Picture, if you will, the slack-jawed derision with which Little Richard or Elvis Presley might have greeted an announcement, in 1959, that comedy or cooking was ‘the new rock and roll’. ‘No suh! Ah don’ like it!’ With pianos to straddle and trousers to split, neither of these great architects of the Pop Age would have deigned so much as to give the idea a second thought. That any rival phenomenon could pinch the mantle of rock and roll, or parade around in its borrowed crown, would simply have been unthinkable. Rock and roll defined the modern age, and nothing else would do.
This happy state of affairs managed to last, in Britain, until the start of the current decade. Then, in 1990, when the country was still watery-eyed and winded from being punched below the intellect by the Recession of the late Eighties, the great surge of public fervour for England’s chances in the World Cup of Italia 90 gave birth to the latest catchphrase in analytical shorthand: football, we decreed, was ‘the new rock and roll’.
And the media were swift to authorize this radical shift in value judgements. Unlikely celebrity pundits such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ignatieff were wheeled out from behind their hitherto bookish identities, to dabble in populism and turn the tears of a pre-lapsarian Gazza into a kind of weeping effigy for the burgeoning church of Laddism Nouveau. That soccer should be ‘the new rock and roll’ was a triumph for the zeitgeist surfers, providing as it did a sinewy little label that could be easily adapted to a whole succession of ensuing phenomena that appeared to define the state of the nation.
Barely had rock and roll itself had time to acknowledge this sneaky jab to its noble jaw, when the success of Luciano Pavarotti, whose rendition of ‘Nessum Dorma’ as the ‘’ere We Go’ of Italia 90 had brought Puccini to the High Street, inspired the heretical suggestion that opera, in fact, was the new rock and roll. And, as the latest speculation on what brand of cultural activity might best reflect the national temper, kept buoyant in the ether of popular enthusiasm by various combinations of tenors through the early 1990s, opera might well have been the new rock and roll had it not been usurped by the reinvention of stand-up comedy.
Comedy became the new rock and roll when Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer took the trappings of psychedelic dandyism and applied them to what seemed like an imagining of Morecambe and Wise on helium. Suddenly, released from the humour of political correctitude that had kept many young comics on the raised awareness cabaret circuit, British comedy exchanged jokes about Margaret Thatcher for cartoon surrealism and an infantilist nostalgia for the popular culture of the early 1970s. All too soon, by way of Vic and Bob, Harry Enfield, Sean Hughes and Frank Skinner, comedy’s claim to being the new rock and roll seemed assured when Newman and Baddiel, of ‘The Mary Whitehouse Experience’, played sell-out shows at Wembley Arena – thus conquering the ultimate venue of rock and roll itself. This triumph of comedy over pop and football – as the new rock and roll – would be compounded by the fact that many young comedians would discover secondary careers as celebrity panellists on TV quiz shows about pop and football.
But no sooner had the new generation of young British comics settled down to a collective reign over the national mood, than out of the comparative obscurity of Goldsmiths College and warehouse exhibitions in London’s East End came the pronouncement that contemporary art, festooned with ironic chutzpah by the youthful practitioners of neo-conceptualism, had in fact taken over from comedy as the new rock and roll. There was even the suggestion, as young British artists became famous for making sex- and death-obsessed conceptual jokes with ironic punchlines, that art had become the new rock and roll by being the new comedy.
But if BritArt was a cultural co-product of BritPop, as suggested by Arena magazine, then the international success of Oasis would remind the nation that rock and roll, actually, was the new rock and roll and always had been. And that would have been the end of it – except for the fact that ‘BritCulture’ had inspired the media to reinvent Swinging London, and with it a restaurant and gastronomy boom that made cooking, in fact, the new rock and roll. (Other than a faint flurry of excitement around the contractual arrangements of Zoe Ball and Andy Peters, which had threatened to suggest that being a children’s television presenter was the new rock and roll, the issue had never been clearer.)
By the autumn of 1996, with new expensive restaurants opening all over London, each one a tribute to the luxurious styling revealed on the pages of Elle Decoration magazine, and with braised artichoke hearts on wilted rocket being concocted nightly on British television, anyone who could poach an egg in a minimalist interior was on the cutting edge of culture.
So what might be the next rock and roll, in 1999? Answer: Designer Witchcraft. It was only a short step from the luxurious mediation of herbs, olive oil and shaved truffle, which typified the cult of the neo-Foodie, to the cleverly styled photographs of natural ingredients and state-of-the-art spells that appeared in the velvet-covered publishing sensation of winter ’97, Hocus Pocus: Titania’s Book of Spells.
In a stroke of sheer brilliance, in terms of marketing, at least, Hocus Pocus took the visual language of Elle Decoration and ‘Alastair Little’s Italian Kitchen’ and applied it to a practical guide to white magic for the New Women of the urban cognoscenti. With spells for wealth, health and a happy love life, this was New Age sorcery for the Bibendum generation, as though Titania herself were sprung from the womb of the Conran Shop, tutored in the Aveda school of minimalist aromatherapy and sent on her mystic way to heal the hearts and guide the heads of high achievers bored with Prozac and the Marie Claire problem page.
With a rival publication, How to Turn Your Ex-boyfriend into a Toad, selling equally well, the cult sensation was building up to a juicily media-friendly phenomenon. And this latest challenge to the increasingly materialistic and somewhat chauvinistic procession of phenomena that had comprised the new rock and roll – each one describing a further return to the demonized and elitist values of the 1980s, only dressing down now in the name of populism – brought about the triumph of female spell-weaving which conjured up the Spice Girls. Bred in the magic test-tubes of advanced marketing, the Spice Girls are a comma in the history of cultural commodification: they bridge the gap between virtual reality and legalized cloning. Both of which might yet be the new rock and roll.
The brief December twilight gave way to the hostile blackness of a winter’s night. Even the sodium orange of the streetlights seemed to be sucked into the darkness, leaving just a gleam of a tangerine mist, hanging in the trees. Inside the apartment, barely audible, came the sound of some difficult modern music – sudden, pedal-dampened piano chords, a jagged crescendo … On the low black coffee table, which was varnished and polished to such a sheen that it looked as though it was lacquered, was the box of the CD – some pieces by Pierre Boulez.
‘… plunk.’
This was anxious music – culture-vulturing city slicker music. It sounded as if someone were trying very carefully to extract a snooker ball that had become stuck beneath the strings in a grand piano. But how to describe a culture-vulturing city slicker? Well, it was all based on a drawing. This is what you got.
In the first place, this winter’s dusk, it felt like the end of something. Like the Russian play where the collapse of an entire social order is announced by the snapping of a violin string. Perhaps the Eighties were exhausted, too, the pneumatic self-confidence of the decade’s rhetoric slowly beginning to deflate. (And these are observations about a certain, single aspect of an era – that aspect being the effervescent mist that shivered and tingled just above the fizzy bits of the zeitgeist.)
The latter half of the 1980s had seen the beginnings of destabilizing cultural status and blurring aesthetic boundaries. Terms such as ‘accelerated’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘dystopic’ were in currency, conveying the sense of a new, volatile, high-speed culture – the future was beginning with the ruination of history. From the Alessi kettle to your average maroon and turquoise balustraded business park office building, the Three Ps of post-modernism were making their presence felt: punning, plagiarism and parody. What larks Pip, old chap, what larks.
As if to mark the moment, the ‘semiotext(e)’ booklets by or on the principal cast and chorus of post-modern