BANDS love banging on about how working-class they are, but if you’re from a working-class background you may wonder what exactly it proves. Here are some repeat offenders.
Black Sabbath
It’s always claimed that Sabbath’s sound was inspired by their industrial working-class jobs, but did it influence the actual content of their music in the slightest? Ozzy mainly sang about bog-standard metal topics like madness, evil and Satanism, and most of their songs have cheesy horror titles like Children of the Grave. Plus they’re called Black Sabbath. If you’re working-class yourself you’ve probably never even considered dabbling in the occult, because it’s silly.
Happy Mondays
Shaun Ryder has shared many tales of his scally youth in Manchester, usually involving drugs and ‘robbing’. He’s mentioned breaking into houses, which it’s worth noting is not ‘working-class life’ and more ‘being a criminal’. Some of Shaun’s stories are a tad implausible, but even if they’re true, most proles don’t go to the pub aged 12 or bunk off school to have sex with bored housewives. And if anyone thinks working-class people are like Bez it should be treated as a hate crime.
Pulp
Pulp are of course working-class and from Sheffield, and their biggest hit deals directly with class, specifically Jarvis Cocker’s art student ex-girlfriend who apparently really did say she wanted to ‘live like common people’. Which is cringe, but Jarvis’ boyfriend skills are lacking too. Surely he should have dispelled her misconceptions about working-class life gradually over the course of a loving relationship? That seems nicer than waiting years then writing a massive Britpop hit portraying her as a f**king idiot.
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce’s parents were a bus driver and a legal secretary, so the debate about whether he’s working-class is a bit pointless, and anyway it’s his music that drones on about working-class stuff. Johnny 99 is about a man who turns to crime because they ‘closed down the auto plant’. The River is about teenage pregnancy and a man forced to get a job in construction, but ‘lately there ain’t been much work’, and so on. The blue-collar misery never ends, so it would make a nice change if Bruce did a song about a privately-educated PR executive called Sophie who’s having an absolute mare getting through her emails.
The Farm
The Farm got way more attention than they deserved in the 90s, largely due to their dinky terrace fashions and the NME’s tendency to fellate any artist who went to a comprehensive. In fairness they did have coherent leftie views, but if we’re brutally honest they weren’t much cop as a band. Fluking a massive hit with a stodgy rip-off of Pachelbel’s Canon isn’t the greatest musical achievement.
Oasis
The Gallaghers often reference class, but never in a political way, just in the course of their various whinges, such as saying Blur’s Song 2 is ‘music for posh brats’. Well done for addressing that important issue, Liam. So there’s not much substance to Oasis’s working-classness; Noel likes being rich instead and Liam is entirely preoccupied with himself, like a very old teenager. That doesn’t stop them ostentatiously using the tooth-grinding working-class phrase ‘our kid’. You know who else prefixed nouns with ‘our’ a lot, guys? The twats in Bread.
