explanation – the working class has been ideologically incorporated, its values reflect a profound acceptance of bourgeois culture.36
It is this viewpoint, primarily regarding the notion of ‘passive’ culture that has become so engrained in attitudes that define ‘legitimate’ art, and thus arts policy upheld by the democratisation of culture position.
But if one turns to certain examples of modern cultural output that has stemmed from Black working class communities in the UK in recent years, the defence of passivity becomes one that is impossible to uphold. Grime music - a form of rap music deriving from a combination of influences including UK garage, dancehall, and hip-hop, originating from working class communities in East London in the early 2000s – is one of the most notable examples of this. In an equivalent manner to hip-hop (as it emerged from marginalised African-American communities in the Bronx) grime music began strongly rooted in the Black London identity of its practitioners and developed as an often politically charged and message-filled genre providing a commentary on the circumstances of the communities it emerged from. Indeed, writing of the fieldwork he undertook researching five focus groups who were involved in the grime and hip-hop scenes in the south-east of England, Todd Dedman concluded that his findings illustrate 'an affirmation of […] resistance to a dominant hegemonic culture for those engaged with hip-hop and grime culture.'37 Artistic outputs that so
directly contradict the notion that ‘working class culture is rooted in non-revolutionary/quiet/passive values’ provide a direct challenge to that justification of their exclusion from the public cultural system.
The second reason that grime music exemplifies a challenge to the validity of a democracy of culture position in the 21st century is that it is inextricably bound up in - indeed, its success has
somewhat depended on - the influence of commercialism on the genre. This relationship has not always been a straightforward one and is tied to the history of the music as an underground, often explicitly anti-commercial genre. This is before events such as the now high-profile artist Skepta's winning of the Mercury Prize in 2016 (a prominent British prize open to all genres but historically won by pop acts, and often coming as a precursor to commercial success), and the English grime artist Stormzy's rapid rise to success after his debut grime album Gang Signs & Prayer reached number one in the UK album charts in 2017. It is precisely this relationship with commercial industry forces, however, that show grime as representative of the entanglement between ideas of artistic agency, access to resources and the relationship of governance to the free market. These are all influences that have that have played a large part in influencing arts governance in the UK and a reticence to embrace wider forms of cultural output that could steer policy away from the democracy of culture model.
36 Corrigan and Frith, 'The Politics of Youth Culture,' 231.
37 Todd Dedman, 'Agency in UK hip-hop and grime youth subcultures – peripherals and purists,' Journal
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It may well be pertinent to ask why specifically looking at music's interaction with policy over time, rather than any other output of culture (for instance the visual or theatrical arts), is an effective representative of attitudes and interactions between policy and the arts. The first reason for this is a purely practical one: music is ubiquitous across society. Data from an extensive survey of the UK population's interaction with culture in the 2008 'Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion' survey showed that only 2% of households surveyed in the UK do not possess any form of recorded music. Further to this, 40% of households that were surveyed owned over 200 CDs (or equivalents).38 As
such, one can extrapolate that interactions with music in some form cover a vast cross-section of society and thus provide a fair challenge to the question as to why a proportion of these interactions are not supported by the public governance of music.
There are also more ideological reasons as to why music provides fertile ground as to the study of its development alongside and with arts policy. As Mike Savage puts it:
[M]usic is also different from other popular activities, notably television viewing, because of the extent to which musical forms have been part of a long-term historical tradition associated with 'high' culture, which has been institutionally venerated and supported over several centuries […] Music therefore spans popular and elite culture in an unusual way.39
These arguments do not singularly define music. Dance, for instance, could certainly be argued to hold similar characteristics. But, the view of music's possible transcendence from daily life, with its roots in Kantian aesthetics often seen because of music's ability to rely on form over content, allows it to be held on a pedestal that other forms of culture do not so often have reason to be held on. This elite association with music is coupled with music's use as a central component and marker of identity for mainstream and subcultures alike, making it a powerful and important part of the lives of
communities who may be relatively disadvantaged or marginalised by society. It is in these strong identity forming subcultures, which have used the commercial market to support their work, of which grime music could be considered as a modern manifestation, that there lies one of the biggest tensions between arts policy and arts practice. To understand the manifestations of these tensions it is useful to tie the genre of grime music (as exemplary of, rather than encompassing, the artistic output of
minorities that challenges the legitimacy of the status quo approach to diversity in the arts) to a pivotal point in cultural action and artistic policy in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time strong subcultural identities of Black youth in the UK began to mix with commercialism, a move particularly shown through the success of the band Aswad. Concurrently to this, artistic policy became more explicitly aware of the problem of diversity in the arts, whilst also becoming more prescriptive over its governance.
38 Bennett, T., Silva, E., Warde, A., Savage, M. (2008). Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical
Investigation, 2003 – 2005. UK Data Service, SN: 5832.
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Despite the influence of Jennie Lee’s ‘A Policy for the Arts’ in the 1960s, which increased funding for the arts in the UK and laid out a commitment to diversity, actual governance of these funds was done with minimal interference. The arts writer Norman Lebrecht reflected on the administration of the time with a telling anecdote that shows the extent to which the government adhered to an ‘arms length’ principle that saw the Arts Council managing its own funds with little direction from government. He writes:
John Denison, the Council’s director of music from 1948 to 1965, would get a call at times from David Webster, the Covent Garden manager, asking him to drop by after dinner for a chat. On a fine night, the pair would take a stroll down Weymouth Street and Webster would confess that the box-office was a bit low: ‘I don’t know if we can pay the wages next week,’ he’d mutter. Next morning, Denison would send him an Arts Council cheque for £1,000 as an advance on the next year’s grant. ‘That’s how it was done,’ he told me. ‘No forms to fill, no fuss.’40
As can be imagined from such an ad hoc approach to governance, the funding decisions made in this manner have been severely criticised. Writing about the panels of experts that were used to decide Arts Council subsidies to in the early 1970s Robert Hutchinson concluded that they were ‘little more than the rich looking after its own pleasures.’41
The drastic turn in governance that came at the end of the 1970s to 1980s, however, was triggered far more strongly by economic pressures than any concerns over governance. The fiscal crisis of the welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s, which saw cuts first from the Labour government in the mid-1970s, then drastically increased at the turn of the decade with the Thatcher government, led to progressively tighter controls over the economic management of the Arts Council.42 In 1987, the
Arts Council’s grant was reduced so far that they were required to halve the number of organisations it supported. This led to an extreme push for arts organisations to seek support from corporate sponsors. The ‘Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts’ was set up to help cultural organisations build alternative income streams in 1976 helping to increase the business sponsorship for arts organisations from £600,000 to £20 million in the 10 years after its foundation.43
Though the influence of this fiscal turn in arts policy has been long lasting, it was not
definitive. As the arts sector moved into the 1990s, a shift towards a new subjectivity towards the arts could be felt. Not now one of the promotion of high art aesthetic value, nor the commercial value of the artistic industries, but towards what can be seen as a new type of 'use value' for the arts. If Theodor Adorno had bemoaned the transformation in the perception of the art-object from the
evaluation of it's 'use-value' to it's 'exchange-value', then the next turn in policy behaviour represented
40 Norman Lebrecht, ‘Wanted: A Keynesian Vision for the Arts,’ Standpoint, December 2010. 41 Robert Hutchinson, The Politics of the Arts Council, (London: Sinclair Browne, 1982), 68. 42 Ian Gough, ‘Thatcherism and the Welfare State: Britain is Experiencing the Most Far-reaching
Experiment in ‘New Right’ Politics in the Western World.’ Marxism Today 1980, 7-12.
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a disrupting third option to Adorno's binary.44 Adorno's conception of the 'use-value' of an art object
rests on his intransigent belief in the possible autonomy of Western art music which pushes at the frontiers of musical development. It is the theoretical equivalent of the notions of 'excellence' that governed arts policy before the economic turn. In Adorno's theorisation, Thatcher's promotion of the commercial value of the arts shifts the value of the art-object from its 'use-value' to its 'exchange-value'. In other words it leads to the valuation of the art object in terms of its potential for exchange rather than any inherent worth in the object itself, something the business investment in the arts would hold as its primary concern. Adorno sees this rise of the commercialisation of art as an outgrowth of European liberal industrial nations and their economic dependence on the United States after the First World War and the inflation that followed.45 This explanation has been extrapolated into a
post-Second World War context, with writers such as Kyle Gann suggesting that the business culture that flourished in the 1950s on corporate values was reinvigorated by Reaganism in the 1980s, reducing art to mere entertainment, diversionary but not particularly necessary or reliable as a source of truth or self-knoweldge.46 Whether or not the repercussions on art itself were as strong as Adorno and Gann
describe, the 1980s arts policy in the UK can be seen as a form of Thatcher's Reaganism in action. Significant backlash to these corporate values was felt in the 1990s. Criticisms were not pushing for a return to a promotion of Adornian high art 'use-value' conceptions of art. Rather, arts new 'use-value' could be seen to be engaged in its value as promotion for individual and community growth and cohesion. The Arts Council England's 1989 paper 'An Urban Renaissance' noted that the arts held not just economic value, but could be used as a 'focal point for community pride and identity' and to 'build self-confidence in individuals.'47 This new 'use-value' of art was far more
socially-focused, and championed a far more abstract enrichment to peoples lives than the business-oriented policies of the early 1980s had done.
Munira Mirza, in tracing this attitudinal change, has attributed it to what is often called the 'community arts movement' of the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, which she argues, 'led to a radical questioning of the function of art in society.'48 The development of community arts was cemented into
a movement by activities such as Su Braden's publication of Arts and People in 1978 which esestimated that there were around 5000 community arts projects taking place around the UK.49
Before the Thatcherite business models of the arts of the 1980s, the community arts movement had
44 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 45 Ibid., 132.
46 Kyle Gann, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (California: University of California
Press, 2006), 7.
47 Arts Council Great Britain, An Urban Renaissance: Sixteen Case Studies showing the Role of Arts in
Regeneration, (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1989). Quoted in Sara Selwood, 'The Politics of Data Collection: Gathering, Analysing, and Using Data about the Subsidised Cultural Sector in England,' Cultural Trends (2002) 12: 47, p. 30.
48 Mirza, The Politics of Culture, 52. 49 Braden, Artists and People.
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actually already made some inroads into arts policy. In the early 1970s, the Arts Council of Great Britain set up a working party to decide whether they should be funding community arts at all. Their concluding report declared a panel should be established to administer funds to the community arts sector – a committee whose power was significantly reduced in a restructuring in 1979.50 The funds
administered, however, were small and heavily competed after.51
Nevertheless, the community arts movement has often been seen as the first major push towards a cultural democracy in the UK.52 This is party due to its direct challenge to 'outdated' notions
of 'high' and 'low' art. Lee Higgins writes that:
'Community arts' earlier manifestations were therefore associated with the working class and working-class values, placing the work in opposition to the so-called elitist art worlds of classical theatre, art galleries, and opera.53
Higgins is, as such, arguing that the community arts movement proved an effective challenge to the hegemonic cultural attitude towards working class art, as derived from Gramscian theory and argued against by the CCCS theorists. By taking the focus away from the aesthetics or style and instead placing emphasis on active participation in an activity, the community arts movement did pose a radical challenge to the establishment and years of hierarchical convention.
50 Community Arts Working Party, 'Community Arts: Report of the Community Arts Working Party,' June
1974.
51 Lee Higgins, Community Music: In Theory and in Practice, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
27.
52 See Mirza, The Politics of Culture; Higgins, Community Music. 53 Higgins, Community Music, 30.
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Chapter Three
The Failure to Embrace Cultural Difference
Despite influencing a number of arts practitioners and administrators, the community arts movement and its supposed notions of 'cultural democracy' were met with criticism from both the political left and right. It is in the validity of this criticism that can be found some of the primary hindrances to a move toward a model of cultural democracy in the UK. However, it is also in the inadequacy of this criticism in recognising the nuances of its own argument that I attribute the failure to conceive a developed concept of cultural democracy that could have progressed some of the arguments of the community arts movement whilst recognising its flaws. The most influential critic of the community arts movement was Roy Shaw, a British public servant who was Secretary General of the Arts Council between 1975 and 1983. In his 1987 book The Arts and the People, Shaw criticises the ideology of the community arts movement, citing its patronising approach to ordinary people. He wrote:
I was reminded of the Tory peeress who in the 1930s went round telling housewives in depressed areas how to make soup out of cods' heads. She was generally well received, until one housewife asked challengingly: "Who gets the rest of the cod?" I wanted everyone to have some of the rest of the cod and was not happy about the provision of a cods' head culture for the poor.54
It is the failure of both Roy Shaw and proponents of the community arts movement to adequately address this allegorical question which the former so validly posed, the question as to who gets the rest of the cod, that one can see the failure of arts policy to have radically questioned the status quo.
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Shaw's response followed Bourdieu in his line of thinking. It extrapolated that the lack of diversity in the arts was due to lack of access to excellence. It recognised that this excellence was predicated by structural inequalities that supported the importance of cultural capital, and as such it followed a seemingly natural course of progression. The solution should be found in increased in education. Fast-forward to the material incarnations of Shaw's thinking and the major clients of the Arts Council, such as the Royal Opera House in London were persuaded to take action such as the establishment of their education department in 1982.55 The Arts Council itself set up an education
department under Shaw’s leadership in 1979.56 Shaw's thinking challenged the notion of working
class involvement in the arts as passive, but did so in a way that questioned the notion that working class communities could not be active participants in the dominant cultural ideology. He writes:
Those who contrast the alleged passivity of looking at a work of art and the creativeness of doing your own thing clearly have little idea about what is involved in the appreciation of a work of art...To encourage people to write their own poetry instead of reading Eliot or Philip Larkin, is to encourage blinkered narcissism and consequent cultural impoverishment.57
Where Shaw's argument falls short, however, is – to borrow his phrase – in his own blinkered view of cultural excellence. In the following denunciation of the community arts movement, Shaw bemoans their insistence on cultural relevance at the supposed expense of quality. He remembers a leading community artist, Graham Woodruff asking in 1983, '[w]here in classical ballet do you find something of the concerns of working-class people? What of unemployment, of poverty, of destruction through nuclear war, of welfare right?'58 Shaw's caustic response is that:
The answer is, of course, hardly anywhere. For that, television drama like the Boys from the Blackstuff is certainly more relevant; but working-class people can also respond to the stylised beauty of a Balanchine ballet or the dramatic and lyrical force of the ballet of Romeo and Juliet. (They do in the Soviet Union).59
It is in this line of thinking that a rift between a cultural democracy as overwhelmingly defined in the UK by the ideologies of the community arts movement and the proponents of the democracy of culture model has emerged. An irreconcilable split has been perceived between the notions of relevance and excellence. It is this split that has driven public resources away from those from marginalised communities seeking to become producers of excellence, but an excellence defined by its difference to that of the dominant ideology of the ruling classes of the age. It is also this split that
55 Pauline Tambling, email to the author, July 3rd 2018. 56 Ibid.
57 Shaw, The Arts and the People, 135.
58 Graham Woodruff addressing the West Midlands Arts Association in 1983, quoted in Roy Shaw, The
Arts and the People, 135.
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has driven those communities to find the resources required to nurture excellence in an alternative system, namely the capitalist commercial structure that arguably defines creative output more than public governance can. But the commercial system does not act as a mirror of that defined by public governance. Indeed, a seminal UNESCO report on the role of governance in culture argued that government intervention exists to 'correct some of the distorting effects of free market mechanisms.'60
It is this acknowledged difference between public governance and commercial 'governance' that means these communities do not reap the same societal benefits from their involvement in the arts that those involved in arts under public governance do. But more importantly, this cycle also drives art of excellence and difference towards the commercial market. The prevalent ideologies of the dominant class (heavily influenced by Adornian notions of the culture industry) are then able to negate the value of this art through its commercial association, creating a spiral of perception and access that becomes seemingly impossible to escape.61
Aswad and the Rise of Commercial Black British Music
The process of producing art of both difference and excellence is something that can be seen as exemplified in the late 1970s and 1980s by the Black British reggae group, Aswad. Around the time of Aswad's formation in the mid-1970s, the researcher Naseem Khan was gathering evidence about the cultural and financial position of 'Ethnic Minority Arts' in Britain for the Arts Council. The lack of funding and opportunities given to the arts produced by ethnic minorities in the UK was highlighted in the resultant report 'The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain.'62 Though
Khan's report did not lead to much lasting change it did provide a damning indictment of support for minority arts in Britain, citing 'a low level of public patronage and publicity, as well as state under-funding and a lack of coherent policies.'63
It is against this backdrop, and Roy Shaw's influential position in the Arts Council, where the thinking espoused a rejection of a synthesis of cultural relevance and cultural excellence to be found
60 WCCD, Our Creative Diversity: Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development
(WCCD), (Paris: UNESCO, 1996), 41.
61 Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry’.
62 Naseem Khan & Arts Council of Great Britain & Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian and Great Britain
Community Relations Commission, The Arts Britain Ignores: the Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (London: The Commission, 1976).
63 The report led to the development of a number of conferences and the setting up of the Minority Arts
Advisory Service (MAAS). Though this small organisation became an official legal entity in January 1977, having originally been set up as a one-woman operation by Khan herself, it ceased to exist in the 1990s due to insufficient funding; Kwesi Owusu, The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain - What can we Consider Better than Freedom? (London: Comedia, 1986), 48.
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in difference, that Aswad entered the London music scene. Dubbed by Kwesi Owusu as the
'innovators of the 1970s',64 their style mixed the sounds of their Carribbean heritage with their place as
Black British youth in British society, best described in their own words:
With Aswad – from Day One – all of us were in England, but our parentage came from The West Indies. So, even though we were listening to what was going on over here, at the same time we were still connected to what was coming outta the Caribbean. You know, calypso, reggae and bluebeat were still very much part of us because of the lineage. So basically all Aswad has ever done over the years is make reggae music – just like all the reggae bands who are from Jamaica – while at the same time also incorporating the influences we've heard from other forms of music here in England.65
Aswad’s music can be seen as a stated expression – consciously or unconsciously – of their position in the community. Their music, and their status, was defined by a penetrating presence of the ‘other’ into British society. Whether immigration is viewed positively or negatively by the majority of the public, it poses a cultural dilemma. Both artistically and socially, immigrants (and to varying extents their descendants) bring a new strand of culture to a society. Especially in a society with as engrained and powerful a culture as the UK, immigrants (even by their very labelling as such) raise the question as to how they will be received. By no coincidence, this question is reflective of the debate around the notion of cultural democracy. Because of the dominating (a word that in this case could be replaced ‘hegemonic,’ in the Gramscian sense) nature of British culture, a simple expectation of the rise of multiculturalism as immigrants arrive in a new culture is unrealistic. Multiculturalism suggests an equality of distinct cultures, foregoing the reality of a dominant culture; here existing as the activities or manifestations of ‘British’ culture as has been legitimized by acceptance through public policy or widespread cultural practice. Moreover, the notion of multiculturalism also alludes to a sense of essentialism – the aim to preserve a particular, ‘pure’ form of a culture – diminishing the ability of that culture to adapt to new circumstances.66 It is this idea of ‘adaptation’ that can be seen as
characterizing Aswad’s music. The group do not fall victim to the ‘melting pot’ that Horace Kallen so forcefully warns against, in which minority cultures are expected to assimilate into the dominant culture – a process seemingly encouraged by the public routes into arts support. 67
Rather, Aswad, in their social and artistic position – or perhaps in their artistic position as defined by and reflective of their social position – seem to embrace the notion of cultural difference. In writing of the musical group and their peers, Kwesi Owasu has defined their position as second generation immigrants in society as the following:
64 Kwesi Owusu, Black British Culture and Society: A Text-Reader, (London: Routledge, 2000), 9. 65 Tony Robinson speaking to Pete Lewis, 'Aswad: Reggae Gold,' Blues and Soul Magazine July 2009.
Accessed 13th Jun 2018.
66 Waldron, J., ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,’ in The Rights of Minority Cultures,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10.
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Unlike their parents, the second generation of Black youth did not see themselves as ‘temporary guests’ of Her Majesty’s government. They were not here to work and eventually return ‘home’ to the Caribbean or Africa. Britain was their home, and according to one of the symbolic political slogans of the time, they were ‘Here to Stay’.68
It is this ‘here to stay’ attitude that marks out Aswad’s position in the space of cultural difference. Both multiculturalism and the ‘melting-pot’, assimilationist views of cultural contact place the new culture in a passive position where it is either stagnated in a singular, pure, essentialist form or simply covered, absorbed and nullified by the the dominant culture. In contrast, Aswad are embedded in a decisively active cultural space; a space in which cultural difference can be defined.
I have noted earlier how Homi Bhabha distinguishes the notion of cultural difference from that of diversity – separating the idea of cultural difference by its ‘political need to negate the homogeneity [of cultural tradition] in the negotiation of new cultural demands.’69 Bhabha’s theories
have been somewhat criticised for his apparent vagueness over the specific application of his concepts. I see this not necessarily as a weakness in Bhabha’s work but as a telling invitation to explore the ways in which his theories surrounding the power structures of colonialism map onto, and intertwine with other structures of power. With Aswad finding their success in a world where ‘they had little choice but to engage in the class- and race-laden structures of British society’,70 the cultural
power structures they were making their art under must be considered for all their facets – particularly as concerns the view of the intersection of working class culture and commercialism. Brinsley Forde, a founding member of the group, exemplifies this intersection in his description of the groups position in the 1970s: ‘We were born here and we should have been receiving all the benefits our white schoolmates were receiving, but this wasn’t so. There were no jobs, bad housing and pure pressure on the streets.’71 Though a crucial facet of their perception and identity, it is not solely through a
postcolonial lens of race that groups like Aswad – and the art that develops afterwards in a related cultural space – navigate a field of cultural difference.
Aswad do not threaten the hegemonic system of cultural value by the artistic fact of their using ‘calypso, reggae and bluebeat’ in their music. Music originating from countries outside of the UK and their respective cultural traditions does not threaten the status quo of British arts policy. Its value can be defined by the system (for instance, containing it within a label of ‘world music’ – a term still used by the Arts Council England to this day).72 Rather, it is the form of Aswad’s success that
68 Kwesi Owusu, Black British Culture and Society, 10. 69 Childs and Williams, ‘Bhabha’s Hybridity’, 142. 70 Kwesi Owusu, Black British Culture, 10.
71 Author’s interview with Brinsley Forde, 1998, in Kwesi Owusu, Black British Culture, 10. 72 See, for instance,
