The left has long been about what ‘should be’ rather than what ‘is’; but alternative media has become just about standing up for the individual
The original punk movement spiralled out of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s SEX shop in London’s Kings Road in 1975-76. Leather, bondage gear, ripped t-shirts, dyed hair and mohicans were the standard uniform, and before long The Sex Pistols had gone to the top of the charts with Anarchy In The UK and God Save The Queen - despite, or because of, a BBC ban.
The Pistols’ Johnny Rotten and McLaren were credited with conceptualising this all for the media, and young writers such as Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons started to cover it in the music press. Unlike Genesis and Pink Floyd, punk let the youth think that anyone could now be a rock star, and for every great group, i.e. The Clash, a thousand regional troupes were formed, of naturally variable quality. This resistance to the establishment cultural scene, exemplified by corporate record label EMI with its progressive rock and the Beeb, was a Monty Python-style rejection of the dominant conservative ethos of the time (even though a Labour government was in power during the scene’s rise).
The social media headlines generated by the likes of GB News and Talk TV since 2020 - taking some cues from Fox News and The Daily Wire in the US - reflect a similar movement from almost fifty years prior. The Queen and Colombia Records of 1974 are very much the Adele and Google of now, and a thousand/million YouTube or Rumble commentators are expressing their understanding of the new status quo.
That status quo is still rebels versus conservatives, but the natures of both have changed. The rebels are now instantly labelled far/alt.right or conspiracy theorists, while the conservatives are now the ‘progressive woke’ establishment. Problem is that the alt.right tend to refer to traditional values and rationalism, while the woke extremists - who are also largely establishment-supported - deem anyone right of the Bolsheviks to be the enemy. Still, those alternative media commentators may all have sometimes spectacular beef with each other, but eventually seem to recognise the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ expedience in which media-political rhetoric has long played out on both sides.
There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about, quoth one Oscar Wilde at the end of the century before last, inadvertently predicting the current power of gossip and adversarialism in the media landscape. Legacy media will criticise social or alt.media for this, but they do exactly the same thing, behind more long-established titles. The currency is likes, subscriptions and shares, and as long as any energy, positive or negative, plays into that business model, the finance wonks are happy.
Thus the social media tactic of picking fights with a series of bigger-name accounts in order to increase your followers and algorithmic reach is the new ‘chart-hyping’, and the new order of the day. Record pluggers in the olden days might go into a branch of HMV and buy 200 copies of a particular single in order to push it up the charts, in the hope of a then-essential Top Of The Pops appearance.
All well and good and the underbelly of how the media works - also see advertising - until the attacks on private lives, doxxing of names and addresses and false allegations based on showbiz gossip become a bigger part of the currency. This grisly area - taking scalps including the likes of Philip Schofield, Huw Edwards, Dan Wootton, Lawrence Fox and daily more - is very much the ‘78 US Sex Pistols tour, during which the band split up and Sid Vicious’ girlfriend Nancy Spungen was found dead in a New York hotel. Sid was suspected of her murder, but broke his bail conditions and soon after died from overdose himself.
The positive revolutionary vibes so often seem to turn toxic when the revs get a taste of success - a lesson learnt in the late 20th century by Tony Blair, very much the Godfather of Woke, who changed the shape of Britain with a smart suit and a determined smile. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit vote in 2016 were bellwethers for the rise of alt.media, as the creeping doubt that came along with ubiquitous DEI policies went in hand with supportive blanket coverage of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the Covid lockdowns.
Comedian Lewis Schaffer’s globalist, pansexual ‘Team World’ is pitted against ‘Team Nation’, and national leaders in Denmark, Argentina, the Netherlands, Portugal, New Zealand and Ireland have begun to reassert state-individualism. While academics correctly figured 70s punk as a socio-cultural iteration of a contemporaneously struggling economy, they tended to skip over the individualist ethos vocalised by many of its leading lights, most vociferously John ‘Rotten’ Lydon.
Irish-blooded Lydon, later of the very un-working class sounding Public Image Limited, claimed to be solidly sticking up for the British working class, including being vocal in his support for Brexit. Morrissey had long bemoaned the effect multiculturalism was having on Britain; Alice Cooper expressed a degree of trans-scepticism from the stage; while Billy Bragg became a leading loudhailer for trans rights - increasingly seen as anti-women’s rights. Were these latter three men punks? Not really, but the sense of bawdy individualism, a power only endowed by commercial success in the arts, embodied the same spirit. The music didn’t have to be aggressive and abrasive for the punk spirit to shine through, and fifty years later it didn’t even need to be reflected in music.
There is more punk in Calvin Robinson’s Christian fundamentalism or Sonia Poulton’s relentless calling out of media malpractice than there is in any legacy-media, Ofcom-approved quango. Same goes for ‘privileged’ Laurence Fox or Oxford-educated Andrew Doyle - all are individuals who are deeply suspicious of the scope-creep they see surrounding them, and feel a need to communicate that as loudly as the can.
Progressive woke establishment media might at its heart believe that any means justify the end of complete equity of outcome and the eradication of all boundaries in society, but alternative media has located the disastrous potentials for the Enlightenment individual within that. The ideologicality behind revolutionary Year Zero-thinking is now in cultural - if not always total political - power, but it’s pretending it is still in a balaclava and Doctor Martens.
The left has long been about what ‘should be’ rather than what ‘is’; the traditional right doesn’t know what to do; but alternative media has become just about standing up for the individual. With Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood now dead, 2025(ish) will see fifty years since punk stomped out of their SEX shop. It was important, and energising, and the term itself was rescued from being an insulting American slur to embodying the spirit of reinvention - but it’s not in the blue hair and septum piercings any more, as they are now the uniform of establishment-approved rebellion. Punk spirit is now solely located in the remaining sovereignty of the individual.
States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/States-Independence-Pop-Rock-Beyond/dp/B0B3SWLQXT
Brilliant article Sean.