Liam Gallagher didn't make stupidity hip; he's just part of a long tradition of stupid British men. Photograph: Getty
Our own Ben Marshall's Uncut interview with Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke is in the news thanks to Okereke's allegation that "Oasis made stupidity hip."
Well, I know what he means. And his assessment of Oasis is one I can only agree with: "over-rated... pernicious... repetitive Luddites." But to blame them for making stupidity hip? If stupidity ever went out of fashion, I must have missed it.
Okereke has a point in as much as Liam Gallagher has made himself a poster boy for swaggering laddishness and for the idea (if you can call it an idea) that willful ignorance, mindlessness and reflexive aggression are virtues. But if it wasn't Gallagher, it would be somebody else.
It's a longstanding British trait to at best suspect and at worst loathe anything resembling "cleverness". We take it for granted that intellectualism is inherently vain and absurd. (These adjectives may apply to many intellectuals, but that's not the same thing.) This generates a corresponding fallacy: that anti-intellectualism has intrinsic worth, and that sensible, modest Britons - if they do say so themselves; and they do; oh, how they do - will embrace it unthinkingly. As if there were any other way to do so.
Robust, simplistic responses - physical or verbal - to complex matters are as venerable and cherished a part of our national heritage as roast beef or the yeomanry: "No nonsense", as the John Smith bitter adverts put it - with some irony, when you consider that those ads are a clever send-up of the whole concept.
People who think too much (and, often, thinking at all is thinking too much) are evidently Up To Something. Hence such labels as Chattering Classes, Liberal Elite and so on. Which, of course, ties in to Britain's perennial obsession with class. And this, Okereke has nailed nicely: "It's this idea that to be authentically working-class you need to be untainted by the airy-fairy ephemera of education. And it seems to be pretty unique to this country." We'll forgive him that qualifying of "unique", even if the airy-fairy ephemera of education should by rights have prevented it.
Okereke could have gone further and pointed out that it's not just about the way the classes view themselves, but the way they view each other. The middle and upper classes are host to plenty of what Curtis Mayfield memorably termed "educated fools"; the working classes boast an abundance of under-schooled wits and sages. And yet, in conversation, oafish opinions will invariably be satirised with the use of a comedy working-class accent, while intellectual views will be parodied in a voice like Brian Sewell's. But genuine dolts are just as likely to possess a middle-class veneer as a yobbish front. Although nowadays, presenting a yobbish front may well be part of that middle-class veneer - after all, you wouldn't want to be mistaken for one of those poncey intellectual types.
Oasis are not the cause of this ugly doctrine, then. They're the effect. And what a dull effect they are, too.
