Britain in the MODern World

In an essay published in the August 13 dated issue of Time magazine, the usually adroit commentator Nick Cohen made the point about the Olympics opening ceremony that, 'when it came to modern Britain, the best Danny Boyle could offer were crass pop songs'. If Mr Cohen watched the closing ceremony he can only have been confirmed in that view. If only there had been Crass songs instead of crass pop, things might have been far more interesting.

But then the Visa Olympics are not meant to be anything more than a two-week long advertising bonanza for the global brands who take most of the money out of the 'Games'. In that, the Brits did the mighty credit card, junk food and European auto industry proud. Britons happily turned Caliban's speech, used in the opening ceremony, into a hymn of praise to the slave masters who exploited, raped, pillaged and murdered the monstrous 'other' that Shakespeare created Caliban to represent. Britain took poor half-mad William Blake's poetic appeal ('Jerusalem') against the ecologically disastrous, polluting, and uncaring industrial revolution and made it into a hymn of praise to 'progress'. 'Jerusalem' should never be sung in celebration of national pride, that would be like asking John Lydon to advertise butter.

Where once Britain ruled the waves and oversaw the dismantling of indigenous civilisations around the world, now she simply serves those who own the brands that set the price of 'freedom' to buy, buy, buy! Watching either of the live-action Olympic extravaganza you cannot help but think that Britain is now defined by the waves of spontaneous, anti-authoritarian pop culture and youth cults which punctuated the latter half of the 20th century, and which have now become icons of marketing cool. Once anti-authoritarian protest songs have become weapons of mass persuasion in the war on people's wallets as waged by Starbucks, McDonalds, HSBC, Coke, Fred Perry and the rest of the homogenous junk-peddlers too numerous to mention.

The Olympic opening and closing ceremonies presented an idea of Britain as a land of rehashed, warmed-up and reconstituted pop culture, and its inhabitants a nation of nostalgia-obsessed, heritage-spewing worker ants striving to keep calm and resolutely backward-looking as the world moves on. The appearance of a bunch of 'Mod' scooters on stage, just like the ridiculous 'pogoing' dolls at the opening fiasco, exploited, trivialised and sanitised the once honest and heartfelt principles on which each youth cult was founded. But that's OK, because now everyone can be a 'Mod', not just the privileged few who came up with the idea in the first place, and if you're willing to pay for the gear then you can buy into any anti-social cult, right?

The willingness of performers to push their back catalogue on any global stage can't be argued with, of course. As much as the sight and sound of child porn site visitor Pete Townshend playing 'Baba O'Reilly' with its chorus of 'teenage wasteland' is obscene, it's still a crowd pleaser ('My Generation' is beyond a joke). Although I'm not sure that crowds of teenagers who've had their paltry £30 a week learning grant removed in order to pay the £9 billion it cost to turn the slums of East London into a ghost town can afford to be that pleased about it. The sheer hypocrisy and cant displayed by the organisers, bands and politicians who wriggled their fat arses in time to the crass pop on offer was unpleasing to me, certainly.

There were far more deserving exponents of British musical excellence who would have made a greater and more relevant representation of past British arts culture. What would the world have made of Robert Wyatt in his wheelchair singing 'Shipbuilding', or 'Stalin Wasn't Stalling'? How about a video-projection of England's greatest stately homo Quentin Crisp relating bon mots from his life instead of the self-hating, hypocritical liar Bulsari, a man so petrified of revealing his sexuality that he entered into a sham marriage and was threatening to sue anyone who dared write that he was gay even on his AIDs-inflicted deathbed?

Why not play Gavin Bryar's majestic 'Sinking of The Titanic', have John Cale perform 'Catastrofuk' instead of the Who, Grasscut instead of Blur, anyone other than Beady Eye, and let Adam Ant on stage to twat that attention-seeking idiot Russell Brand before he opened his mouth? If we must have our past regurgitated for the titillation of visa-swiping morons the world over, where were Linton Kwesi Johnson, Annie Whitehead, John Cooper Clarke, Eve Libertine, PiL and Gang of Four?

Actually, on second thoughts, to quote a man who used to believe that Pete Townshend was someone to look up to, 'the public gets what the public wants'. Problematically, it seems that the public wants a neatly packaged version of the past, and since it has no idea what the definition of 'Mod' is anymore (isn't it an acronym for Mostly Old Dads?), how can there be a future?