The row over the privileged backgrounds of Lily Allen and Mark Ronson, among others, and the record - LDN is a Victim - which slags them off, provoked an interesting debate about class on the Music Weekly podcast last week. Host Paul MacInnes asked the band Pull Tiger Tail whether attending university - as they did - made them less valid as artists.
Put on the defensive, the band said that some of their favourite groups - Radiohead and Blur - had been to university, and, anyway, Pull Tiger Tail dropped out before the end of their courses. Any criticisms were nothing but inverted snobbery, they said.
In one sense the band were right. The middle-class experience is as valid a subject as any other for music, or for drama or literature, but it is worth asking whether there is something about working-class life that makes it, as a subject, more attractive to an audience or a reader.
Speaking in very broad terms, working-class lives are closer to genuine risk than middle-class ones. Middle-class people take personal, emotional and financial risks every day, but in many cases they are able to do so with some kind of safety net beneath them. The same is not true of the poor.
As a hard-up journalism student, I always knew that my parents would help me out if I really needed them to. And if all else failed there was always the credit card. These options aren't open to the very poor. For them, unlike for me, running out of money meant a real chance of going hungry, being evicted - or, even worse, having to do something dramatic, maybe even criminal, to get that money. These are rich topics for art. They will always find an audience.
That might be contentious, but the one idea that seems to be universally accepted in this whole debate is that the only thing worse than being middle class is to be middle class and pretend to be working class. This seems to be the nub of the complaints levelled at Allen and Ronson, for example, and it is the reason why the Oxford-educated Ben Hudson of Mr Hudson and the Library - who makes no attempt to hide his background, accent or mannerisms - seems to have been accepted on the hip-hop/grime scene.
But surely the idea of "keeping it real" is a very dull, restrictive way to look at art, which has always thrived on imagination and invention. If Shakespeare had kept it real, Romeo and Juliet would have been set in Stratford. If David Bowie had kept it real, all his songs would have been about the life of David Jones in suburban Bromley. If Michael Jackson had kept it real, no one in their right mind would have ever suggested that kid was his son, and Billie Jean wouldn't have been much of a song.
