News

Editorial: Privilege and the Right to a Creative Life

• 9th Jun 2015

I received a press release today about a young female musician called Purdy that set this article percolating in the back of my mind. It boasted of her talent, beauty and fine stock like she was a champion racehorse rather than an aspiring artist. It gushed with glamorous tales of her growing up on Ian Fleming’s estate, performing with Lana Del Ray on Richard Branson’s private Necker Island, shows at Formula 1 events, her background as a painter for Mick Jagger and a muse for Scottish artist Jack Vettriano. It invited me to a presumably glitzy reception somewhere on Dean Street with free wine and pizza and regaled me with information of her next performance at the French Embassy on 23rd June for a UEFA launch.

Aside from the faintly misogynistic tone of the press release, it got me thinking about social inequality within the arts. I’m far from pointing the finger at someone for being fortunate enough to have been lucky in life – I’m a middle class white male with a job in music, a stable family life and a privileged upbringing; I recognise the irony in my raining indignation on someone for the life they were unknowingly born into. It’s also not for me to take away from anyone’s achievements – Purdy most certainly didn’t get where she was purely off the back of upbringing or connections; she’s also a fantastic songwriter. I also recognise that I am not some knight in shining armour battling inequality in a patronising grasp at crossing the ridiculous class boundaries that we still seem to live our lives by. However, it did bring to the forefront a question that has been recurring over and over again to me lately. How can we go about addressing more widely – and hopefully rectifying – what seems to me like an obvious skewing of the arts away from young, talented kids from underprivileged backgrounds?

Day in and day out we are witnessing the erosion of access to the arts in all forms for the members of our society who could benefit from it the most. Creativity and the vital, empowering voice that it provides is being wrenched from their hands every step of the way. Schools are having their targets changed, local councils are having their arts budgets slashed, university fees have become so disgracefully over-inflated that only the luckiest have any dream of being able to attend. Every day I open my emails and am greeted by a heap of music from people who were lucky enough to study their passion as a profession, they were lucky enough to have parents who could drive them to rehearsals, pay for their first guitar, support them at their concert. They were lucky enough to live in a city with thriving grass roots music venues and clubs, safe environments to nurture their talent which seem now to be slowly picked off by regulations or crumbling in the face of austerity.

If only the battle stopped there. Some of us working in the industry as journalists, PR’s, managers, label executives, booking agents and more are also slowly and systematically becoming an ingrained part of the institutionalized problem. We cover the bands we identify with, we support the familiar or bands who are lucky enough to have made it through all of the aforementioned struggles to even get to that first rung on the ladder which catches our attention. Our capital city is swollen with people working in the arts competing for a handful of spaces. We scrabble over unpaid internships to gain that vital first foothold that will open the doors to the industry of our choice and who makes the cut for those unpaid places? The young person whose parents can afford to top up their £800 a month rent on a bedroom in a shared house, or the young person who has to work a full time job to even dream of just scraping enough money together for their rent and Oyster card? This is not me laying the blame at the feet of the lucky; it’s me saying we need to be more aware of what’s happening right in front of our noses at the foundations of the industry and do more for those who have not been so lucky.

In 2012 I interviewed Wisconsin rapper and social activist Brother Ali for The 405. At the time, I naively asked him whether he felt that what I perceived to be the “intellectual” nature of his music was an usual thing in hip hop. Here’s his reply:

“I don’t agree that our music is any smarter than anybody else’s music. To be very honest I feel like that’s an opinion that a lot of people have. It’s very popular and it’s a privileged opinion that doesn’t take into account why hip hop existed in the first place. It was created to be a voice for voiceless people. Voiceless people created it. If there weren’t voiceless, oppressed, marginalised, invisible people suffering to make life possible for the rest of us they wouldn’t have created hip hop, so they created it for the purpose of teaching us what we don’t know about ourselves. The fact that people who don’t come from that situation are allowed to participate as listeners and as artists is a beautiful thing, it’s a testament to the loving nature of oppressed people.”

“So for us to be allowed to participate, it’s an opportunity to learn something about other people and ourselves if we really want to listen with open ears and hearts and minds. The fact that somebody is talking about things that we can relate more easily to, and that we feel like that’s smarter, that’s really us missing everything that there is to learn from people that don’t share our backgrounds.”

“I think 50 Cent, Little Wayne and Wacka Flocka can teach us a whole lot. The question is; are we really hearing what’s there, or are we choosing to hear what we want to hear? I think too many times it’s the latter. There’s a lot there that’s not said with the words. European’s are people that come from a written society and so we value the words on a page, hip hop comes from an oral tradition so the way something is said is almost more important than what’s being said.”

Three years later and contemplating all of this, I feel like I am only really now understanding his answer and realising the arrogance that I approached the subject with. Over three generations the UK has gone from a society that offered free education to all, to one in which just ten prestigious private schools produce over 10% of the country’s professional elites; where a degree in Politics, Art or History can cost nearly £30,000. There are many wonderful people and amazing charities working hard to do fantastic things to rectify this – Arts Emergency is just one of those charities, and it’s one that I’ve been compelled to join and do as much as I can to promote.

You can dismiss this and call it a guilt crisis if it makes you feel better; that won’t change how I feel. I’m minded to agree with journalist Sunny Hundal who recently said in an article; “Not much annoys me more than the stereotype that to be liberal is to be full of guilt. To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others.”

http://www.arts-emergency.org