![]() Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock and roll, the Beatles later experimented with several musical styles, ranging from pop ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock, often incorporating classical elements and unconventional recording techniques in innovative ways. With members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, they became widely regarded as the foremost and most influential music band in history. One of the most astonishing live performances ever caught on film.The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. What happened when I went to see Paul McCartney play live for the first time, last week, in New Jersey.Ī clever way to help people put down their phones and focus. Have it out, people! Let’s fight our culture wars honestly.Īfter the jump, for paid subscribers only (free with a seven day trial): All of the actual arguments are thereby avoided. Instead, it gets presented as a neutral, merely bureaucratic term, and the pearl-clutching epithet of ‘culture war’ is wheeled out when anyone questions it. If you think ‘decolonisation’, for example, is a meaningful and necessary activity, then recognise it as a contentious political goal, argue for it on that basis, and welcome counter-arguments. It shouldn’t disguise itself as something else. But for conflict to be healthy it has to happen out in the open rather than under the table or behind closed doors. I’ve written a whole book about how conflict can be productive. After all, culture is very important to society and worth arguing over. ![]() I think we should stop using culture war as an insult. But however you look at it, significant changes in cultural norms have been introduced from above, sometimes under the guise of a false consensus. In some ways the discourse around these issues has been changed for the better as a result, in other ways not. It’s true that the current government pro-actively engages in petty, and frankly futile, provocations, but such tactics are very small fry compared to the way that political, civil, academic and corporate elites have engaged in a stealthy redefinition of what it means to be, say, racist, or a woman. I just think it’s a bad thing not to be honest about it. I don’t think trying to make or police cultural change is necessarily a bad thing, by the way - the left has changed society for the better that way in the past. The left comes across as more culturally aggressive than the right, the more likely to ‘call out’ incorrect language or behaviour. Meanwhile, to most voters, it’s probably the other way around. But it’s always the other side which makes war, never ‘us’. They talk about it all the time, despite or perhaps because of the fact the left has made a lot of progress on the cultural battles of recent years and met surprisingly little resistance. I have long thought it’s a bit odd quite how much people on the left love to bemoan culture war discourse. I’m a moderate, pacific commentator you are a ghoul. We’re just taking sensible decisions on your behalf if you object, you are engaging in a culture war. So if anyone voices criticism, as the education secretary does in this case, that can only be because they are unreasonably belligerent. ![]() ![]() They’re just the way things are, or have to be. Instead, what happens is that policies like this are presented by left-liberals as apolitical, common sense, quasi-scientific decisions, taken by experts. Now, I’m sceptical of the whole exercise - I broadly agree with David James - but even if I thought the OCR was doing something smart and necessary here, I hope I’d be honest enough to admit that this is a politically assertive move, and be willing to defend it as such. Just because the decision-makers sit in an office in Cambridge instead of waving placards in the street, and just because they deploy bland language, that doesn’t mean they’re not engaged in politics. The OCR is effectively lowering the status of poetic tradition and raising the status of contemporary poetry, in order to meet certain social goals. That, to me, is cultural activism, even if you agree with it. Background: the OCR, one of Britain’s main exam boards, is reorganising the GCSE poetry syllabus to introduce more ‘accessible’ and ‘diverse’ voices (I put those words in quotation marks because they involve some rather tenuous assumptions), at the expense of poems by Philip Larkin ( An Arundel Tomb ) and Wilfred Owen ( Anthem For Doomed Youth ).
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