Brian Eno in Prospect magazine, on the death of uncool…

“There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.”

Why is this interesting here on the JURN blog? Because Eno relates this apparent change to increasingly nuanced classifications of cultural products. Which must arise partly from our ability to tag and generally re-clump cultural products into ever finer categories (Amazon Listmania lists, Spotify playlists, etc) online, although one can see ample evidence that this was starting to happen in music before 1995 and the Web. Possibly there’s also some spillover from huge genre blockbusters, since better classification and cultural navigation routes mean that far more people can now migrate out from quality blockbuster experiences to similar but much more obscure product (e.g. from Harry Potter to The Giant Under The Snow).

Eno perhaps misses some subtleties. Category-proliferation is inclusive in the online world (Wikipedia pages which easily explain the finer points of said classification to the un-initiated, and searches that quickly offer up frictionless samples of it, easy-access online communities of interest). This plenitude helps to spread the range of sustained interests people have, which means British politeness has to go into overdrive to keep up, when we meet someone in person and they start talking about their interests — thus possibly contributing to the demise of “uncool”. But the real-world groups forming around / promoting these categories remain exclusionary, since age-related group dynamics and simple shyness kicks in (you won’t see many over-40s at your 8-bit electropop game-music night, or groups of eager adolescents at a classical concert). And perhaps even more exclusionary because the categories are so niche, and so the fragile boundaries need all the more patrolling. “Uncool” still potently exists in the real-world of cultural events, and in musical terms it’s still tightly intertwined with social class and age and personal prettiness.

Hopefully, though, Eno concludes by suggesting that…

“The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences” … “what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life”

I’m not sure that’s likely, at least not in the British context. The British climate has always been conducive to us drawing the curtains and “living in our imaginations” for six months of the year, often while sampling all sorts of exotic and fantastical influences and stories, but it doesn’t seem to have made the national character any the less reserved.

And I think it might be more useful to consider “old or foreign” as separate issues. Eno is being quietly political, by casually conflating them. Although, in the end, it’s true that they’re part of the same process of cultural assimilation and re-invention.

The British have always seen “the foreign” as potential material to be quietly appropriated and re-worked into the national culture and national identity. Be wary when the British start to pay serious cultural attention to “the foreign” — we usually want to assimilate it and neuter it. The attitude is that we don’t openly talk much about that process, though — hence the social usefulness of “uncool” at the moment of appropriation, while under the surface we’re actually quietly exotic-ising it so as to extract all the cool we can, ready for eventual re-shaping and re-deployment in the “taste wars” that have long served as a useful proxy for all sorts of other polite social conflicts in the British Isles. And then 30 years on, once it’s safely drained, to claim bits of it as our own and to forget its origin.

And popular unashamed interest in “the old” is nothing new. This neo-romantic antiquarian strain can perennially be seen everywhere in British pop culture since the circa 1966/7, from Pink Floyd weaving references to Hereward the Wake into their lyrics, to the Beatles neo-Victorian dress and moustaches on Sgt. Pepper, Peter Gabriel on Salisbury Hill, Jarman’s re-imagining of Shakespeare, Morrissey’s love of graveyards, Vivian Westwood’s clothes, Edward Larrikin warbling “everything that I adore came well before 1984”, to modern antiquarians such as Julian Cope. There are many parallels in art, film, and literature. There’s always been a sense that the past is a mine to be plundered for contemporary cultural production. What has changed recently in the culture is perhaps the sudden breakdown of the Blairite hegemony around Englishness and history, and that is perhaps what Eno is picking up on where he talks of…

“The idea that something is uncool because it’s old … has left the collective consciousness.”

Although this is certainly not the case with our architecture, where the credo among planners is still very much “old = neglect it, so we can demolish it”.