FREE CLAMPDOWN: POP-CULTURAL WARS ON CLASS AND GENDER PDF

Rhian E. Jones | 113 pages | 29 Mar 2013 | John Hunt Publishing | 9781780997087 | English | Ropley, United Kingdom Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender by Rhian E. Jones

In an extract from her new book, Rhian E Jones discusses the relationship between culture - via Shampoo Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender - social class and gender. The book looks at representations of class and gender in the politics and popular culture of 90s and 00s Britain, how these representations became increasingly narrow, restricted, and reliant on stereotypes, and how this development relates to the more recent debate on 'chavs'. As Britpop's tentacles uncoiled, Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender from Camden into the wider world of New Labour, New Britain, its music grew to reflect and reinforce a wider Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender turn which rejected the perceived stifling excesses of 80s 'political correctness' in favour of the hollow postfeminist triumphalism of 'girl power' on one hand, and, on the other, 'new laddism'. In the course of this, women artists tended to be squeezed to the margins, and their media presentation restricted, both by the elevation of 'lad bands' and the focus on male key players and kingmakers, and by the fact that the transformation of the UK independent scene into moneyspinning 'indie' was taking place alongside an odd concordance of feminism and neoliberalism, in which the former's relationship with capitalism moved from critique towards accommodation. Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender latter trend saw the peppy and profitable brand of 'girl power' promoted as a depoliticised, nonthreatening form of feminism, a recuperation which not only displaced the explicitly political music of riot grrrl but also edged out other pre- existing alternative and less commercial expressions of female identity. In 90s indie, and in early Britpop, voices which diverged both from the vacant consumerism of 'girl power' and from new laddism's deferent camp follower, the Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender, were heard alongside those by whom they appear to have been retrospectively drowned out. Kenickie, a pop-aspirational indie band with wit, swagger and style to spare, and Shampoo, a mock-delinquent duo from the London suburb of Plumstead, both seemed more fully their own created cartoon, more at home in their proto-'chav' drag, than Jessie J or later appeared. Contemporary interviews often found half-baffled, half-seduced middle-class male journalists in awe of the bands' offstage inhabiting of their onstage personae: rather than stereotypes of exoticised others, they were opting to play the pantomime versions of themselves. Both Shampoo and Kenickie were grounded in appreciation of the ' escapist proletarian-glam aesthetic, both were able to articulate the experiences of suburban or provincial girls in fearless, loving awe of what the city and the future had to offer, and both embodied one music writer's identification of 'that terrifying stage where teenage Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender are half-human, half-rat'. Shampoo, remembered mostly for the bubblegum-punk perfection of their third single 'Trouble', were snottily disdainful of anyone over twenty-one and of anyone 'still hanging out in Camden Town'. Jacqui Blake and Carrie Askew their individual names seemed secondary to the bulletproof united front they presented were informed by protective self-parody rather than stereotype, pouting and glowering in clashing styles and colours, a kitsch riot of fluorescent wigs, peroxide, high ponytails, dark sunglasses, Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender print and glitter. Their songs were equally cartoonish, an escapist anatomy of the inane and mundane, staying out all night and staggering home at dawn to face the music, 'running wild in the city' and, in a line of splendidly evocative economy, 'throwing up your kebab in a shiny taxi cab'. Hyper and combative where Elastica were laid-back, Shampoo's music and image nevertheless evinced a similar kind of unimpressed and half- amused self-possession, offering no entry point for the vulnerability of sentiment or idealism. Girl Power was also the title of Shampoo's second and its lead single. Although they were by this point a major label novelty act, Shampoo's dour and dead-eyed anthem of 'girl power' as license for antisocial truculence 'I don't wanna go to college, don't wanna get a job', 'I wanna smash the place up just for fun' stood instructive comparison with the ' tamed and defanged brand of empowerment through consumerism, as well as mocking contemporary anxieties over female delinquency. Kenickie began, like Elastica, as three girls with guitars and an unassuming boy drummer, forming in in the summer of Like the Manics before them and the Libertines after them, Kenickie oozed Last Gang in Town glamour, but theirs was a distinctly girl gang: sticky cocktails and stick-on spangles rather than spilled pints and regrettable tattoos. Their acknowledgement of as a basis for their blend of charity shop chic and highstreet fashion also indicates the ways in which they extended the lessons of riot grrrl beyond that scene's demographic. Kenickie excelled at anatomising female self-loathing in its biological and social forms, and at fashioning sleek, fierce paeans to poised and self- possessed female independence. Where Shampoo were wilfully dumb and impenetrably obnoxious in their music and presentation, Kenickie offered greater intricacy, sympathy, intrigue and vulnerability. Their songs were full of the competing impulses of self-belief and self-doubt that blight adolescence, each presented in its respective natural habitat: streetlight-bright and PVC-shiny nights out with no coats on versus shadowy dawns full of shivering sleepless regret. The music, like the subject matter, ranged from brash and upfront to achingly romantic to grittily bleak, mixing spiky guitars and shiny blasts of brass with silvery swirls of keyboard and girl-group harmonies and handclaps. And they were as unapologetically sharp, witty and smart as they were sexy. The London music press tended to hymn Kenickie to the skies, as though the capacity of regional-accented girls for wit and articulacy came as some surprise. The band themselves, however, experienced their representation as a site of struggle. As purveyors of a regional and class-infused feminine identity, Kenickie complicated attempts by the music industry and media to fit them into accepted and appropriate boxes, and lost out in Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender process. Their guitarist and vocalist Marie Nixon recalls: 'Because we were girls, we had to be marketed as pop. No one would have ever asked our male contemporaries, like Ash, to model Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender on the Lorraine Kelly programme'. In the music press and the wider industry, Kenickie's novelty status as 'northern lasses' led to an anxious objectification based on their perceived 'tartiness' — which, according to their bassist Emma Jackson, stemmed from Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender confused, because class-inflected, reading of the band's presentation:. We realised the importance of the visual and from our inception tried to look 'glamorous', in our own way. We favoured short skirts, high heels and synthetic fibres - preferably in an animal print, celebrating our idea of glamour… It became obvious Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender EMI had worries about our image, whispers about 'tartiness' began to reach the band and increasingly stylists seemed to be steering us towards the knitwear sections in shops. Our maxim 'We dress Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender, we dress tacky' was now a commercial problem. Visually, our rather aggressive northern femininity, which was part of our appeal, had to be watered down. Kenickie's brassy, breezy self-expression was also presumed to signify an 'easy' sexuality, making them the objects of an unstable Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender of lust and disgust:. We were asked if we were in anyway like Viz's Fat Slags, 'only thinner', and these were the journalists who liked us! The interviewers seemed bemused by our hostility to their question - 'So what you're asking us, then, is, are we slags? The asking of such a question demonstrates the reduction of all their assumptions about our perceived class, gender and regional roots to the grotesque parody of North East women in the Fat Slags comic strip. This ignored our own statements about our identity in our music. This lack of understanding by a middle-class media of how such a comparison might be received highlights the frequent intersection of sexism and classism, whereby all women who are perceived as working-class are implicitly 'chavs', and all 'chavs' are explicitly easy. Kenickie's female frontline, like Shampoo, had an earthy, cartoon-glam aesthetic, half Old Hollywood starlets, half explosion in Claire's Accessories. Their particular brand of glamour was, as Susan Sontag wrote of Camp, 'a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it'. Their towering heels, aggressively revealing outfits and lashings of makeup were worn on their own terms; a Pink Ladies-inspired protective covering rather than a puppeteered provocation. Tangled up with the roots of this look was the history of glamour as a means for 'ordinary' girls to dress 'above their station' through artifice, lavish and luxurious but popularly accessible, which did not require the backing of 'good breeding'. In its more recent forms, this kind of glamour has become identified with either 'vulgar' appropriation or defiant class drag, in both cases serving to emphasise rather than disguise the class of its wearer. Carol Dyhouse's history of the termhowever, traces how glamour's possibilities for transcending class and gender barriers generated predictable anxiety, cloaked in snobbery and appeals to national loyalty: at the height of 'glamour' as emulative and ambitious artifice and excess, a signifier of the upwardly-mobile and autonomous woman 'on the make', British Vogue encouraged its female readership to forsake this brash, democratic and over-the-top aesthetic in favour of a 'natural English look'. Kenickie's songs were suffused with the idea of Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender the escapist, aspirational glamour of the Night Out, using its imaginative appeal to Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender the grime and gloom in which one finds oneself immured. Their music offered a presentation of provincial female life crafted with sympathy and solidarity, and an insistence upon their social and sexual agency. This self-expression, coded as 'cheap' and 'tacky' but also constituting a sociologically specific idea of empowerment through glamour, was interpreted by outsiders as 'tarty', imparting a certain vulgar showiness, forwardness and immodesty — a judgement based on the band's perceived working-class identity and on their deviation from hegemonic feminine conventions. Subtly but significantly different from ladettism, whose template was a doe-eyed and football-shirted take on the gamine rather than the glamour girl's campy excess and abundance, Kenickie's was not an identity which sat comfortably within Britpop. Like the figure of the working-class aesthete or politicised intellectual, the working-class girl who expressed a casually confident, self-possessed and independent sexuality on her own terms rather than those of lad culture struggled to find a respected place in the Britpop pantheon, even as Blur's video for Country House enlisted glamour models to portray working-class Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender sexuality, under male direction, in the form of commodified stereotypes. Follow theQuietusBooks on Twitter for more. Share this article:. If you love what we do, you can help tQ to continue bringing you the best in cultural criticism and new music by joining one of our subscription tiers. As well as the unparalleled joy of keeping the publication alive, you'll receive benefits including exclusive editorial, podcasts, and specially-commissioned music by some of our favourite artists. To find out more, click here. 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Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Clampdown by Rhian E. Jones Goodreads Author. Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? From chav-pop pantomimes to retro-chauvinist landfill indie, the bland, homogenous and compromised nature of the current 'alternative' sector reflects the interests of a similarly complacent and privileged political establishment. In particular, political and media policing of femal Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? In particular, political and media policing of female social and sexual autonomy, through the neglected but significant gendered dimensions of the discourse surrounding chavs, has been accompanied by a similar restriction and regulation of the expression of working-class femininity in music. This book traces the progress of this cultural clampdown over the past twenty years. Get A Copy. Paperbackpages. Published March 16th by Zero Books first published March 11th More Details Bread and Roses Award Nominee for Shortlist Other Editions 2. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Clampdownplease sign up. Lists with Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Feb 09, Tara Brabazon rated it it was amazing. This is it. This is what cultural studies scholars should have been writing in the last ten years. Instead of walking away from discussions of the political economy or - even worse - becoming apologists cheerleaders? This book by Rhian Jones is inspirational. I have taken 10 pages of notes a This is it. I have taken 10 pages of notes and found myself cheering out loud while reading it. Jones investigates what has happened to working class women and men in and through popular culture in the last two decades. This is not a book about representation. This is a Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender about invisibility. Working through 'chav' culture and Britpop, Jones has created a nuanced, considered and truly brilliant analysis of the casual racism, sexism, classism and xenophobia that has punctuated our century. I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to read this book. It is an inspiration for all of us working in the humanities in higher education - a role of great privilege - and provides an opportunity to remember our political role and our social accountability. Time to get angry. Time to get busy. Mar 29, Lis rated it liked it. This is such an important book - my worry is that, couched as it is in academic language, not enough people will read it. View all 3 comments. Aug 11, Guy Mankowski rated it it was amazing. The second half of this book is possibly less discussed but the first half, but the insights Jones offers into the artists and their contribution to culture are excellent and written about in a highly compelling way. May 21, Alan Trotter rated it it was ok Shelves: non-fiction. Really disappointing. It's an interesting topic—examining why pop culture has become so politically conservative, satisfied to shore up rather than critique or attack. In particular its focus is popular music, and on representations of women and the working class. I think Jones's position is coherent and a good account of it could be made, an account that could be interesting, could be vital. But it's so badly written. It takes until the second part of Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender book, 30 pages in, for a good sentence Really disappointing. It takes until the second part of the book, 30 pages in, for a good sentence to appear: a play on Orwell, describing the Tories under Major as seeming like "a government impossible to indict [and Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender all the future held was the prospect of a grey cricket shoe stamping on a human face forever". For most of its length the writing is unbearably flat. Even less forgivably, the easy flow of jargon is allowed to dictate the sense Clampdown: Pop- cultural Wars on Class and Gender what is said, and the result can be confused or outright meaningless. It's writing as a submission to pre- constructed, received thought. It doesn't help that the formatting of the Kindle version is similarly lazy, with apostrophes dislocated from their words, and footnotes that link to the wrong place or don't link anywhere at all. At its worst, it's the kind of writing that Orwell himself complained about: "The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. View all 5 comments. Feb 27, Roxy rated it really liked it Shelves: rg. Published a couple of years ago and relevant now more than ever. There are much-needed dissections of issues such as ap Published a couple of years ago and relevant now more than ever. There are much-needed dissections of issues such as appropriation of working class culture, and the intersections of class politics and feminism. The only thing that ever so slightly let it down for me is that it's a bit wordy where it doesn't necessarily need to be. If you read cultural theory, political theory, any kind of theory and are used to seeing long sentences with long words, then you won't have a problem; for me there's just an irony that such vital issues, which need to be recognised and understood by, really, as many people as possible, are not quite as accessible as they should be. I would also suggest you take the section on Britpop with a pinch of salt - personally I'm not into it at all, so it was difficult for me to be able Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender recognise certain elements; if you're quite into it yourself, I'm sure you can draw your own conclusions. Either way, this was a brilliant book to read. I would have rated this 4. Jan 19, Simon rated it it was amazing. This short, passionate book articulates one answer to how the UK is able to suffer the hardest, deepest and most damaging cuts to the public sector and welfare in generations and still see it as something necessary and even desirable. Jones argues that pop culture has gradually drifted to the right, particularly over the last ten years, cutting off one of Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender key avenues of self expression to all but those privileged enough to be able to be self sufficient. As a result protest against the untram This short, passionate book articulates one answer to how the UK is able to suffer the hardest, deepest and most damaging cuts to the public sector and welfare in generations and still see it as something necessary and even desirable. As a result protest against the untrammelled progress of ideological capitalism has been neutered at the same time that the constant and prolonged dismissal of working class society as 'chavs' has resulted in an all but conquered society. It is difficult to read this book without feeling a growing sense of anger. Jones does not offer any answers, since that is not her purpose. She is simply pointing out the issues. Although this book uses pop culture, and specifically music, of the last twenty years as its theme, this is merely a lens through which to examine the changes society has undergone. I would encourage anyone remotely interested in the current state of politics to read it. Aug 15, Paula Maguire rated it liked it. I found this a challenging read and have to admit that I didn't' get everything. I probably need to re read it Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender a 'dippy' book and not from start to finish because you need to savour the arguments. However I largely agree with the premise of the book ; that music has become increasingly mainstream and middle class cold play and mumfords, or anodyne xfactor and it working class voices increasingly marginalised, or ridiculed. Aug 31, acb rated it really liked it. Amy Winehouse and the exclusion of lower-class perspectives and inclusion of poshos' caricatures of hideous proles in a music industry where participation is increasingly limited to those with inherited wealth. Jun 13, John Carter McKnight rated it really liked it. Jones' writing is brilliant, pyrotechnic, clever, scathing, but most of the time I had no idea what she was on about. Reading Clampdown was like standing behind someone at a cocktail party who's clearly having a fascinating conversation that you can only hear half of - tantalizing, but not edifying. May 31, Louise rated it really liked it. When I was first made aware of this book I got ridiculously excited. A look at music and politics, with bands like Kenickie looked at? The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | Clampdown: Britpop Culture Wars, Kenickie & Shampoo

I wrote one such piecewhich cited such songs as the Jam's "Town Called Malice" and the Beat's "Stand Down Margaret"and implicitly wondered: why, when we live in times every bit as tumultuous, has everything gone so quiet? The question has been regularly Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender for half Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender decade now, and Rhian Jones sympathises with Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender. But in this thoughtful, short book, she argues essentially that our pop culture remains reflective of what's happening, but it has done a degree flip, so that the dominant voices now mirror the values of the powerful. As far as musicians are concerned, little Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender this is a matter of conscious intent: it's down to the fact that they are usually lightning rods of one kind or another, and what they channel these days is a kind of post-ideological establishment-think, complete with the blank acceptance of the rightward march of politics. This is all heady, ambitious stuff, probably better suited to a full-length book. But quickly, the intensity of her critique makes her book unputdownable. And the fact that she sprinkles the text with references to those great pop-cultural intellectuals the Manic Street Preachers — like her, products of the South Wales valleys — says a lot about what she thinks might still aspire to. Stripped down, this is a cultural history that goes from the early s to the present. Meanwhile, she writes, "those who happened to be born with the same signifiers involuntarily bolted on" — that is, your actual working class — "were vanishing from public view, their place on the political and cultural stage taken by ersatz, commodified versions of themselves, in a process so seamless as to be sinister. Quite so. As Jones sees it, the way was thus opened for a horror show that arrived just under a decade later, when two former private schoolboys came up with the cheap and nasty cast of the hugely successful sketch show Little Britainnot least Matt Lucas's Vicky Pollard, every right-wing trope about working-class women brought to life. She is right, too, that there was another s, embodied in politicised writing in the music press, and no end of non- how distant we now are from a world that spawned the London-based band Stereolab 's "overtly communist indietronica". She also writes about the punk-feminist subculture known as riot grrrl, one last go at giving rock a bold female refit, before what followed pushed women to the margins. Among the casualties were Kenickiea three-quarters female band from the post-industrial north-east, fronted by the future TV and radio presenter . Society books. A fierce and valuable book that charts the sell-out of pop culture since the s. John Harris.