The Antisocial Socialist

Quick, what do the following bands have in common?

The Clash
Crass
Gang of Four
The Mekons
X-Ray Spex

If you answered, "Sabs is really into them," or "they're all seminal British punk bands," you'd be correct. But the answers I was going for is that:

1) They all had at least one member who had some sort of post-secondary arts education, and
2) They all formed before Margaret Thatcher's 1979 election, not as a response to it.

One of the things I hear every now and then is that, well, at least we'll have good punk music. The association of loud, angry, political punk music with grim Thatcherite England is obvious, and maybe I've been guilty of that sort of aesthetic Stalinism, believing that as the socio-economic climate grows increasingly bleak, the arts will respond with an explosion of outraged creativity.

Except that this is not how art actually works. Sure, a significant chunk of punk grew out of poverty and squats, led by disaffected dropouts, but this is not the whole story. Art rarely emerges from despair alone. Historically, artists had wealthy patrons, and the image of the noble artist starving to death in a garret is very much a modern notion, presumably invented by capitalists to justify slashing public funding to artists.

I mean, it makes sense. To have the freedom to create, you need to have basic material needs met. That's not to say that artists are inherently wealthy, comfortable people, or happy. But just as it is ridiculous to assume that social change emerges from abject misery—it generally comes from relative, not absolute deprivation, see also the American white working class—it is silly to think that just because things are more depressing out there, a wellspring of cultural innovation will magically emerge to combat it. That shit needs funding, and guess what one of the first things to go is when the hard-right takes power.

So no, we are probably not going to get good punk music again. Sorry about that.