Sculpture Magazine

There is a grievous apathy in this country at the moment, our nation of overfed, cosseted automatons who sit and moan about problems they can solve, but who instead willingly accept the tales told of murder in a distant land in order to justify wrongs perpetuated against those who live mere minutes away. CCTV cameras are no longer the weapons used by a malevolent establishment intent on holding on to their power; they are now the necessary weapons in the fight against an invisible terror. We are more watched than any other nation on earth, the freedoms that founded the basis of this beautiful Britain, so loved, are being eroded. We will shake our heads at the crimes against humanity being committed in other countries while ignoring the detention of citizens without evidence being presented. Gun crime is at an all time high. But not to worry, the apparent cause of this is modern rap music, so that now the mumblings of a cliché ridden fool such as 50 Cent have been elevated to the status of culturally changing. What has happened, where is the Public Enemy, the Smiths, the Specials and Dylan who have now the responsibility to protest? The war on Iraq is now universally denounced for being illegal, even while the government who perpetrated it continues to knock down civil liberties, and the opposition shamefully hide from their cooperation by using the same language of change. Why has no-one has attacked this? 

If you register your travelcard, the government tracks your movements across the city of London. Why is this not wrong? When did we become so frenetic in the search for that next iPhone, that HDTV that we ceased to care? Someone far wiser than me pointed out that, where the movements of the past seeked to change the world, ours will settle for a gig promoting a few bob for Africa. This guilt appeasement, this culture of the self has left a horrible void in our music. Neil Young and Janis Joplin will release albums amid a wave of interviews applauding their protest credentials all the while selling their albums from Starbucks. They are now establishment, and we lap it up. 

And it's not even their fault. Nor is it the fault of the corrupt gravy train that runs our country, or the political correctness lobbies who in their mindless zeal succeed in silencing the very voices who hoped and despaired at their creation. Not X Factor, not Heat magazine, not even the Daily Mail. It's ours. Our generation, the young, have given up. We sneer at any hint of wide eyed sincerity when our own cynicism is equally naive. The Urban Outfitters "revolutionary retro" T-shirts, the listing of Bob Dylan as the favourite songwriter in Facebook, the sounds of The Smiths echoing through university halls, all of these are insulting when we provide nothing revolutionary ourselves. How dare we wax lyrical about the class war and the fight against Thatcher when we spectacularly fail to repudiate the current ills in our society. Instead we voice our hatred of manufactured pop and "rebel" by smoking weed, that big bad substance that still won't jeopardise your Graduate Program at Price Waterhouse Coopers. 

Don't get me wrong, this isn't an attack on the meaningless catchy tunes that pervade today's music scene. A great tune is a great tune nonetheless. But that's all it is. In ten, twenty years time, we will have robbed the future youth of that amazing feeling we had when hearing Joy Division, The Specials, or relatively recently The Roots' attacks on the norm. The Enemy or Arctic Monkeys are the closest we've had to producing anything like the same social commentary, and at the moment it's nothing more than that.

There are so many blows being dealt against what we should all hold dear and yet we restrict our minds to focusing on our own petty differences. The establishment (and I resolutely use that word in the fullest, presently mocked manner it used to be used) have restricted our liberty. They've outright lied. They've sent some of us to war. They've created an illusionary world in which the search for wealth is in itself enough of a goal, and if not wealth then short-lived fame. And we've believed them, like no other generation has since the 50s. Surely we must question them constantly, if for no other reason than past generations who were proved right themselves? Our music must challenge any and every accepted notion being fed to us. It is the most precious gift of youth, and a promise that will be broken if we allow ourselves to age without doing so. If we don't, if we fall into this trap of complacency, then as the previously mentioned wise soul said to me, our beautiful land of freedom will surely fail. He has already fulfilled his responsibility and eagerly awaits the next revolutionaries, whether or not he agrees with their ideals. Surely if any medium can, it is music.