Joe Lean. Chirpy chirrupy cockernee barrelboy songsmith. Knees up mavver braaaahn. It's just a stage name, he raffishly admits under his artfully corkscrewed haircut; his real name is Joe van Moyland. He won't hide his middle-class background. Fact is the guy was christened Joseph Antony Bernays Beaumont. The guy is so confused about class and self-identity that I wouldn't be surprised if he auditioned for the role of Winston Smith in 1984 wearing a top hat and a silver-topped cane.
Banal caterwauling and awful poetry aside, the pout of his lips leave the exact amount of space to poke a silver spoon into. The sub-Corbijn photography, the chasing after a vacantly doe-eyed nonentity who points her feet inward and walks like a 25-year old version of a 5-year old...these tropes are so hackneyed that they're artless and weird, like a dish with a photograph of a cat on it.
It's not the fault of Lean/van Moyland/Bernays Beaumont. Rock and roll continuously and ignorantly self-mythologises so heavily as the working-class artform that I'm surprised i. that the irony hasn't been sucked out of the universe and ii. that a band hasn't yet taken to the stage in miner's lamps and pith helmets.
A few months ago I reviewed the NME compilation album of 2009 and complained that it contained a whole lot of black signifiers despite the lack of black musicians. The basic nub of the argument was not specifically that the record was racist; it was that the group of people involved in musical manufacture and receipt (i.e. artists and audience) were so scared of what constituted their own authenticity, that they stole the authenticity of others. In as far as such a thing exists anyway.
This is Esser. His song 'Headlock' is track 17 on disc one of said compilation. If you really need to hear it, it's here. I wouldn't though. Take a look at that picture. I mean, a really good look at it. Does anything strike you as incongruous?
An ersatz teddy-boy haircut with mod dress? Making music with undeniable connections to dance, hip-hop and pop? People can talk about post-modernism and the delineation of the pop-culture tribes but these only occur in groups with no discernible means of individuality. Their 'individuality' is to fetishise and magpie other vibrant forms.
I read a great line in an article in Philadelphia Weekly; it stated that 'hybridity is the new authenticity'. I believe that. There's no sense in pining for a fictional Britain/world. We're better than that. We are multi-cultural now and wiser for it.
What class fetishism and tribal fetishism in fashion and music amounts to is a form of cultural and historical tourism. So, when you spot someone who is wearing a keffiyah, NHS-of-1984 glasses (with no glass/plain glass - even worse) and a trilby, it is morally correct to thrash them within an inch of their lives. Coincidentally, it'll be the first authentic experience of their lives.
That said, it happens in higher arts too. Cormac McCarthy was born Charles McCarthy - Charles presumably no earthy enough for McCarthy's blood and thunder Americana. Playing on your own unglamourousness is funny, and it didn't harm David Mitchell, did it? The English middle-class is riven with internal conflicts. What's inauthentic about that?
