Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Cultural appropriation has killed modern music

The likes of ZE records could never exist today

Kid Creole on Top of the Pops, 1982

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of a woman – took a mysterious liking to all the outrageous acts I was crazy for, from Roxy Music to Sparks. Having been driven to find ever more unwholesome combos, the final straw came when, one Sunday morning, I was lying in bed when I heard the strains of my precious Velvet Underground album – WITH THE ANDY WARHOL BANANA COVER! – floating up the stairs. I’d never moved so fast in my lazy little life.

‘It’s about drugs! And male prostitutes! And a thing called SADO-MASOCHISM!’ I squealed at my dad.

The dog looked sad.

Of course music goes through the doldrums – but the crucial element of woke-scolding is what makes this slump different

‘I don’t care what it’s about,’ my dad shrugged with magnificent insouciance. ‘I just likes the tunes…’

Mute with frustration, I marched from the room and back upstairs, only for my father’s jolly Wurzel-type voice to follow me mercilessly: ‘Oi’m…waitin’ for me man!’

He was ahead of his time; in subsequent decades, the rise of the ‘Kidult’ saw men, especially, unwilling to put away childish things. Though Oasis and Blur might have squabbled, they had one thing in common – they were liked equally by teenage girls (‘Liam!’ ‘Damon!’) and middle-aged men (‘Noel!’ ‘Graham!’). But things have changed, according to the Guardian, where 36-years-young Daniel Dylan Wray wrote: ’A 2015 study of people’s listening habits on Spotify found that most people stop listening to new music at 33; a 2018 report by Deezer had it at 30… in my 20s, the idea that people’s appetite to consume new music regularly would be switched off like some kind of tap was ludicrous.

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