Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — The Imagined Village: “World Music” Celebrities Fly-Tipping a Revisioned Socialist National Culture in an Imaginary Rural Setting to Bolster Regionalism
Just when you think realism’s canvased its last audience, there’s a rough Halloo! as the media summons itself and gathers round yet another mytho-mimetic Englishness folly purporting to represent all of us in miniature. Herewith, The Imagined Village, on Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD-derived Real World Records. An early record sleeve boasts a mock-up of a brown, Highways Agency-approved heritage tourism signpost, which positions their product with excellent precision.
The Imagined Village identifies ‘the village’ as a recoverable national asset and seeks to tease out the essential village in even the most ghastly urban space by promoting the edginess of hidden histories and reanimating failed communitarianism in the only terms ‘we’ seem able to understand. The Imagined Village is cultivating the imaginary village as a site of contest, giving an ideal topos mostly placed in ‘the rural’ an aura of urban liminality. You might as well say that ‘the urban’ resides in the middle of rural England. Both positions are equally idiotic — as is interrogating one by applying the other as a text, lever, clamp or electrode. My dubjective antennae are drooping, stilled by non-sensation.
Turn left into The Imagined Village tourist destination
Before the off, there have been so many cogent criticisms of the continuing trend in English/British social life to revert to the archetypal, ideal topos of ‘the village’ in circumstances of distress, whether ironically to destroy the myth or in seeking empowerment through reclaimation, that I can hardly be bothered to take them to task over it. Read Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) for starters.
The reimagining of English folk music as Angliana has been a long time coming. It’s been a good four years since Jah Wobble’s English Roots Music. Even longer since Professor Brian Short’s editorial recontextualisation of rurality beyond ‘the village’ in The English Rural Community: image and analysis (1992). Taking its name from Georgina Boye’s excellent book, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (1994), The New Imagined Village, as I can’t help but think of it, limps in last. Full marks to them though for naming their ventriloquising after Boyes’ book, in which she agrees with a 19th century critic of folklore who said that folkism is “a fraud, a delusion, a myth” and “simply a name for our ignorance”. The Imagined Village is an imaginary community arts outing, an imaginary community memory project, an imaginary identity forum, facilitated to death by a handful of Eighties performers plus some newer ones, including:—
Benjamin Zephaniah
Billy Bragg
Chris Wood
Eliza Carthy
Johnny Kalsi
Martin Carthy
Paul Weller
Sheila Chandra
Simon Emmerson
The Copper Family
The Gloworms
Tiger Moth
Trans-Global Underground
Tunng
As if The Good, The Bad and the Queen (2007) wasn’t a revolting enough spectacle, with its metonymical music hall reimagining of the masses as full-on stoned prole metropolitan intellectuals — or was its sparseness about silencing the flow of sounds and voices the better to hear Albarn trill? — its cultural retrenchment and its hoarse Cassandraean wail of warning disguised as a paean. And isn’t the music hall invariably adduced when songwriters and popsters with pretensions to Englishness add the detuned pianoforte into their repertoire? As if Iain Sinclair’s increasingly provincial property pages hadn’t so effectively subborned space and community histories into narrative outcomes in the unfashionable commuter envelope. Disappearing even further up his own disappearance. As if class hadn’t been sufficiently reified in its unenviable non-metropolitan place by such meterorically entitled critical theorists as those working on The Idler’s hideous crap towns project. I think we’ve all cottoned on to the idea that these creatures actually mean crap people: povs, chavs, oaves, cider mums, with their ghastly wrong clothes and extraordinary manners and speech that the culturally entitled love to approximate nasally.
Now we have to contend with ‘classless’ — but fully racialised and gendered — artistes from The Past ventriloquising The Idiom of The People back at us, much as their dead mentor Cecil Sharp did with the tired corpse of a Cambridgeshire peasant shrouded in a shepherd’s smock to hide its horrid puppet-master’s diddling fingers.
The IV website is pretty anaemic: headings in copperplate, text in accessible non-serif, light pink background. The banner image is a faded blue willow-pattern print effect representing ‘the rural’ as what’s left of an open space on the edges of a heavily built-up urban area, with blocks of flats in the background, a jet flying overhead, what appears to be a lad in a shell-suit claiming through walking a small hill that could be a long barrow. The low wall running round the boundary of this open space is perhaps a piece of 1950s or 60s landscaping or maybe an survival of an earlier ruralist development statement made during the emparkment of an earlier village demolished so as not to ruin the view from a nearby country house. The policeman in a high-vis vest inspecting a burnt-out motor in the right foreground is clearly not preventing crime.
Even as I write, cadres of hauntologists and other more minor cultural figures are literally sweating ectoplasm trying to reconfigure, degrade and mash-up the past and make things better now by renarrating decades’ worth of educational material, antiquarian fictions, future sounds from the past, signifincant conjunctions of this and that, and whatnot. And some of them — notably Ghostbox — are doing a grand job, too. Clearly, the more graphically minded among the hauntologists were not asked to participate or refused and thinned out and the job went to a less switched on motherfucker.
A glimpse of home in The Imagined Village
I give standing ovations to affective imaginings and I’m all for letting the voices out/in/through — but not like this. The Imagined Village says it’s engaging with the great debate on “what constitutes the English identity”. Well, listen to this. The English identity envisaged by Billy Bragg’s mates in the Labour Government is an archive of data taken from citizens that, under the increasingly doomed-yet-inevitable identity card scheme, the state would own and sell back to the individuals who provided it under licence.
Bragg, like Cecil Sharp before him, is ventriloquising wildly. He’s using The Imagined Village project as a way to underwrite the Government’s failed regionalisation project, thinking that given people’s love of history, folklore and place — apparent in the popularity of Time Team, etc., they’ll eventually come round to appreciating the new territories of the invented regions. His imagined village is a reanimated Festival of Britain search for the best — a local identity competition with the usual penalties for not joining in. It’s habitus, but without the fun element.
Bragg supports the economic and cultural regionalistion of England, which was soundly rejected by the plain villagers of England in the only direct vote on the subject so far in the north-east, but which is currently going full steam ahead and overseen by the spookily generically titled Government Offices Network, which covers the Government offices for the regions — effectively the regional civil service — that administer the unelected regional development assemblies and the regional development agencies they serve.
What historical English regionalism looks like: a flag for East Anglia, invented around 1900 by George Henry Langham, later president of the London Society of East Anglians
According to the South East England Development Agency, the regional development agency with responsibility for corralling culture in the imaginary village I don’t live in:
A SEEDA document called “Culture Counts” spells it out even more clearly: “We must harness the energy and abilities of people to improve the productivity and the standard of life for all.”
The imagined Village seeks to harness the English villagers’ imaginations, the most powerful weapon in the political arsenal, in the cause of economic regionalisation.
19th century infrastructure in the imagined village
It’s a fact that the or even a English identity has lessened me. English identity — its weight, distance and proximity — has by turns made me crazy, afraid and ashamed. England gives black people schizophrenia and gives the wretched poor cancer to kill them off. England is the sound of my mum and dad excusing themselves. English identity is not forgotten, unclaimed. We threw it away and don’t want it back. Or if we’re willing to countenance its return, we want its weirdness called to mind, visibly altered by our scarring it on ejection, whited-out and/or felt-tipped in, like Belbury or Rawlinson End.
The Imagined Village: “We all walk in the footsteps of our Victorian song collecting ancestors but feel it is more relevant now than ever to question who decides what it is to be authentic and English and more importantly what it is that makes us proud to be English musicians.” I don’t walk in the footsteps of Victorian song collectors. Many of my direct ancestors were unlettered rural peasants from whom songs may have been collected. If I walk in anyone’s figurative footsteps, it’s those of late 20th century record collectors.
I’d really like to know what it is that makes them proud — PROUD! — to be English musicians. They don’t care to say on the website and I missed the Newsnight featurette yesterday evening at 11pm. Perhaps it’s the fact that they’ve found a forum for their collective ignorance. I can wait to find out more…
An illustrated talk in the imagined village hall
The most pressing task for all hauntiquarians is avoiding at all costs a dialogue with Billy Bragg, a future peer of the realm in waiting due to his support for Tony Blair’s plan for a mainly non-elected second chamber in Parliament and for his championing regionalism at a time when no politician will touch it. We hauntiquaries won’t be dragged into the village hall under false pre and subtexts yet again for another of his talks, illustrated with magic lantern slides, about the joys of common land, vintage socialist processions and Englishmen in shirtsleeves standing proud without flags to cover their pride.
I’ll set up my own talk about the dead villages of England, remembering their tight surveillance-mindedness and all the fighting with villagers from other villages.
A hauntiquary intuitively appreciates authenticity as a strategically dialogically useful experiential counter-factual. A hauntologist, thinking authenticity an unutterably dreamy fiction, would of course purposefully collide two past experiences — genuflecting over their meaningful dissolution/compaction and the specificity of the (culture) space they describe in their implosion/explosion, in the empty garden at the end of (history) time — and stand ruefully regarding the vista of their own regarding.
John Clare in the 1860s, from Johnclare.info
It’s no surprise that The Imagined Village don’t mention John Clare, England’s best nature poet, for whom the village represented a community from which he was excluded, albeit partly through inclination and choice.
I end with Clare’s poem, “I Am” (1840), which should put to rest any lingering doubts about the worth of reviving the village idea. After all, Clare was a conscious man, an autoethnologist, aware of the ebb and wane of folk tradition and village life, which he put behind him at every opportunity, walking out and away into the fields and woods and sky, till he was “out of his knowledge”. The imagined village left him a conscious psychedelic husk. Do ‘we’ all now relish immediately being entitled to the thing Clare rejected?
I am: yet what I am no one cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live — like vapors tossedInto the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the restI long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below — above the vaulted sky.
Edit:
Eliza Carthy has entered into a dialogue on this post (see comments). She does right in calling into question the dualism of the ventriloquist/dummy idea I used to characterise Cecil Sharp’s internal colonialism and links that with a thought-provoking line about people’s conscious continuation and appropriation of musical traditions, especially in respect of families who sing and play music: “When exactly do you stop being the ventriloquist and become the dummy, do you think?”
Comments closed, 17 September 2008.
The best part of a year has passed since I posted it and it’s time to let it go. Thanks to those who’ve taken the time to read it and voice their opinions.
Posted by Neil
on October 13, 2007 at 1:16 am
Tags: Ecology, Regionalism, Spatiality, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
October 15th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
If instead of ‘imagined’ they said ‘dreamed’ we’d easier see this for the thin imposture ’tis. I spent decades dreaming in a village, drying jazz mags on bushes, eating mushrooms and listening to mosrite guitars, playing atari and smelling new cars and girls clothes. I could go on all day and so could you and so could anyone, but the true secret of the village is sexually solitary, onanistic: not communal. Maypole my arse.
Why are there fountains in the Dream House of the collective? Are they burst water mains? I remember when all this was casinos, in the other future, now floods float the mobile library, we punt past the bus stop, Hiawatha and I. Back in the village with my ghost mother.
I stll get chilled to the fucking marrow by that ‘vast shipwreck’. ‘…I long for scenes where man has never trod…’ he says, radio glass-breath voice inside the visor, taking the last slow step down from the lander, little billows of blue crystal dust, the twin suns casting his shadows across the mesa, pointing two ways, both away from the wreck of the SS Helpston. He’s carrying a flag, but I can’t see what’s on it.
A
October 16th, 2007 at 10:21 am
John Clare, autonomous astronaut!
Thank you.
Neil
October 16th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
I’m afraid I have to disagree with what you are saying here… I found The Imagined Village’s music rather moving and I am personally of the opinion that anything that encourages a love of traditional folk music is well worth encouraging.
It is possible there is a political message behind their music - but isn’t there in everything! Adverts on TV try to get us to buy their products, books try to influence our perspectives and music is no different. Otherwise, we would sing in meaningless syllables. The world of Political Correctness has gone mad. If we cannot vent our ideas in music, just as you have done with words above, there is no point to language or the intellect. Just my personal view, you understand.
I am a foreigner who has lived in the UK for most of my life; I have seen ‘regionalism’ both as a foreigner and as a local. I have lived in towns and country villages, and I have experienced the ‘regionalism’ you are referring to. Regionalism, to my mind, is a positive force, and encourages people to have pride in their origins and in their land itself. There is nothing negative in being proud of where you come from.
The English are a rural people. This has been the case for quite a number of years, and as a medievalist, I have intimate knowledge of the rural past that you refer to. It is important to save the already weak knowledge of that past, or the English people lose their true heritage. If encouraging the young of this technical, hyper-speed, hedonistic and stimulating world to love folk music is the way to save this piece of English heritage, I am all for it.
Most young people in the UK will know of Jennifer Lopez, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Radiohead etc. They will likely not have heard of Tam Lyn. Seriously, if we can encourage a love for folk and world music, for heaven’s sake, lets do it!
Just as a final point, I believe John Clare wrote this in a mental institution, and being a lit student myself, I would hasten to add that most sane persons do not follow the advice of poets. The suicide rate is a little too high…
October 16th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Most sane persons do not follow the advice of poets, Sceopellen, that’s for shit sure. Clare didn’t commit suicide, but that tough motherfucker’s death seems to be hanging like a pimp threat in yr ellipsis. If, as you say, political correctness has gone mad, and intimate knowledge of the rural past, pride in origins, in land itself, is all that stands against the entartete kunst of blacks and hispanics confusing our young, I’m not surprised that at the mention of poetry you reach for your revolver. Punting your false dichotomy of speed and pleasure vs. Volk music, as you have done with words above, is positively Cambodian (although of course some of the most forward thinking hedonistic psychedelia ever to goose the squares emanated therefrom). This is my personal sarcastic view, you understand.
October 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Sceopellen, thank you for your comment.
It’s easy to say “The English are a rural people”, given the weight of ruralism in English culture. But rurality and images of rurality are not always the same thing. Some thought should be given to the proximity of urban/rural in most parts of England (call it Green Belt or what you will), which calls into question the easy separation of urban and rural. In fact, given this proximity, it could be said that most of the English are in fact suburban. This is not to say that there are not large agrarian spaces with population centres in England.
I’m happy to admit being brought up in rural suburbia — in a village near Cambridge — that was designated in the postwar period as part of a nodal development plan that aimed to avoid ribbon development of the kind seen in south London and Merseyside and target mass development at the less pretty Cambridgeshire villages.
On the rurality of the songs Cecil Sharp collected. Georgina Boyes, who wrote “The Imagined Village” (1994), after which this new musical project was named, is far from certain that all the songs originated in villages. In fact, there is much evidence showing that Sharp redesignated certain songs found in towns as village songs. Whether or not you attach importance to Sharp’s practice, if you’re a ruralist there’s still the matter of identifying the more rural place — the village or the town. I’m not so bothered, since having made a study of early modern custom, tradition and literacy I can make an informed guess that songs travelled with the people who wrote and adapted them over the years, so it’s unlikely that a song would have originated and stayed in one place. Having said that, I see no reason why a place or person-specific song shouldn’t start somewhere and stay there. It would probably die there, though.
Look at the link to the Copper family songbook on The Imagined Village links page. Most of the songs are far from locally specific and most have to do with national culture. A cusory glance reveals only one song with a Sussex subject: “Shepherd of the Downs”.
I’ve long since stopped thinking about culture as a series of gains and losses. Nostalgia is not a bad thing, but there are degrees even of sentiment. If ‘we’ — I’m using inverted commas to distance myself from the ‘we’ of The Imagined Village — have lost certain place and person-specific songs invented and lost in the past, should I become anxious about it? In the imagined totality of culture, how many good new songs have been invented to replace lost ones? And how many ‘lost’ songs remain in new songs composed from shards of old ones’ words and melodies or adapted from their predecessors? And if songs are mislaid or set aside by their singers as time passes, what is it that ‘we’ have actually lost?
Given the efforts of folksong collectors over the years to preserve old songs, there’s little danger of the corpus being lost — unless there’s no interest in keeping it going. And there’s plenty of interest at the moment, and has been for more than 100 years. When people stop being interested, the songs will vanish of their own accord. I’m not afraid of a passage from old songs to new songs, from old ‘folk’ traditions to new traditions. All tradition is invented at some stage.
What you term “weak knowledge” of the past — some inherent fault in the consumers? — is the result of context receding and individual cultural artefacts becoming less understandable. There is such a strong historical sense in English culture, albeit with an emphasis on the pastness of the past, that it’s easy to stir people’s love of heritage. I see no loss of heritage around me. In fact, I’m overwhelmed sometimes by the press of preserved material culture and occasionally adversely surprised by the longevity of ephemeral artefacts, such as popular songs.
Put simply, I don’t care if ‘we’ lose a couple of dozen folksongs about General Wolfe. I’m more upset by the actual loss of people’s lived experiences. I’d rather Cecil Sharp had asked the people he collected from about their sense of place and themselves than filleted them for popular songs and ignored their collective cultural knowledge.
On your point about the political message of The Imagined Village, I’m not saying that politics shouldn’t be mentioned by culture producers or saying that I’m surprised that a political point is being made by Bragg and Co. — I’d be surprised if there weren’t! — but that I think the political basis for The Imagined Village is ill-founded or, at worst, mendacious. My post is a critical response to a putative search for dialogue on “the English identity” via folkish mumming that hides a regionalist agenda based on New Labour policy.
Finally, I think your dualistic take on madness colours your view of John Clare. Sanity/insanity is best understood as a spectrum rather than as two separate boxes into which we dump people. I can’t resist suggesting a hint of totalitarianism emerging in this part of your comment: figuring folksong as utter reality in contrast to poetry, the bottomlesss pit of abject imagination. Do the words John Clare wrote mean nothing? Perhaps if he’d written folk songs rather than poems — as peasants like him are supposed in the popular imagination to have done — he’d have a bigger presence in the minds of ruralists and folklorists.
Neil
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I am not relating my above comments regarding ruralism to our “modern” society - I am referring to English heritage. There is a big difference there. Tam Lyn was definately not written in “modern” suburbia.
Why is there a requirement to lose music in order to gain it? Why not allow it to evolve, just as The Imagined Village have found a way of doing. Giving ‘old’ music a new lease of life will encourage diversity. A good analogy could be found in genetics - we may wish to get rid of previous traits that are now a disadvantage, but we would lose those elements of the gene pool which may leave us at a disadvantage later, e.g. the debate over GM crops.
The songs have been kept alive, but it has been a struggle to do so, and may well drop-off the radar at some point. Surely that would be a great shame? In classical music, there is so much we have lost; most people’s knowledge extends a little beyond Mozart. Does that discount the value and indeed the reasons for keeping the less popular composers or artists? Some literature was viewed as worthless in its contemporary time, yet now, it is held in great esteem.
Of course, John Clare’s work is valuable, beautiful and should be preserved. However, many would discount it because of his mental illness. I don’t quite see how the quoting of John Clare was supporting your argument. He in fact missed his rural roots and was torn between his fame and his love for his home-lands…
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Thanks for responding.
I wasn’t saying that we inevitably must lose music to gain it, but that I don’t regard culture as a matter of gains and losses. I’d argue that lyrical or musical ‘losses’ may indeed subsequently reappear, reinvigorated, as traces, sometimes quite recognisable traces, in relatively newer songs — even though those newer versions or homages may be quite ancient from our perspective.
On classical, or as some still refer to it, ’serious’, music and preservation in general I don’t think it’s a matter of choosing between “keeping”, as you say, or discarding — not in a cultural-consumption sense at any rate. Of course, the matter of how music is archived and who’s responsible for it will always be a matter of concern. However, referring back to my views on ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ music — the pop music of the past — I think people will decide what they want to hear and when they want to hear it.
When popularity wanes, as it always will for some things, and popular audiences diminish, as they inevitably do, communities of collectors, often completely separate from state infrastructure, will, as they have done in the past, curate the cultural knowledge they’re interested in. This is what happened in the case of ‘folk’ songs, knowledge of which didn’t come to Cecil Sharp in a dream, but through the hints and suggestions of antiquaries throughout England who’d accumulated much that they took to represent their localities.
It’s happening today, too, with the music of Joy Division, for example, which is very much of its time and space of origin and was mostly unspoken of by the music-buying public but has become popular again after the release of the movie “Control”, after laying virtually dormant for years in the minds and vinyl-vaults of a relatively few collectors and enthusiasts.
You’re absolutely right when you say that John Clare was “torn between his fame and his love for his home-lands”. The trouble is, his fame as a poet was fleeting and when he returned to his home-lands he found the people there unable to support him financially or spiritually. The village had nothing for him. And the home-land of his imagining at the time of his incarceration in an asylum in Essex, many many miles south of his native Helpstone, was not a place of blissful rural contentment, but emerged in his fantasies as a lifetime’s experience of rurality and day-dreaming in poesy reduced to one single point: the long-deferred union with his dead first love, Mary Joyce. So the village for John Clare was — at the very best — a place of bittersweet tensions; at worst, it was the site of his most devasting losses.
Of course, ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ music speaks of loss, disappointment as well as joy. It’s not that I spurn a fictional form for its anti-realism, but because its present consumption feeds an idea of place, built on such ‘evidence’ as this, that seeks a separation between ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ that is not so apparent as it seems. Clare was a village working man who spent his leisure time in the woods and hills near home and in nearby urban centres and, for a brief time, lived and worked in London. Where and how, exactly, do we place his experience of the village? And should we assume a specifically rural heritage for all those who sang ‘folk’ songs? If we do so, are we not placing them somewhere that they may have abhorrred or at least felt ambivalent about? What I’m saying is, do you think they’d have celebrated ‘the village’ in the same way we do? If not, we need to think a bit harder about how we ‘naturally’ position themselves and ourselves in respect of the preservation and perpetuation of national heritage.
I agree that there’s a place for the reintroduction of formerly lost or undervalued cultural artefacts. That was my reason for mentioning John Clare. And let’s not forget the great stir in literature caused by the reintroduction of Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into the canon of English literature — albeit Eng. Lit. did all right without their widespread influence for so many years. And as a fan of the sometimes turgid B-movie canon, paperback thrillers and comics, there’s always a place in any culture with any sense of itself for material that helps us get how that culture is formed and used contemporaneously. But I don’t agree with your sense of preservationist near-panic about loss.
Generally, I think you’re conflating preservation and the protection of heritage and cultural value. I’m not saying that everything old is bad and everything new is good. In fact, in musical terms it’s probably the other way round. Given a choice, I prefer independent-minded underground records from the 1960s to most other forms of popular music. And I’d always go for melody over dissonance, which means I’m often cast as ‘reactionary’ in music discussions with forward-thinking minds. Having said that, I’m against preservation as an ideology because it assumes a prior valorisation of certain stuff. If it’s the stuff of the elites, we can all guess what’ll be preserved. However, it’s harder to say what bits of popular culture should be ’saved’ or kept from destruction. Given the vagaries of popular taste and the difficulty in comprehending the reasons for the popularity of some current popular cultural products, I’d hate to be in charge of curating their preservation for future audiences. To be on the safe side, should we save it all, just in case…?
Just for fun, consider this. Who’s to say whether popular cultural material from the past escaped destruction because of or in spite of its popularity? What if the ‘folk’ songs that survived are evidence of the lowest cultural common denominator…?
November 12th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
What a sour load of over-expressed toss. How can anyone write tripe like “The Imagined Village is cultivating the imaginary village as a site of contest, giving an ideal topos mostly placed in ‘the rural’ an aura of urban liminality”…whilst taking apart someone else’s work? “Liege & Lief” was a stunning reworking of grand old songs, as was Springsteen’s Seeger Band. So is The Imagined Village. Get over it…
November 14th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Thank you for your comment.
First, to answer your question: those words give shape to my perception of how The Imagined Village is constructed. I appreciate your not liking my style. I assume you’re inferring that my writing is of such inferior quality that I should not attempt to criticise others. Although you’ve highlighted a particularly densely constructed sentence, it is, I think, a good sentence and one that conveys my understanding succintly. If you don’t like what I say, fine. But I’d prefer it if, in this forum at least, you refrained from covering your preference — your not liking the way I say things — with weak literary criticism.
The Imagined Village exists to prompt discussion of what English identity means. As I’ve said, I don’t propose to discuss the matter with Billy Bragg — life being too short — but I’m happy to talk about it with anyone. That’s what I was doing in this post. I’m sorry you’ve chosen to ignore my main argument, which incidentally is also the primary focus of The Imagined Village.
Secondly, I’m sorry you tasted sourness in my load of toss. I can only imagine that you’re suffering from the kind of synaesthesia that often affects musical partisans or extremists, leading them to perceive an artist’s body of work as an extension of their own identity. If that’s so, I can understand that my words may have affected you.
Thirdly, I do not know what the words “get over it” actually mean, although I’ve heard them uttered umpteen times. However, I do know that this phrase is a verbal tic set off by social or cultural embarrassment. It’s similar to teenagers saying “shut up”, “whatever”, “yeah, right”, “spastic”, “dur-brain”, etc., or laughing inappropriately when they encounter something they don’t understand. I suspect you’re using the phrase to draw a line under your adducing Springsteen, in which case a full stop would have been sufficient. However, if you were passive-aggressively telling me to shut up, I’d be forced to greet such rudeness with a reworking of another grand old English lyric: “So what, you boring little cunt!”*
All the best
Neil
*The rousing refrain from the Anti-Nowhere League’s “So What” (1982) — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH7pOUm5s9k — which was the B-side to their version of folkster Ralph McTell’s sentimentalist “Streets of London”. The juxtaposition of these numbers suggests the ANL were reminding folky McTell that the voice of the people is not just a monolithic folk shibboleth, but a living thing to be heeded whenever and from wherever it emerges.
November 14th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I’ve deleted a very brief follow-up comment from Hillhunt that contained a weak insult and added nothing substantive to this post.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Dear Neil,
I rather closely agree with most of your analysis of the imaginary village conceit, on a strictly theoretical level. That is one part of me, the mind, agrees almost 100%. On the other hand, I actually think the music is pretty good and I forget about all the other stuff when I’m listening to it. I must admit that I do this a lot in relation to music. I make an effort not to anaylse too much, and ‘groove’ to the melody and the rhythms, occassionally I even listen to the words!
I somehow doubt that the people behind the imaginary village project are as scientifically minded as you are, they are, after all, ‘merely’ musicians, rather than academics specializing in history, economics, anthropolgy, sociology… I think it’s interesting, but missing the point somewhat to critcize a group of songs, or a musical idea/ideal, as if one were examining a prime piece of political ideology. Clearly there’s ideology and politics involved. But Billy Bragg is hardly a serious political figure is he? Again I quite like some of his stuff and I try not to think about his connections with New Labour, which I personally find bizarre and incomprehensible, and don’t get me started on Bono and Blair, what a pair!
A lot if this ‘folk romanticism’ is pretty dire, ahistorical, and silly; especially when seen in an accurate historical perspective; problem is, this harsh, strictness, often leads one into an intellectual corner, which is a rather bare and cold and puritanical place, with little joy and enjoyment.
I once remember listening to the musician David Crosby, of the Byrds, talking about the effect the ‘folk revival’ had on him as a youth. He’d been used to the rather ‘limited’ lyrics of conventional American popr music, and was hungry for more, something a little bit deeper. Then suddenly some girl he’d picked up in college turned him on to Matty Groves and Tam Lin, and more. These old songs had a profound effect on him. The moon in june, and commercial. love lyrics, were replaced by; blood, death, gore, incest, murder, rape, infanticide, and lots of other juicy subjects for songs, a light went on in his head and he realized one could reach backwards and forwards at the same time and use tradition to express ones attitudes about the present.
January 31st, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Thanks so much for your post, Michael. I appreciate your taking the time to write. I agree with your take on David Crosby: when you get a song or a piece of music, a light does switch on in your head and you do realise that you can “reach backwards and forwards at the same time and use tradition to express ones attitudes about the present.”
If I get you right, I agree. It’s all about finding a way to deal with past cultures that takes account of their meaning then and now.
My bottom line is that if something moves me, I’ll go wherever it takes me. Yes, I groove!
I’m not against the type of music The Imagined Village makes. I regularly listen to folk-type music. For example, recently, I’ve been listening again to The Watersons and the Carter family. I like listening to music and songs that are about more than negotiating fashion trends.
And I’m all for reuse and rediscovery in culture. Hidden histories are only hidden because the main forces writing, archiving and curating mainstream versions of history prefer trajectories and projections, rather than simultaneity and multifarious experience.
I enjoy the romanticism of revisionist approaches to history and culture and I like the thrill of relative antiquity. We’re not talking guilty pleasures here. I really, really like old stuff because it’s old, because it’s distant, because it’s different, because it’s speaking a different language.
Billy Bragg certainly regards himself as a serious political figure: he’s been serious about his political activism since at least the early 1980s. He was active in the high-level New Labour campaign to reform the House of Lords in the United Kingdom Parliament and was involved in lobbying for that change. As an aside, he was not in favour of a wholly elected House of Lords, which you might have expected a committed socialist to be. But that’s another matter.
In making my point about Bragg, I was linking a current British Government campaign to promote political regionalism through localism with Bragg’s new musical project. The two things are so similarly founded that it’s hard to believe he’s not using The Imagined Village, as a Labour Government spokesman and part-time policy maker, as a platform for his views.
Of course, The Byrds were doing something completely different from The Imagined Village. Yes, they were revisioning a whole world of music that had come and gone but had left tangible but increasingly faint traces on the American popular cultural mind, and in that of cultures globally, too. But they weren’t seeking to forge popular political opinion in alignment with a particular point of Government policy. And although they were a massive part of the music business (industrial capitalism, etc.), they were a vital part of the counter culture, which more broadly sought to inculcate in people the sense that politics and culture were theirs to use to their best ability, and opposed the mainstream political consensus.
I’d be a lot less critical of, and probably less interested in, The Imagined Village if Bragg and his New Labour ideology weren’t the main force behind it.
I think my main problem with The Imagined Village is that it’s using “the village” as a trope and setting for its revisionist narrative. Were the songs they’ve revived and recorded bound to the locales they were ‘discovered’ in by Cecil Sharp and others? If not, why choose to fix them in an ideal place? Why not call the project The Imagined Past? I’d be most interested in that.
I’m not an academic, by the way, although I’ve done some academic studying. And I’m no scientist. A glance at my recent post on the proud professional sceptic, man of reason, Damian Thompson, should dispel any suspicions about my scientific bent!
All the best
Neil
February 16th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Hi Neil,
I am afraid you have the central premise of the Imagined Village band entirely upside down. We have absolutely nothing to do with New Labour, or regionalism, or the fetishising of rural idylls. Calling the band the Imagined Village is supposed to be a reinvention of what constitutes the “village”. And while Billy has been using the concerts as a platform for certain of his beliefs, I assure you that don-democratic government hasn’t come up once (if he does believe in that, which honestly I don’t actually buy for a second). And, if you don’t mind, his is not the only voice in the band and we do not all agree, or present one idea or ideal of what we think Englishness should be.
John Clare did “write” folksongs, mining existing traditional material that he knew well for inspiration for his poetry. Chris Wood’s new album Tresspasser has a strong Clare theme and the title track is about Clare and what the Enclosure act did to him and his state of mind. Our recent tour opened every night with Chris talking and singing about him.
You seem to have assumed a great deal about us from just looking at the website. However, thankyou for sharing your opinions on this subject with the world, because that is genuinely what we are about, and I think I might have learned something from reading what you have written, even if it was an uncomfortable experience and I really don’t like being called ignorant or a ventriloquist. And that “diddling fingers” thing was just gross.
all the best
eliza c
February 17th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Thanks for your comment, Eliza.
Just to clarify, I wrote this post after seeing the briefest of brief mentions on TV one evening and reading the website. The album hadn’t been released then and I couldn’t find any free downloads of Imagined Village tunes. Not being in a position to comment on the substance of the music, I focused on the presentation of the project as I received it, including on Bragg’s involvement, which I still find problematic for the reasons I’ve mentioned previously.
I’m glad I was wrong about John Clare not being a part of your project. I couldn’t find any mention of him on your site and wrongly assumed you’d written him out of the imagined village. Of course, his version of ‘the village’ is a deeply critical one. I guess we differ about Clare. I think that enclosure was just a part of his sorrow. He was at least as exercised about his perception of his relative achievements in poetry. I reckon, since he put all his energy into writing poetry, he’d like to be remembered as a poet.
I didn’t call you ignorant. I don’t think anyone who’s heard you speak about your work or about music could accuse you of that. However, I did accuse your group of “collective ignorance”. I should have expanded that point in my post, because as it stands it’s weak and comes across as a blank insult.
I’d like to expand on that assertion now by saying that the discursive openness of your project seems to be based on those elements of the imagined village that Georgina Boyes exposed as the mendacious ideological bases of Cecil Sharp’s appropriation of and assumptions about English identity: basically, that folk songs come solely from ‘the village’. In other words, I was wondering why musicians in a project seeking to examine the diversity of English identities would admit in advance to pride in having already been defined in terms of a controlling ideology of Englishness-in-music.
I shan’t expand on my charge of ventriloquism, except to say I’ve never understood the genesis of the sound of the ‘folk voice’.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply.
Neil
February 24th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Hi Neil,
Exactly! That’s why it’s called “The Imagined Village” and not “The Village That Everyone In England Lives In Where We All Sound the Same”. The point is not Cecil Sharp’s motives however, which I have had issues with myself, but the reality of the physical body of musical material that he discovered which would not have been discovered were it not for him. Yes, it’s a pity he didn’t write down more of what they were saying as well. Perhaps he should have painted their pictures too, and taken blood samples! Nicked their shoes for greater understanding of their feet! Sorry, got a bit carried away there.
Personally, while I used to feel very excercised about English people being ignorant of their culture and very much discussing traditional music in those worthy and disapproving terms, terms of loss, now I feel that the question of Englishness and the building blocks on which our current culture is resting can only help in the wider debate. I could trot out a well-used Bob Marley quote at this point, you probably know it. I won’t dismiss the traditional canon as music either, because it’s there. Most music’s great. I do also hope we will “lose” some of the shitter old songs as we go…but it’s not up to me. Having been artificially dragged from an early death by the Victorians, hopefully the natural process of elimination can take over now, within the very weird confines of the folk “scene’, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to be, and elsewhere if we can drag it out of that particular ghetto, convenient as it may be.
My folk voice comes from my parents. My Dad is a different story, they were not so much singers but at least seven generations back they were musicians; my Mum’s voice came from her parents and her grandparents and their’s, as far back as the family can remember. When exactly do you stop being the ventriloquist and become the dummy, do you think? I think most folkies miss the point, learning stuff off people’s records. That the dummy trying to make the ventriloquist stick their hand up there? Unless you’re Jon Boden, in which case you like that sort of thing. However, when you and your parents have grown up listening to the radio and not to eachother I can see that emulating something you’ve discovered yourself that seems more “real” might be what you think is your only course to having a mujsic of your own. Or it’s a start, and then you go off and become a teacher or a social worker and your personal development continues while you remember folk music as something you did as a teenager, consequently holding on to an old musical style that everyone else has rightly forgotten about. Whatever, it’s a genuine part of our modern culture now, I can’t escape it. Doesn’t mean I approve, I just understand.
cheers
eliza
February 24th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Thanks, Eliza.
I particularly appreciate your calling into question my use of the ventriloquist/dummy image, which, although I still think it’s good because it’s funny, gives the impression that I regard the re-use of, or narrative accounts of, popular culture by people from a different background always as a form of grave-robbery and colonialism by a social/cultural elite. Well, I do and I don’t. I find it a bittersweet experience going over the antiquarian interests of the past.
Very funny bit about the portraits and blood samples. Actually, I’d like to know more about Sharp’s private collection of peasant memorabilia. I’ll bet you a Jon Boden CD that Sharp had at least one shoe in his private stock!
I see that musical tradition is a cultural reality for many, whether they’ve taken it from family context or picked it in opposition to other influences around them. My take on musical taste is, if it moves you it’s all right. My position on identity is pretty much the same. Like you suggest, music is a great marker of identity for many. I’m a bit more of a pessimist than you are, though: I don’t think most music is great and I think the generic exclusiveness of the idea of identity is as problematic as its potential inclusiveness is appealing.
See, I don’t understand, but I’m trying!
All the best
Neil
June 18th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Neil
A few wisps of an idea and a couple of pictures does not make for the subject of a truckload of pseudo-academic polemic.
I think it would have been a lot more helpful for everyone if you had listened to the music (i.e. the main output of the project) before you decided to state your opinion on the project. Sort of makes sense really.
Keith
June 18th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Thanks for posting, Keith.
Yes it does! (See post’s existence and discussion for confirmation of this.)
And it’s actually real polemic.
I don’t enjoy modern folk music, but I enjoy talking about identity.
I’m sorry you think I’m not being helpful.
Which bits of my post/ideas/thoughts do you not like, disagree with or object to, apart from all the above?
Neil
September 16th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Hi Neil,
Keith seems to have chosen not to reply, but I’d like to take up his point - does it not strike you as somewhat specious to take philosophical potshots at an entire project when you have failed to experience the project’s main output? (the music).
I understand that you enjoy talking about identity, but the complex multi-faceted nature of regional/national identity being spoken of by the IV project runs right through the music itself.
Yet you feel perfectly content to berate them for things you wrongly believe them to hold true en masse. As Eliza suggests, Billy Bragg is one voice among many (& not even the driving force as has been suggested elsewhere - this is Simon Emmerson) but like anyone he has his own mind & political beliefs, which to me encompass a very modern inclusive sense of what it is to live in the UK. (his song “Half-English” seems to sum this up perfectly - it’s also been mixed into a reworked old song by IV - “John Barleycorn” - there’s a pretty poorly recorded version here -
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jdGis5jy-CE
with BB’s addition coming about 6mins in & a better recording on the band’s own site here
http://imaginedvillage.com/audiovideo/35/
but it seems to take an age to load up for me! & I can’t work out whether BB’s addition is included or not)
Incidentally, if you’d rather remain untroubled by the music itself, some of Billy Bragg’s IV lyrics are posted here -
http://www.mos.umu.se:3455/CCEng/35
(skip down to “Hard Times of Old England)
You talk of grave-robbing & ventriloquism, yet many of the artists involved are descendants of English folk musicians, or consider themselves to be part of a changed British culture, made more diverse & interesting by the cultures & crossovers from other lands.
But I think it’s the text, dripping with derision and sarcasm that I find the most distasteful, especially when again coupled with the dishonesty of not having listened to the bleedin’ music!
You say you don’t enjoy modern folk music - you seem to be stating this as an adequate reason for not having deigned to listen to it - fair enough to not listening to a music style that you don’t like (despite it being an enormously diverse genre). I don’t like Metallica, but I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to try to build a complex argument against their political / cultural views based on never having listened to them.
On the BBC site that led me here, you write - “I’ve written an adverse commentary on The Imagined Village on my blog” - surely a commentator should have experienced that which is being commented on? Or as Wittgenstein might have put it - “Whereof one cannot speak - thereof one must remain silent”?
MikeMcG
September 16th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
oh & the Billy Bragg song I was struggling to find a version of (England Half English Meets John Barleycorn) is available to hear for free on the IV Myspace page - http://www.myspace.com/theimaginedvillage
September 16th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Thanks for commenting, MikeMcG.
“does it not strike you as somewhat specious to take philosophical potshots at an entire project when you have failed to experience the project’s main output? (the music).”
I should say not!
“Yet you feel perfectly content to berate them for things you wrongly believe them to hold true en masse.”
This point has been covered in my discussion with Eliza.
“You talk of grave-robbing & ventriloquism, yet many of the artists involved are descendants of English folk musicians, or consider themselves to be part of a changed British culture, made more diverse & interesting by the cultures & crossovers from other lands.”
Eliza enlightened me on that point. The folk music tradition is a living stream of culture.
“But I think it’s the text, dripping with derision and sarcasm that I find the most distasteful, especially when again coupled with the dishonesty of not having listened to the bleedin’ music!”
Derision, yes; sarcasm, no. I’ve produced what I regard as a fairly straightforward polemic. I was not dishonest. I mentioned that I hadn’t listened to the music, except for a brief excerpt on TV which foregrounded Bragg’s involvement. You have to understand that, as I’ve said, this is not a music review, but a brief essay on the most recent flush of English identity culture.
“You say you don’t enjoy modern folk music - you seem to be stating this as an adequate reason for not having deigned to listen to it”
Yes, that’s what I’m saying.
“fair enough to not listening to a music style that you don’t like (despite it being an enormously diverse genre). I don’t like Metallica, but I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to try to build a complex argument against their political / cultural views based on never having listened to them.”
Your privilege and preference. However, I think different. I’ve only so much time and tolerance. I know as much about the Imagined Village project as any casual observer with an interest in issues of culture and identity.
‘On the BBC site that led me here, you write - “I’ve written an adverse commentary on The Imagined Village on my blog” - surely a commentator should have experienced that which is being commented on? Or as Wittgenstein might have put it - “Whereof one cannot speak - thereof one must remain silent”?’
I trust your non-silence means you’ve read the work this quote relates to, MikeMcG!
Wittgenstein, that old misery, said loads of things (there are more of his sayings here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/ludwig_wittgenstein.html). Anyhow, I think you’ve misapplied this particular Wittgensteinism, as the Imagined Village musical project and related notions of English identity are things whereof I can speak.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I guess my point was that, of that which one knows not (in this case, this musical project) one *should* remain silent.
& no, I’ve not read the Tractatus, but I did like the Jarman film, does that count?
I obviously have no problem about you expressing your thoughts about English identity, I’m just bemused that you would choose to deride a particular piece of art in order to support your position, when in fact you’ve not experienced it!
September 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Perhaps the sign should read: “Bemusement Park, This Way.”
I was commenting on the elements of this piece of art that I experienced — certain images and text used in marketing it. Like I’ve said, this is not a review of the recording.
——————————-
I think that’s enough comments for now. Please email if you’ve any further thoughts. Time to leave this post to its own devices.
September 26th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
[…] the one hand, this; on the other, this (with a retort in comments from Eliza Carthy, who cannot sensibly be accused of not knowing her […]