The continued gentrification of youth culture
It’s been a long time coming, this, my personal blog. I maintain other blogs, more about that in the future no doubt, but have been looking for an outlet to occasionally vent my spleen for some time, and, well here it is. Why today? Well, I read something today which made me feel particularly sick, and angry, to say the least. Not that I don’t get angry pretty much every day, but this exceeded my usual levels, rendering me visibly resembling a Looney Toons character with steam flooding from my facial orifices. What was this outrage you cry, the sickening kidnap of Jaycee Lee Dugard? Nah. The continued waste of human life in the Middle East? Nah. Nuclear arms in North Korea? Naaaah. Noel leaving Oasis? Get over yourself!
No, this was something far more sinister, dark and deluded. Reading and Leeds boss and Glastonbury operations director Melvin Benn, he who earlier this week pleased me endlessly with a proposed ban on flag waving parasites, has taketh with one hand what he giveth with t’other and led a charge to cut down on crowd surfing at festivals. What a prick!
The Reading Festival holds a special place in my heart, as a young teen in the early to mid-nineties I frequented the festival whilst it was just the plain old ‘Reading Festival’, none of this duel location bollocks. I’ve enjoyed the great; New Order, The Smashing Pumpkins, Verve (yes, before the ‘The’), the ever-magnificent Pavement, Beck, Bjork, Neil Young, Primal Scream, Pulp, Rage Against the Machine, Radiohead, The Beastie Boys and Prodigy to name but a few, and the not-so-great; Fishbone, Terrorvision, Menswear, Oasis and even the Stere’fucking’ophonics. But there’s always been one constant. The crowd bloody well goes for it.
Because, you see, Reading has a history of being a rock festival. For two successive years, in 1993 and 1994, I had the pleasure of The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow clouting me in the face with his Dr. Martens as he writhed around the crowd wailing with his Elvis on crack shriek. In 1998 Liam Howlett’s gang of Essex ravers whipped the crowd into one of the most frantic I have seen as they raised their middle finger to The Beastie’s calls to drop ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ from their set and even in 2000 when I ventured to the festival’s first foray ‘up North’, I was introduced to the deliciously heavy stoner-rock riffs of Queens of the Stone Age by a very naked Nick Oliveri and witnessed Slipknot reduce the main stage throng into a deluge of thrashing bodies piled two or three high in places.
So why now are Reading/Leeds bosses promising to eject crowd surfers from the arena site, forcing them to walk the perimeter before gaining re-entry? Surely it’s not because the Paolo Nutini loving, Pimms sipping, Times Reading, floral welly-wearers are upset that their Waitrose picnic has been interrupted by a stray piss-soaked boot crossing their eye-line, because as far as I can recall, Paolo Nutini loving, Pimms sipping cunts don’t go to Reading/Leeds! I would hazard a guess that it’s not because the bands are calling for this ‘madness’ to end, or at least the last time I looked I didn’t see that sniveling little dogshit Billy Corgan on this year’s bill.
No, no, no my friends, this is just another attempt by out-of-touch wankers in suits to sanitise the activities of the youth. Much like desperate attempts to restrict the use of recreational drugs in clubland, the closure of illegal raves and the continued efforts to hike the price of alcohol, it’s another clear suggestion that organisations, councils and governments are petrified of a youth culture with an identity. Why have a bloody good rock n’roll slam dance at the front of the crowd when you could be filming the fucking thing on your mobile phone and uploading it to a corporation branded pseudo-blog….. and there’s another thing that gets me riled, mobile fucking phones at gigs……. Jesus wept!