Britishness, Popular Music and National Identity

Neuroscientists have recently become interested in the ways our brains have evolved to maximize our musical abilities, understanding music as a mechanism for building group togetherness. The ways in which our brains pattern sounds into songs, remember those patterns, and generate intense emotional responses, seem intuitively related to the workings of national affiliation. The idea of exploring British national identity through modern popular music is therefore appealing and timely. On first glance this book provides a narrative of cultural ascendency. It argues that, since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of cultural identity. Its focus is on how evaluations of popular music have interacted with understandings of contemporary Britain. The book’s opening demonstrates some of the strengths of this approach. Morra begins by comparing and contrasting the responses to the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics. Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony was celebrated (and occasionally criticized) as a counter-cultural phenomenon that revealed the idiosyncratic character of the British. By contrast, the Closing Ceremony by Kim Gavin—artistic director to Take That—attracted criticism for its bombast and lack of imagination. As Morra notes, however, the basic ingredients of the ceremonies had more in common (The Beatles, Shakespeare, Winston Churchill) than divergent media interpretations allow. The book’s opening introduces the contradiction at the heart of the book’s argument: British popular music is often celebrated as giving expression to a rebellious, anarchic spirit supposedly inherent in British people, but this new wellspring of ‘greatness’ also depends upon older rhetorics of cultural supremacy. This rhetorical stalemate comes to dominate the book: Britishness, Popular Music and National Identity becomes a narrative of cultural ascendancy stalled

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Britishness · Ceremony · Criticism · Greatness · Identity (music · Literature · Musical · Narrative · National identity · Political science · Popular music · Sociology · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · History · Law