Where are the songs about booze and civilians, banning the bomb and abusing the children?
I'm seriously considering starting a blog about Birmingham's alternative scene-- politically and musically speaking. (Randomly-- I've thought ever since I considered the plethora of weird place names-- seriously, the city centre has a Needless Alley tucked behind the Tescoes-- and bonkers, beautiful street-level geography that there should be a
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Do you think earnestly-political 90s music has dated, at all?
I don't think it's dated for me, but I might feel different had I personal, political memories of the nineties. I don't remember any of the events they're singing about even if they did happen in my lifetime, so I don't have the uncomfortably nostalgic sense about them. Songs about, say, the Criminal Justice Bill, the Miners' Strike, Liddell Towers, Lewisham '77, the Birmingham Six, Margaret Thatcher, Red Clydeside-- they're all the same to me, because I never heard them the first time around, and don't remember the events they refer to. They move me in the sense I feel connected to the the historical struggle they're on about (god, that's wanky-- you know what I mean), but not in the "I was there, this was a meaningful part of my life" sense.
If there was a flourishing sub-genre full of songs about the political sphere now (you know, like, anarchopunk songs about trying to kick the shit out of the EDL in 2009, not the NF in 1977), and I went back and relistened to them in ten years time, I might feel what you're describing. But I haven't been politically engaged for enough time to get nostalgic about it yet. (I can't think of that many current earnestly-political bands that I'm really into: the Indelicates are new, the rest have all been around for donkeys-- Billy Bragg, the Levellers, New Model Army.)
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