How immigration can save rock'n'roll
The baby boomers are going into retirement and northerners are being told to move to Slough: only immigration can save us from a cultural wasteland


Steven Wells guardian.co.uk, Monday August 18 2008 13:17 BST Article history


Mum and dad-rock ... Photograph: Martin Godwin

Is the current war of words between the anti-immigrant, Hitler-worshipping fascists of the BNP and culture-hopping pop singer Lily Allen a silly season special? Well no, it actually cuts right to the heart of the greatest threat facing rock'n'roll: the generation that kicked it off is getting old and popping its clogs. And unless Western culture gets a massive influx of fresh young blood soon, our music is going to get old and die with them (along with the entire economy).

According to a series of reports, the world as we know it is about to come crashing to a halt because white Americans will be a minority by 2042. And a European birth rate in terminal decline means that pretty soon there'll be nobody around to wipe the bottoms or pay the pensions of the rapidly retiring baby boomers. Plus, some daffy Conservative think-tank in the UK says all northerners should move to Slough because northern cities are beyond revival.

So, to recap: Our formerly industrial cities are in desperate need of fresh blood. We aren't having enough babies, and the counter culture spawned in the 1950s and 60s and the music most associated with it is coughing its lungs up (while muttering bitterly about how you never hear an English accent in Knightsbridge anymore) in Spanish retirement villas, old folks homes, indie blogs, dad-rock mags and other urine-reeking bolt-holes where the living dead gather to conspire against the young. It's this last fact that should particularly terrify those of us who like our popular culture loud, vibrant, dynamic, radical and noisy.

Because here's the thing - the baby boomer population spike that spawned rock'n'roll is about to start gasping its last but won't actually be dead for (medicinal-pot-and-Viagra-sustained) decades. Which means we face a cultural zombie scenario where the desires and energy and instinctive radicalism, anti-racism and multiculturalism of the young are swept aside by the need to cater to the festering white conservative walking-dead baby boomer biomass.

Meanwhile, the developing world is bursting at the seams with babies, toddlers and teenagers, many of whom would love to come to the West but can't because of bizarre racist immigration policies and the absurd and morally and intellectually indefensible (not to mention anti-democratic and anti-free enterprise) notion that workers shouldn't be allowed to live anywhere in the world they damn well please.

The solution is obvious. The West needs immigration like the deserts need the rain. To stave off cultural brain death and save rock'n'roll we must throw open the floodgates of immigration. By doing so, the young will once again outnumber the nearly dead - totally revitalising music and providing "us" with a new generation of both avant garde artists and audiences for avant garde art. Music in particular would experience the dizzying and exhilarating rush of input from dozens of other cultures, hopefully drowning out the dull, smug, self-referential, post-Smiths indie/hipster monoculture once and for all.

As an added bonus, an entire generation of developing world youth would be removed from the cockpit of religious fundamentalism (presuming they don't make the hideous mistake of moving to the American bible belt) and would be exposed to the irresistible distractions of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. They would be won over forever to the light side of the force (the enlightenment, liberalism, atheism, sexual permissiveness, punk rock, disco dancing, ice cream, real ale, books, puppy dogs and all that good stuff).

That's why I am so looking forward to a browner, more polyglot rock'n'roll Britain. It's a total win/win situation. Or it will be if "we" can curtail our racism.

Published last week was a New York Times interview with British playwright Hanif Kureishi. The first paragraph referenced Kureishi's 1997 film, My Son the Fanatic.

Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver, watches his increasingly devout college-age son Farid sell his electric guitar. "Where is that going?" Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. "You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!" Farid looks at his father with irritation. "You always said there were more important things than Stairway to Heaven,' he says in his thick northern English accent. "You couldn't have been more right."

I actually saw that happen to the British-Pakistani kids I was at school with. Two brothers in particular. They angered their Tory-Muslim dad by embracing punk and sexual liberation and liberal politics and one of them went on to become an internationally famous rock musician. Then, like so many of their generation, they both (to varying degrees) embraced Islam and Conservatism. Talk to either gloriously Bradford-accented brother and the conversation soon turns to their bitterness about decades of spirit-crushing racism. The elder brother lost count of the times he saw faces fall when he entered a job interview room.

We had them and we lost them. And tens of thousands like them. We can't afford to screw up like that again. Because without mass immigration "our" culture dies and our music dies with it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/au ... .save.rock