Phar distant past

Whilst trading insults about each other's mother in the outro of their 1992 masterpiece 'Ya Mamma', one of the Pharcyde eventually cracks and blurts out "you're a sellout," to which of course the response is "your mamma's a sellout." These days, this strikes me as wonderfully evocative of its time: the idea that being a sellout could be an insult now seems endearingly archaic. Indeed pretty much everything about the Pharcyde's debut album 'Bizzare Ride II' seems to speak of an entirely different world: one where a hip-hop album could be about more than how much money and women one has, or how much everyone should be waving their hands/drinks/bottoms in the air. 

I've talked about the lack of disconnected subcultures before and hip-hop is an entire genre that has moved from a subculture to become a dominant part of the mainstream. In the process it has become a business more than a culture. Hip-hop (in its broadest sense) is still one of the most creative forces in popular culture, but one of its core traditional narratives - with rap as a means of wealth creation to pull the performer out of poverty - has become distorted and the means have become confused with the ends. Hip-hop is almost entirely about money these days and has been for many years, as DJ Shadow observed in 'Why Hop-hop sucks in 96'. I don't think this is exclusive to hip-hop: the single minded banality equating conspicuous consumption with achievement is ubiquitous across mainstream culture and thought. It goes hand in hand with the total commodification of subculture. 

I have reached an age where my youth is being re-appropriated by the young; there are DMs, chunky-heeled boots and ripped jeans all over the place. I realise that as an older person, I am now totally outside the world of the teenage and cannot really understand all its special codes and signifiers (and nor frankly, would I want to), but it seems like these days you can just buy your identity off a shelf in Topshop. Certainly the ripped jeans all seem to be neatly slashed at the knee and the DMs come in any style or colour to suit your quirky personality. Maybe I'm excessively romanticising my own teenage years, but there was a sense of real idividuality to the modifications you could make with a bottle of tippex and some coloured laces. You did it yourself, so you couldn't be confused with the drones who just bought what their parents wanted them to wear; so you could not be mistaken for a part of the system. I'm sure plenty of young people still feel that need to define themselves as apart from the compromised world of adults, to show that they are pure of intention, unsullied by the lazy compromise of their parents' world, it's just that the adults own all the means of them doing so. Their righteous dissent and frustration is neatly packaged and sold back to them or given continual outlet online. In such a world, you can't sell out; you've already bought into everything. When there is a place for everything and your every whim (no matter how angst-ridden) is catered for, you're never really outside the system. Without ever being able to see form the outside, how can you even know the bounds of your world? You learn to love your prison, as it provides everything you think you need, even the impression of alternatives. As you are given an outlet for dissent, you believe that you have agency in the running of the prison; because you get to peep though the panopticon from time to time you think you're included in the administration. It's like an entire society with Stockholm Syndrome. 

I'm not really sure why we would desire to try and break out either, when the outside is likely to be worse, or at least we have no way of knowing it won't. Our prison costs a lot to run and outside those costs are mounting up. So we stay here, we pay lip service to dissent. The youths buy perfectly ripped jeans and Nirvana t-shirts so they can look dissatisfied for a few years whilst working towards a good vocational qualification. They can strop about a bit and rage at the world, but that's just normal teenage behaviour, they'll soon get it out of their system, or the system will work it out of them. 

In the UK at the end of the twentieth century, the last of the discernible music movements were virtually defined by commercialism. Dance music was at least subversive to start with: giving birth to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. But even before the full weight of the law was applied to stop people having fun, the ravers were being herded out of the fields and into the superclubs where they could be fully exploited by promoters and organised criminals. Britpop on the other hand was simply a commercial manifestation of the indie that had existed in the musical underground for decades. It was defined simply by being commercial indie music. The underground was the mainstream and we all rushed to embrace our new found popularity, happy in a world where anyone can have a beard or long hair or ripped jeans and it will mean precisely nothing. And you know why?

You're a sellout.