There is, John Whittingdale says, something uniquely brilliant about Britain’s creative industries, which he summed up to the Conservative party conference by quoting a line from the Sunday Times: “There are no French Rolling Stones, no German Beatles; there is no Italian Bond, no Spanish Rowling, no Dutch David Bowie.”
Nobody does it better, in other words. Whittingdale hailed the way British culture – in film, television and music – is consumed around the world, but forgot one crucial point. That if it were not for the US, none of this would be true.
The Beatles and the Stones were products of America: of American music brought back to these shores, where it found a receptive audience in young people who had the advantage over most of those in other countries in that they spoke English and knew what those American musicians were singing about. They were products of America in that they became superstars in America, and once you’re an American superstar, you’re a global superstar.
The same is true of television and film: our products are watched around the world because the rest of the world is attuned to watching programmes or films dubbed into a native language, something the Anglophone nations reject. Instead, we subtitle and shift “foreign films” off to arthouse cinemas and “foreign TV” on to the outer reaches of the our TV listings. We know other nations make fantastic art; we just prefer to compartmentalise it, rather than welcome it into the mass market.
Whittingdale’s is a peculiarly reductive view of art, in which there have to be winners and losers, and winning is decided purely by commercial success. No one expects him to be championing the latest release on Static Caravan, or hailing a short film he saw at his local arts centre – he’s running the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, not an outsider art blog – but it would be nice if he acknowledged that there is more to art than turning a profit.
But there’s something more telling than Whittingdale’s belief that money is what counts in art, which is his blithe dismissal of the work of others. The French don’t do pop music? Tell that to Daft Punk, the most influential group in pop over the past 15 years, creating the style that dominates the world’s charts, EDM. They don’t produce dangerous iconoclasts, who kick against the establishment? Shame no one told Serge Gainsbourg. As for those Germans, all they could manage in the 1960s and 70s were the “krautrock” groups – Can, Harmonia, Cluster, Faust and Neu! – oh, and Kraftwerk, probably the second most important group in pop history, after the Beatles. And in terms of their impact on music made today, ahead of the Beatles. You don’t hear many groups trying to recreate Beatles For Sale any more; you hear lots who want to sound like The Man-Machine.
There have been incredible amounts of dazzling, innovative pop music from elsewhere in the world – the highlife of west Africa, the cumbia of Latin America, the tropicália of Brazil, the fabulous French pop boom of the 60s (and if Whittingdale wants to hear a French Rolling Stones, he should give Jacques Dutronc a listen), and British pop has been well versed in taking from them. Nowadays, the cutting edge of pop isn’t to be found in Soho or Salford, but in São Paulo, Lagos or Johannesburg. The sonic architects of today’s pop don’t look to Britain for guidance, but for sales. And given Whittingdale’s concern with making money, that is something he would do well to be aware of.
