ACFM - #ACFM Trip 16: The Long ’90s

Episode Date: May 23, 2021

In this extended Trip, Keir Milburn, Nadia Idle and Jeremy Gilbert wrestle with the idea of “the long ‘90s”: a set of cultural, political and affective assumptions that have outlasted the 20th century, and from which a certain cohort of today’s politicians, commentators and columnists cannot seem to escape. With music from Roni Size, Stereolab […]

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of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the stand-alone discussion in this episode of ACFM. and I'm joined by the usual unusual crew, Nadia Idle. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're going to talk about a topic we've discussed doing since we've started this podcast, The Long 90s. Jeremy, you're probably a best place to explain what we mean by the long 90s. And perhaps you could also touch on why we might be wanting to talk about it now in particular.

Okay, so the long 90s is a phrase, the various people. people have used. The first time I used it was an academic conference in 2015 and then you got picked up by a couple of people in the press or whatever because I put it on a blog. And at least what I meant by it was the idea that there was this fairly consistent historical phase that begins really on a global scale with the defeat of communism, you know, the end of the Soviet Union. And it's sort of consolidated by the formation of the World Trade Organization, the globalization of the neoliberal Washington Consensus in 1994. And it carries on into some time into the 21st century. And it's characterized by a sense that although technology is changing a lot, like at the level of

politics and also at the level of culture, there's a sense of nothing much changing, like very substantially. Whether that period is now over is another question. But that's what I sort of of meant by the long 90s. And why we're talking about it now is because, well, one way of understanding the sort of political cultural differences between the left, certainly in Britain, and also in some other places, and its most immediate opponents,

meaning not like the right wing of politics, really, but the entrenched of neoliberal centre, is that the centreist politicians and their most ardent support, Horses amongst the wider public are in some sense sort of culturally, politically, you know, psychologically, epistemologically, sort of stuck in this, it's still stuck in the long 90s. And in fact, the whole project of like British centrist politics is an almost sort of magical attempt to bring it back, you know, to bring us back to the golden era of like

1997 to 2010. That is the political and cultural outlook of the constituency that we like to refer to he was the centre his dad. So when we were talking about this, when we

were talking about this, I went and did a Google of the long 90s and apart from some

excellent works by a certain Jeremy Gilbert, there wasn't much that was out there on the

internet using that term, but when we had a chat about it and I realized that this was very,

very similar, very similar concept to the whole end of history conception. So I was studying, I was doing

a master's in political economy around to 2004 and 2005 and some of the theories that were coming out that we were having to study is staffed by neoliberal economists like Francis Fukuyama, etc., who had come out with all of this stuff a few years earlier that basically capitalism had won and capitalism and liberal democracy have created the beginning of the end effectively and there could not and will not be any real hegemonic political system that will work on a global scale after the defeat of

communism, as in 1989, 1990 with the Berlin Wall, but also in terms of the supposed successes of capitalism under liberal democracy. So there was this whole kind of quite, I think, Bolshe set of academic writing around that time, the kind of late 90s and early 2000, which is like, this is it, this is the system. There will not be fascism again. There will not be communism again. This is what we've got. And this is the best way forward.

It might have its problems, but there is not going to be a global, political, you know, a challenge on a level of political economy again. Yes. And then we'll discuss in a bit whether we think that. I mean, I don't think that's true. And we've seen it. We've seen that not to be true.

But yeah, I think that's, That's what the long 90s kind of means to me. Well, one of the reasons that this topic has sort of haunted this podcast, I don't have haunted is the right word, but we've talked... Haunted you? Well, we've talked about doing it since right at the beginning, and it's partly because there's a sense that it's not just the ideology, but it's also the structure of feeling of the 1990s,

which is a Raymond Williams concept we might come back to a bit later. You know, the whole way it felt to live in the 1990s, the sort of the dominant sort of attitudes of that, that era, they basically haunted, there isn't there long, is that they basically last well into the 2000s. In fact, they're still really around now and there's, you know, a very, very important cohort of the population who basically cannot escape that period and cannot understand that their formative views are in fact specific to a certain time or, you know, informed by a specific historical period, which may not, may no longer pertain or exist, basically. And so the reason

it's the reason it cut the dominated this podcast is because of course we were talking about acid corbinism a particular moment in history when something else seemed to emerge basically and the the idea that that world of the 1990s is not just gone but is now completely antagonistic to the sort of emergent structure of feeling of generation left if we want to put it that way means that there's just been this real strong antagonism between what we might think of as a young left and the centrist dads the sort of like Generation X, cohort who dominate political commentary in the Guardian, perhaps even dominate the sort of BBC, etc. So that's why it's haunted our sort of period. But of course, we're in a

new, new period now where perhaps the centrist dads won. Perhaps the centrist dads have won in terms of they now seem to control the Labour Party. And that seems to have gone absolutely disastrously wrong. Kea Stahmer's ratings and the Labour Party's ratings in the polls seem to indicate. But yes, the centristad's really are out of time. They're from a different historical period and have utterly absolutely no grasp on the current moment, basically. This is nuts because I've just realised as you were speaking here that I've dreamt of Kea Stammer last night. Why? Why? Go on and we'll get back to Centristad. Sorry to interrupt. What I want to end on on the whole podcast is to think about, you know, are we really

exiting the long 90s because centriism in the US seems to be taken a very, very different term to the centristism now. So we want to sort of try to work out what that structure of feeling was in the 1990s. Was it inevitable? Was there other potentials in the 90s? What caused it? Why is it no longer historically relevant? Why is it just not accord to the conditions we live in now? On the centrist dad's thing, I think what we're trying to say is there is a group of people who cannot accept that the material reality of the world that they live in has changed since 1997. And they get confused, they cannot accept the material conditions of change. And they operate in terms of their political opinions and wielding of power, etc.,

as if it's still the 90s, whereas in fact, there has been a whole political crash that's affected the UK in a massive way. and then also Brexit, and then also the Labour Party has changed, etc. But as you're saying, they wield power. Is that a fair kind of? Yeah, I think, well, that's right. I would take it a bit further and say, I mean, this is just adding to what you said. So at the end of history hypothesis that you referred to, Francis Fukuyama's argument made around 1990 was, as you said, Nadu, it was that the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War literally meant history, as we had known,

it was now over. History in the form of a grand contest between ideologies and political and economic systems was over. That there would be some residual elements like bits of the Muslim world that would continue trying to do something different. But over the long term, liberal democracy plus capitalism was the only social and economic system that would persist. So the center of that centre is dad's cohort, I think, is people like a couple of years older than us, really. It's people in their 50s now. And it's people who were at university in the second half of the 80s. And their formative political sort of historic experience was the experience of the total defeat of the left by Thatcher in the 80s and on a global scale, like the defeat of communism in the

Cold War. And the fact that they were old enough, like most people our age and younger weren't really old enough at that time to have fully processed it. But if you were like 16 during a minor strike. You can remember it and you process it. They experienced that. But then, you know, because the people we're talking about specifically, in the small minority who would have gone to university already in the late 80s or early 90s, you know, they got decent jobs. They got professional jobs. They benefited from the property boom. They benefited from the wide effect of the tech boom. And they've basically been insulated from any of the sort of trauma, which has affected other social groups during that whole period. They haven't suffered the sort of cultural, social, economic

dislocation and impoverishment of people in the post-industrial regions. They haven't suffered the kind of inability to get good jobs or homes that's affected younger people. And their great kind of moment, I mean, their whole political experience was constant Tory victory apart from under Tony Blair. The only time the Tory's ever got beaten was by Tony Blair. A new label was represented, the limit of actual reform that anybody has been able to implement during that whole period. So it's really understandable that they've really internalised this idea. And also, they were at university at the very moment when, you know, within sort of social theory and related areas of academic work, you know, ideas like postmodernism, a sort of anti-Marxist

turn was really at its sort of height. And they've internalized, you know, from multiple directions, the idea that as admirable as they may have been, the ideals of the traditional left of socialism, the idea of class as an analytical lens through its to understand power relationships, the idea of class struggle as a major of history, all of these are redundant concepts. And that the only thing, if you try to activate those concepts politically or pragmatically or analytically, it can only lead to disaster. It can only lead either to the to the gulags or Tiananmen Square or to just political defeat and marginality. And so, and they completely internalised the idea that the social gains,

that their generation experienced, things like the widespread normalisation and acceptance of same-sex relationships, the very much improved status of women from the professional classes, even the kind of widespread critique of the most vulgar forms of institutionalised racism, that all those gains were like the most that you could possibly. have expected in the form of social progress. And so now these guys are in their 50s, 10, 15 years away from retirement, they've got houses, they made loads of money. You know, there's absolutely no motivation for them to ever reflect upon the fact that, well, apart from anything else, the whole new Labour project, like massively benefited them, but it didn't benefit a lot of

other people that nearly as much as they think it did or as much as they would have liked it to. And there's all these constituencies out there, you know, both young people, both with generation left and the sort of left behind constituencies of the post-industrial regions who were never really given much by the new Labour project and were left nothing by it once it finished in 2010. So they are really deeply emotionally, psychically, culturally, intellectually, politically invested in a set of assumptions about the way the world works and the way the world has to work. And following those assumptions has hugely benefited them materially and personally, like all through their lives.

They've knuckled down and gone along with it and gone along with the sort of neoliberal consensus and accepted what it has to offer. But since 2010, especially since 2015, they're confronted with a situation in which the fact that that doesn't apply to a majority of the population has really caused them problems. So it caused them a problem in the form of Brexit, it's caused them a problem in the form of Corbinism. It's causing them a problem in the form of the Tories, embracing a kind of nationalist conservatism, which is different from the sort of Thatcherite iteration of neoliberalism,

which they define themselves against to some extent. But they don't really have any motivation to actually go do the work, the kind of analytical or psychological work of figuring out how to cope with this new situation. Because why should they? You know, they're powerful enough, they're rich enough, but nothing is really forcing them to confront the fact that a lot of their assumptions were either always wrong or are no longer relevant. I think that the thing that would have changed that

is if there was a huge cultural revolution in terms of music and innovation. I don't think that's true. Like, because we can take Jem's argument a little bit further and look, it's always really hard to put yourself in history, right? It's really hard to sort of like do that analytical work as Jem just put it. In fact, consciousness raising, right? that's what we've talked to about before, trying to position yourself,

understand how you fit into history and wider social structural forces and dynamics. I think it's always difficult to do that. And then therefore, you know, the ideas that you grew up with, you have to think about, well, what was influencing my take-up of those ideas? And how do I have to change those ideas now that the world has changed, right? It's always difficult to do that, but it's triply difficult for that specific cohort to do it. Right. And we can do that.

We can make this argument through my own sort of generational, analysis which is like you know you have these generational distinctions when you have events when you have moments of sort of rapid change basically and what is the end of history the end of history is the is the the idea that like there will never be an event again there will no longer be these events of rapid change that they finished there will no longer be economic crises even at the end of boom and bust as gordon brown put it so that the the ideology of that particular cohort is there will never be a new generation of innovation which will come along and tip our ideology out of the saddle, basically.

There will never be an event again, therefore there can never be a new generation again. So when you have something like generation left come along, you can only see that as like this residual, the last man sort of residual elements of Francis Fukuyama's analysis, basically. You can only see it as pathological. I mean, that's exactly what they did. That's what the Corbyn cult, cultism, is that this is some pathology caused by, some sort of mystical force, basically, yeah. But why are you saying that it's particularly difficult for that cohort?

Because in the cohort before that, the sort of baby boomer cohort, perhaps, they'd live through periods of big, big change, right? And you live through a period when the idea that there were like different classes in society and those classes were sort of antagonistic to them, you know, that was part of history. History still happened through the 20th century. It's only in that, like, period in the sort of 90s where you have a, really, really solid. I mean, ideology is always that, you know, we are outside of history, right? But that one is one which precludes any new events ever happening again. That's what

the end of history thesis is. Is ideology squared, basically, for the, for the centrist dad generation. But don't you think that it is potentially would have been possible that because one of the things that we haven't talked about yet, which you guys are going to talk about, I think, is about the fact that there wasn't this massive, like, change and revolution in music, for example, in that period as it was in the previous decade. So the thesis that I'm coming up with is, well, maybe it's not just about events, but it's also about, oh my God, people look really different than they did, you know, in the 1990s. But in 2000, people didn't look that different than they did in 1990. I think you are on to something there, not yet. There isn't that external thing to force you to go,

oh my God, everyone was wearing, you know, 1950s, you know, housewives, prim and proper and whatever. And then suddenly it's like the 1960s and everyone looks different. That would force you, I would imagine, that would force you to accept that the world is changing around you, even if you did not want to look at the global events or understand politics, etc. So that's just like an offering that it might be one of the factors. No, I think that's a really good point.

Yeah. One of the things, the long 90s thesis was sort of trying to get to grips with was this long sense of sort of cultural stasis. You know, the example I always give recently is what's the most popular show on Netflix, including with like school age kids, it's friends.

You know, it's a show from like, you know, 25 years ago now from the 90s. It's like the ultimate long 90s cultural artifact. But it's also the fact, you know, it's a sort of cliche, I always say to students. You know, if you look at photographs of students or young people, you know, over the course of the 60s, 70s, 80s into some time in the mid-90s,

you can pretty much pinpoint what year it is, you know, within a couple of years from what people are wearing and hairstyles. And that just stops being the case after about 95. There are obviously changes, as we talked about when preparing the show, but they're much subtler. I would have thought,

if you'd have told me in 1995, you're still going to be wearing your hoodie and jeans all the time to work. I'd have said, yeah, probably will, but I've assumed it would have been like a guy in the 80s, like he was still wearing flares to work or something.

But it isn't. Like nobody, it doesn't date me at all, really. It doesn't mark me out as belonging to a specific cohort in the way it once would have done. Who's going to tell him, Nadia? Well, no, you can...

I know how you, I've seen, you're no different. I'm no different. I'm no different. One of my biggest. One of my biggest problems was that nobody talked about Bristol. The music journals in the mid-90s was that nobody talked about Bristol. The music journals in the mid-90s, because they loved Oasis.

They were still obsessed with Manchester, like as they had been since the Manchester moment of the late 80s with things like the Happy Mondays, despite the fact that actually all the really great Manchester bands had come and gone by 1988. But there was never a moment when it was like part of public discourse. Like, oh, look, all the great music in Britain is coming from Bristol. But Bristol was just incredibly distinctive sort of matrix

from which this kind of multicultural music, emerged. Like the first really famous band to come out of Bristol doing this British synthesis of hip-hop, soul, house and techno was massive attack, a huge band, widely recognised as one of the most important brands in Britain in the early 90s. And then by 1997, when the kind of mainstream music culture had been forced to accept that jungle wasn't just noise, that its evolution into drum and bass demonstrated how formerly important it was. And that was really, really registered by Ronnie Sise, another Bristol, a Bristol drum and bass producer being awarded the Mercury Music Prize in 1997. So this is a track, brown paper bag by Ronnie Sise.

The other interesting thing with massive attack is that, like, they specifically emerge out of reggae sound system culture, you know, the wild bunch, which is why they're interesting and is why they were ignored by 90s NME writers. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's true. Well, I mean, reggae sound system culture was a sort of incubator for a lot of those developments that would define their expression in jungle, in, in, drum and bass in the free party scene. It plays a really important role. Yeah, completely ignored, completely ignored by the ideologues of white guitar rock. But we're over that now. Yeah. Well, also, we won.

I mean, you know, we, we, there's no question who won the cultural battle over whether MC culture and ragger beats were more important than Noel Gallagher. As we survey the cultural wastelands and devastation before us, we can say that at least we won. Yeah, but then there's people like me who are still listening to Noel Galga, so maybe, you know, you have lost. So let's go back to the friend's example just to be clear about what the logical conclusion of the use of that example is, Jeremy,

because what I think you're saying is that this cultural stuff from the 90s is still watchable today as if it's current. Like there's a whole set of people of all sorts of different ages who can watch that stuff and it doesn't seem like it's from a million years ago. It's not like watching, I'm trying to think of another. I'm not sure that's true about friends.

No. See, I hate friends. So I can't really. But we always hate it. We all hated friends at the time. Some people love it. The three of us hate friends and we hated it then. But kids, teenagers watch it now

and it doesn't look like from a million years ago. Isn't that like a more nostalgic thing? Because, you know, they basically, they barely work. They spend all their time in the sort of coffee shop and they live in these huge apartment. No, I don't think the kids, I mean, I'm talking about kids, my daughter, Jose. They're not old enough yet for that to be something,

if they have any concerts of that to be something of, to be nostalgic for. Because you wouldn't have those sort of conditions now. It's a bit like spaced, you know, that comedy show from the 90s, you know, because they're on the dough living in these huge houses in London, etc. Well, that's all true, but that would be,

if we were talking about 25-year-olds, then yeah, but I don't think we are really. And I also think it's not just about the Miz Onsen and the material conditions. It's the fact that it's a certain kind of like harmless good-natured American sitcom, which they're still churning out variations of, basically.

You know, if you want to say, is it of its time, are we still in that moment? It's the sense of, well, if somebody made that show now, would it still be popular? And the other, I mean, the big example, example, I'm always interested in it is music. And so one of the things that, you know, people like myself and more publicly, people like Simon Reynolds and Mark, Fisio were really preoccupied with from about sort of 2005, 2010, was this persistent sense that the kind of the sort of cultural

norm that we'd grown up with, which was with the idea that music culture would generate not just good music, not just distinctive music, but totally new genre. of music, which couldn't have been imagined five years previously and that it would do this on a regular basis, like every few years, just seems to stop. It seems to sort of come to an end, really. It really comes to an end with the 20th century. The people who try to argue with me when I say this are people who don't know that much about music and not much about music for the 90s. It's like, no, including really young people who are really deeply immersed in music culture, it's just a given. It's just a truism to make this observation. And it's not to,

to say there isn't loads of good music, but, you know, there isn't an equivalent to, like, the event of drum and bass being heard for the first time in the 90s, or punk rock emerging for the first time in the 70s. And that's one of the things that the long 90s thesis is sort was also responding to. It's trying to get, you know, trying to capture this sense of sort of relative stasis. I mean, the thing I think, it's always important to clarify about this. You know, my perspective is one of the problems with this sort of apocalyptic response to the end of that long cycle of musical innovation, yeah, at the end of the 20th century, was it assumed that somehow that was a historic norm, which we were now departing from. And I would say, no, there's

a specific historic window of a few decades when there's like the most intense period of formal innovation in music ever. And you need to explain that before you start saying, oh, why is it ended and isn't it terrible that it's ended? And I mean, doesn't that map up with the welfare state? Yeah, it does. But can we get back to that? Can we come back in a minute? I mean, that's a whole other question. It's a whole other question. What caused that period of musical innovation? Because I really feel also, because I work a lot with students who are, like, practicing musicians.

I feel like it's important even to say, look, in some ways it's quite liberating to not have to be living through this historical process where you're constantly supposed to be making music that nobody would have been making three years previously. Like I think there's whole subgenres of music that never got a chance to even develop properly because we were living through this. relentless epoch of neophilia, sort of fascination with the endlessly new. So it's not a question of making value judgments. It's just a question of having been a historical cultural shift to which we need to sort of respond. Okay, so why am I going on about all that? Because, I mean, basically, the long 90s hypothesis is trying to get to grips with this complex set of relationships between politics and culture. And I would say, after 2015 in particular, one of the things that seems to be going on is there's a sort of, there's a certain disjunction at least. There's clearly at the

level of politics and the level of formal politics, the long 90s is over. The long 90s is not defined by a period in which Jeremy Corbyn doesn't become prime minister. You know, Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister was always a historical long shot, a very much an outside chance. Within the period of the long 90s, the very idea of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party is totally unthinkable. It's absolutely outside the realm of the possibility. And then it happens. The Labour Party loses Scotland. That was unthinkable. The public vote to lead the EU. was unthinkable. All these unthinkable things happened. On the other thing, I think things after 2015 and even back after 2010, things do start to re-emerge. I mean, certain senses, I think in certain

areas of music, there are new levels of innovation and kind of new echoes of innovative moments from the 70s that there weren't possible before. But at the level of broad mainstream culture, you know, there's this massive political change happening, but we're still living in a world in which indeed, once friend is on Netflix, it becomes the most popular show on Netflix, despite the claims made for a golden age of television, etc. But I think that's a really good point, then. Your point, Nadia, then, is that, well, to some extent, that persistence at the level of the culture of this sort of 90s idioms

and a 90s structure of feeling, it does completely enable people who are basically opposed to the emergence of generation left, the emergence of some new kind of 21st century politics, to just sort of keep telling them. themselves, that actually it's not normal. It's not, you know, that the political norms of the 90s can't really be contravened. I think that's a really powerful observation. Yeah, so I think you've articulated my point quite well.

I think the synthesis of it is, or the centre of it is, is that there isn't an external sort of cultural mood, which is expressed in, you know, clothes and music, whatever, which is forcing you to understand that you're in a different era. And so therefore, you know, if you have that experience as people did in, you know, the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s, you will have it forced upon you to acknowledge, at least, to acknowledge the fact that things are changing and not be so absolutely outraged by Corbynites. Like, they're a complete disease. Like this is like you said a pathology because you understand that things change because you've lived through it. But if you're that age, then you wouldn't have. It's an interesting one, because I always understand the idea that, like,

that neoliberalism has produced in a period of cultural stasis. The reason that was a powerful critique was it was trying to critique neoliberal ideology on its own grounds, right? So what neoliberalism was supposed to bring in was an entrepreneurial society, a society of dynamism and change, disruptive innovation and all this sort of stuff. And so by pointing out, well, you've actually produced a complete opposite. It's sort of like this ideological critique. And it's sort of interesting to think of your point, Nadia, in which that is now being used by

the last standing neoliberal's. The effect of their changes are now being pointed to to say, well, you know, why haven't you produce these cultural innovations? And of course, there are material preconditions for these cultural innovations. Well, big up, all the original jungle is massive. The original dance are jungle is there. General leave you alongside the NB. The world is in trouble.

I'm a tell a murderer. It goes. There's incredible, incredible, or general. Sensi and shine down when they call me Inkit, Inka, Inka, Inka about Jenna. So let's do that, let.

Yo! It's incredible General Levi, or General Levy, depending how you pronounce it. This is a sort of fairly classic, high energy, very ragged influenced jungle track from the sort of beginning of the decade. And it's a pretty, actually, I'm hopefully this one doesn't feature

offensively homophobic lyrics. Pretty sure it doesn't actually. The sort of transmogrification of these elements of bits of hip-hop break beats, a lot of ragger energies, of elements of techno and house into jungle. It was this really sort of unique eruption of creativity and the emergence of a distinctively British, distinctively hybrid, distinctively multicultural form of urban music. And it really did sound like the future,

arriving that's when you first started to hear this. And it took several years for people apart from like small networks of aficionados and like ravers and people listening to local pirate stations to even accept that this was music. You know, it took into sort of 94-95 before, you know, the kind of general opinion of music journalists, other than sort of pioneers like Simon Reynolds, wasn't to say, well, this is just noise. It's just like not even music, really. Pretty extraordinary. I think it's also an interesting. thing to think about how exceptional that the whole post-war period was. So perhaps one way to sort of illustrate what we mean by this sort of,

by what's changed, basically, what changes by the early 2000s? One way to get into that is this is this famous quote from Tony Wilson, who we've talked about on here before. Situationists influenced news anchor from Manchester, factory records, etc. He was talking in the sort of late 90s, I think, and he says, look, you know, I was a young boy at college when the Sagada revolution happened and then 13 years later you know you get punk happens and I was a TV presenter then 13 years after that in 1989 house music happens and that's a revolution I you know

and I was a club owner at that point and he said I just cannot wait for 2002 and to see what will happen in the next sort of 13 years subcultural cycle when that comes around so that's the idea that every 13 years you just have this sort of revolution basically which would overturn things and would make people throw their previous record collections out the window and throw their flare jeans out or perhaps throw their straight trousers out and get their flight by some new flares or something. It's that sort of that sort of cycle, almost like an evental cycle which produces sort of new generations of pop music. He said that that's what broke down. It's obviously it broke down

because you can't point to anything in 2002 or 2015 would be the next wave of that cycle. It's that there's broken down rather than that there's any new innovation in music at all. and you can only explain that well you could probably try to explain it through sort of changes in technology etc but principally it's about the material conditions of life

I've just got worse they've harsioned there's a lot less space of freedom for young people but that's all true but I'm going to come at your a social democratic Keynesian analysis with a more properly

communist analysis he's done the switcheroo I'm going to So that is Because I would say If we're talking specifically about music The great period of formal musical innovation I think really begins in the 1920s

When jazz really starts to consolidate And there's a period of relatively quiet period Like the 30s But it pretty much carries on And then it ends You know, it ends in the 90s really The innovations of the 90s Are the last after echo of it

And it's pretty much coterminous With the historic existence of the Soviet Union On a global scale, what's going on throughout that period is that, I mean, probably this is true in lots of other areas of cultural production as well, is that essentially a sense of possibility, a sense of sort of animating force of innovation in music is really driven by the balance of forces globally and the sense of the sense of possibility created by the sense that the 20th century might not end with the victory of capitalism. they might end in some other way. And the 70s is like the final period of that. That's why the 70s is like the key decade. All popular music today is essentially derived from some key innovation in the 70s, whether it's hip-hop or alternative rock or whatever.

And the 70s is the last period. It's the last period when it's not clear that who the winners are going to be of the great contest between liberal capitalism and its various kind of, you know, it's various contestants. And I think that's the sort of the big story, if you like, for me. And I mean, really, for me, my analysis of the long 90s is, well, the reason you get at this period of this sense of cultural stasis, especially accompanied by a kind of ongoing technological revolution, is because basically at the level of the sort of global balance

of forces, things are pretty settled by the early 90s. But they are settled in the sense that it's key who the most powerful players are in the world, the most powerful players are Silicon Valley, those sections of finance capital that are most allied with Silicon Valley and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Those are the three forces which are the most powerful in the world. They are the people they are going to get the world they want. That is basically hasn't. I mean, that has remained the case, to be honest, since the early 90s.

And it's the fact that on that fundamental level, the level of the balance of social and political forces, despite the changing configurations at the level of national institutional politics, that hasn't really been called into question, and it's still not really in question. I think it's that which really limits the scope for really kind of radical cultural innovation, I think. Yeah, I like this new tanky Gilbert. I mean, while you were just talking, Jeremy,

I was just thinking, okay, has anyone got the world they want? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. In the 19, okay, I know you, every time you say Bill Gates, I'm like, watch out, you're not talking about 5G in the lizard. Like, we need to clarify that. Okay, so I'll let you come back in a second. Okay, fine. There's a group of-

Let cranky Gilbert talk. Tell us about 5G. There's people, okay, leave aside, like, centrist dads. Today, they're, like, it seems like everyone is discontented. and I'm saying even though centrist dads have got or you know Bill Gates or you know a certain section of like you're saying Silicon Valley or whatever like neoliberalism has won in a sense it doesn't feel like there's anyone sitting there going yes this is the world that we wanted

Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos has got the world he wanted but not compared to what he was thinking in the 90s so I'm trying to compare people who were situated in the 90s yeah now I think probably do he I mean Steve Jobs got exactly the world he wants. You can look at what Steve Jobs seems to have wanted in 1972 and he got it. He got the world he wanted. He wanted

a world of unrestrained market relations, social liberalisation, you know and very cheap manufacturing of computers. You know, that's what he wanted from very early on and he got it. He wouldn't have put it in those terms, but he was

expressed explicitly a sort of generic libertarian ideology and a belief that like basically spreading computing as an end in itself was a goal. And he got all that. One of the things that's interesting to talk about with the 90s is when, I mean, I was pretty young in the 90s, but I remember feeling like the internet.

I first touched the internet when I was 17 in university. And I was like, wow, this is our technology. Like this is our stuff. And for about, you know, five, six into the early 2000s, five, six years, there was this feeling that the concepts around big data and Facebook and Google and whatever ruling everything like didn't really exist and we thought this was going to be our space and there was things like you know my space and indie media etc and that's very different now and I guess I'm just wondering even that Steve Jobs is who have obviously benefited hugely etc would people have seen would have wanted desired the technological control which we see today because today it's monopoly is like totally monopolized it's not it's not you know like a marketplace you've got like google and facebook and they and apple and they own everything well if you think if they don't ask the question they would just wouldn't have answered that

question but they would have described a world much like the one we're living in i'm not sure that's true i'm not sure that's true there's the california ideology of the sort of late 70s early 80s and into the 90s, you know, they didn't envision that the internet would turn out this way. Somebody like Jeff Bezos as a person, I'm sure having the wealth of a pharaoh is good compensation and he's pretty fucking happy, do you know what I mean? But I think that the way that ideology thought the world would pan out is not this world of huge monopolies, you know, really shut down sort of internet, do you know what I mean? I know what you mean, but if you go into the history of the debates, like between those

people, the different sections of people in Silicon Valley, say, in the first, half of the 90s. There's a tiny number who are actually interested in taking any kind of action that might prevent that being the outcome. And the rest of them are just not interested in engaging with those questions. It's not like nobody is saying this might all end with a few giant monopolies. You know, there are people on the left fringe of sort of hacker culture and stuff already saying that. Oh, yeah, yeah. The rest of them are not saying, you're talking rubbish, that'll never happen. They're just saying, oh, that's just not an interesting thing to talk about. Yeah. So to all intents and purposes, I maintain, they didn't really care, you know, that that's what happened. And I think, you know, that sort of libertarian anti-monopolism. I mean, the point is that was always, there were always plenty of things you could do if you were committed to really, like, obstructing the emergence of the sort of monopoly capitalism in Silicon Valley. And very few, you know, it's not like they didn't know what they had to do to stop it. And they didn't do it. But they didn't make any attempt to stop it. And I think.

because they were embedded in that wider ideology of the time, though, and like, that is the neoliberal ideology of the 80s and 90s. They've gone through a period in which they've stopped caring about monopolies, and that happened in the 1950s. Yeah, that's true, but also they're not neoliberal. That's the thing. They don't really care about whether they're inhabiting neoliberalism. I mean, I think actually existing neoliberalism is a sort of expression. It's how the political class responds to the fact that those guys become the most powerful people on the planet. They don't care about neoliberalism.

What they care about is just they care about becoming rich and they care about spreading computing like into every area of life. I mean, if you look at their eye, if you trace back, that kind of their micro sector right back to the MIT labs of the 40s, no, that's all they care about really. They don't really, they just don't care about these other questions.

Like, is it through monopoly? Is it through competition? That's for someone else to worry about. That's for economists and like politicians to worry about. So I think they just don't care one way or another about that stuff. They want everyone to have a smartphone in their pocket. They don't care how you get it. Sure, yeah.

No, I just think it's an interesting point to interrogate that perhaps, especially in terms of technological monopolies, it's not what people envisaged. I'm not saying that there was a grand plan. I agree with your point that it might not have been like, oh, this is the vision that we want. This is the vision that works for people. But I think if, you know, if you really interrogate what the internet looked like in, you know, 1995, 1997, it's this thing that has a huge influence over our lives, like the centrist dads presumably, specifically, are not, you know, kicking off about this because they have enough comfort and networks and material wealth in their reality that this is not going to be the thing that they're going to kick off about in a sense.

but I would even imagine that within that cohort there'll be people going like how did we get to this effectively which I think is an interesting position to look at and from where we're standing now because effectively so much has changed but on the level of political economy there's the centrist dad types are still going well no you can't have Corbinism

not we can't have Corbinism but but yeah that it's some kind of pathology because they're unable to accept what those changes have been. No, where you're all right? I mean, it's also true that the sort of the liberal centrist response to the emergence of platform capitalism and platform monopoly has been really specific. So the great text of that is Shoshana Zuboff's books of Avalent's capitalism, which on the one hand is sort of incredible because she's a liberal legal scholar who's

done a really competent, like conjunctural analysis of the new, you know, the new sort of what I call the new regulatory assemblage of contemporary capitalism. On the other hand, her political analysis, a particular response to it, at the end of this really devastating critique of monopoly data capitalism, is to say, oh, we need more regulation, which is just like just sort of nonsense. I mean, it just ignores the extent to which the problem with surveillance capitalism isn't the surveillance, is the capitalism. I mean, it is the surveillance as well, but it's not the technology. It's the fact that it's been deployed in the service of unlimited capital accumulation. I mean, it's definitely true. Like, I think you guys are kind of

gesturing out. None of these guys, including people like Steve Jobs, I think, they never really had a conception of capitalism. They never really thought about it one way or another. They took the line of least resistance to get what they wanted. The line of these resistance was to work with venture capital, basically, and work with the grain of financialization and globalization. But nobody's disagreeing with the general point that it's like finance capital and Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party were the most of the people who've basically driven all this and have certainly got most of what they wanted.

But I think also, I think this notion of the world that they wanted, you've also got to think about the level of culture. Certainly it's the case that those California, those Silicon Valley people, in terms of what are now the mainstream cultural and social norms in countries like Britain and America and to some extent globally and within most corporations,

it's exactly what they wanted. It's exactly the mixture of like social, liberalism, meaningless egalitarian rhetoric, an actual deep hierarchy that they always wanted, they always promoted, even at a really small scale in their institutions. I mean, I think you've always

got to remember how unlikely it would have seemed in like 1990, that by the 2010, you would have conservative politicians advocating for gay marriage and this sort of thing. But that's exactly the kind of thing people like Jobs wanted. That's exactly the kind of outcome they wanted. And even things like we've

talks about on the show, like psychedelic culture. I mean, I think, you know, the partial normalisation of psychedelic culture, you know, the legalisation of weed in places like the state, I think, is driven more than anything by the fact that that was all, for very contingent historical reasons, psychedelics and weed was like always part of the culture of those people, you know. And so they've been able, the more powerful they've become culturally and socially, the more it's become necessary to sort of, you know, partially normalise it. But on the level of the ever, every day, life has become so constricted compared to then, right? So even when we're talking about, you know, that being, there being that group or cohort

that were like, fine, we can see how psychedelic drugs and weed and whatever becoming part of culture on a kind of mass level on the West, like there's so much less freedom in everyday life than there was in the 90s. Well, it depends what you want to do. Depends what you want to do, doesn't it? I think we have precisely the kinds of freedom they always wanted us to have. If you want to do, if you want to coordinate your activity with a bunch of people who are exactly like you but live on different sides of the planet, it was completely important. There was no technical means of doing that before.

Now it's really easy. You know, you can spend all your time just hanging around with a group of mates who live on different continents, you know, talking on Zoom, talking on WhatsApp. That's easy. That's really interesting that you see that within freedom. I wouldn't put that within the cadre of things. I'm going to have to think about that. It's a kind of freedom. It's the freedom to do stuff that those people want to do. And those people wanted to enable other people to be able to do.

So I think that we've had all kinds of freedoms have expanded insofar as their freedoms that those people wanted us to have. So for me, which is different to the guys, obviously, because there's an age difference. I was listening to lots of psychedelic rock from the kind of 70s, etc when I was a late teenager early 20s and then Kula Shaker comes along and these other bands that are playing this psychedelic rock with like all of this kind of Indian

samples in the background stuff that I'd only heard before on the Beatles etc but also some really energetic guitar riffs and I absolutely love a good energetic guitar riff so we're going to play 303 by Kula Shaker I'm just down, I'm just a manstroke pushing some wheel, moving on and down the road to the 3 of 3 in the land of summer sun we had just begun riding out with my friends and I'm a Mercedes-D Ben. So going back to the point about freedom, and this is me talking about within the experience of me in the UK. So I would spend four months in the summer in the UK, something like between 1995 and 2000, or, you know, even later, between 1997 and 2000 and between that 10 years until the crash, I experienced London as a much freer place in terms of like,

private land, in terms of demos, although other people might have had a completely different experience of that. In terms of things like there being loads of nooks and crannies in London that were not overdeveloped and over-commercialised, the fact that I felt like there were places you could just hang out. It was easier to hang out. Things weren't so expensive. I didn't feel under surveillance. Yet things were affordable. It felt like there was a lot more live music. and that's me as like a teenager and in my early 20s and then the crash happens and then austerity happens and all of the things that I love are taken away from me

so all the small festivals closed down like the city festivals closed down so many different community events are taken away a lot of public land is privatized things like Camden Market etc just start becoming built up and full of Starbucks the streets start becoming dirtier like that's what happens with austerity and so my experience of the 90s in the 90s things were much cheaper and easier and more fun it's hard for me to answer a question of whether I feel less free now than I did in the 90s

because that's all mixed up with like life cycle effects and you're a different age etc and that all has an impact but like I can do a quick analysis when I look at my daughter We've talked about quite a bit in the last couple of episodes. She's 20 now, and her life is incredibly, is much less free, basically. It's much more constrained than I was at her age. When I was 20, I was like living in some squat, but, you know, it was a squat in a massive house, etc. We could do some work. We could be on the dole. You know what I mean? It was a time of much, much more freedom. Just had so many more options. It felt much less consterned. by things such as surveillance and these sorts of things,

much less constrained under having to have one single narrative about your life, basically. And so basically everything you do, having to fit into a narrative upon which will fit you into a job market, etc. For young people now, their lives are incredibly much more restrained. What they can do, you know, the amount of freedom they can have to sort of determine their own path is incredibly more restrained than when I was young. You know, perhaps I didn't have a particularly typical,

or wasn't a particularly typical 20-year-old. But, like, yeah, basically, I think those are the things that really have constrained freedom. The ability to sort of reinvent yourself and think about who you want to be, et cetera. I think that is to do with material conditions. It's also to do with the fact that everything you do is now archived, et cetera.

It's quite hard to reinvent, reinvent yourself when your past self, your self from five years ago is all archived on the internet on Facebook or on Twitter and Instagram, etc. Exactly. And also everyone can find you Our parents couldn't find us I don't want to go down the nostalgia too much

But like nobody knew where I was Unless I had told them Like my physical body was Wherever I want Wherever it was I was not on the end I didn't have a device on me It was very very different

Does someone want to say something about spice girls Yo Don't tell you what I want What I really really want Don't tell me what you want I mean, really, really want I want to want what I really, really want No, tell me what you want, what you really, really want,

what you really want to, I want to, I want to, I want to really, really want to zig-a-zag-zik. If you want my future, forget my past. If you want to get with me, better make it fast. Now don't go wasting, my precious time. Get your act together with you. I mean, it was your suggestion. I mean, I can do it. The only thing I'd say about Spice Girls is,

that wannabe kind of blasted this girl power onto the scene, which was, I don't know, as a young teenager, it felt like a good thing at the time, but I don't have a bigger analysis. Well, no, I would just say, there were lots of criticisms that could be made of it. Like, it wasn't, you know, girls were not, like, going away reading Shunumith Firestone

and, you know, and Oakley because of read, because of Spires Girls. But everyone I knew who had, he was a parent of, like, girls at that time, which I wasn't yet, they would be was really happy because simply having the idea of a sort of popular vernacular feminism being expressed in the pop charts was a really, it seemed like a really radical development. And it was also very clearly contrived as a deliberate repost to the sort of

emergent blood culture. You know, the people marketing the spice girls realized that girls were going to be very alienated by this revanchist masculinism and we're going to find a peeding a kind of explicit rejection of it. Of course, the song, the actual lyric of the song is a song about solidarity as well. It's a song about, you know, if you want to be my love, you've got to get with my friends. Friendship is more important than romance. So it is a pretty radical statement on its own terms. So I think we should play ping pong by Stereo Lab.

It's a song from 1994. Stereo Lab are sort of the emerging sort of indie scene. And they're particularly, they're sort of, they're quite a. influenced by sort of crout rock and then sort of like lounge music as well is in there. But one of the interesting things about them is that some of their lyrics, not all of their lyrics, are a left wing and particularly muhuxist. And so ping pong is really interesting because the lyrics are really, in fact, they sort of seem to talk to the idea of contrativ waves, right?

So this is some of the lyrics. It's all right because the historic pattern has shown how the economic cycle tends to revolve In a round of decades, three stages stand out in a loop, a slump or war, then peel back to square one and back for more. Bigger slump, bigger war and smaller recovery. Huge slump, greater wars, a shallower recovery. It's all right, because the historical pattern has shown how the economical cycle dance to be cold.

In a round of decades, three stages stand how it is. There's an slump and war then feel back two, we're one and back for more. Bigger, slump, bigger wars and a smaller recover free. There's an analysis of the song in this article in Viewpoint magazine. I can't remember who the author of that is, and it's great, because they sort of links this idea of, so, contrastive waves of this idea that there are long economic waves in the economy, sort of like 50 years long, basically. And they get marked by these big epochal crises, so like the 1930s and 1970s,

70s, 2008. Whether they exist or not, it's difficult to tell because when you're working in like 50 year periods, the number of data points in capitalism gets so small, it's hard to make a clear distinction. But the idea is there's a sort of long boom and slumps, basically, and then you have crises or wars which clear out the old sort of technological base and allow new technology to come in. So, Condratiev is like a Soviet economist who's sort of left but not Marxists, I'd say that, but he gets taken up by right-wing economists such as Schumpeter, who like this idea. And so basically, this article sort of links the sort of looping analysis of capitalism. There are long loops to the sort of looping, driving, sort of croat-rock, motor-driven

structure of Stereo Lab at that point. So one of their later albums is called Dots and Loops, and they're really into their look, like this looping sort of music in which change sort of emerges slowly. That brings up this really interesting idea of how you link this. idea of long economic waves or that their moments for political change are sometimes very, you know, they're basically historically rare. And how do you fit that in with like human biography? The late 1990s, they looked like a stable period of growth in which things seem to, society seemed to settle down to some degree. The crisis of 2008 shows that that growth was illusory, right?

It was based on debt. And debt is a way to, it's a way to displace antagonism in time, basically. Rather than struggle over resources, now you have access to those resources. now and then, you know, the antagonism comes later when it's time to pay, as it turns out, such was that that debt was linked to asset price inflation. And so when the antagonism comes due, it turns into an antagonism between generations, basically. But it's that point of when I look back at the 90s, I think, I think about this problem of like, you know, what do you do in a period when there seems to be social stability? I spent a lot of the 90s involved in sort of like radical politics and one of the things that we were trying to do there was

work out how you do politics in the new conditions, do you know what I mean? But you need the wider historical era to change before those new forms of organizing can be tried out on a really large level. And in fact, I see the sort of whole period from 2008 onwards as an attempt by that left that was developed through the 90s and early 2000s to try to lose the left melancholy of that time, to try to lose the sort of constriction of possibility that we all took on at that time, basically. That's why you should listen to this song. Perhaps this is also a time to get into our experience of the early 90s, because if I wanted to sort of detach myself from that thing, our young people are we less free now and think about what it felt like in the early 90s?

My early 90s was not preparing me for that, you know, the late 90s and the 2000s, basically. I experienced it as a time of real political flux and change. And it's to do with the fact that like the key event of my youth or early adulthood was the fall of the Berlin Wall. The key year is probably something like 1990, where I'm like 1920. And the Berlin Wall is collapsing. There's all these sort of regimes collapsing around the world. It felt like a period of revolution. And what was going on in the UK was there was a really huge social movement, the anti-Poltax movement. And the anti-Poltax

movement looked very different to a lot of the stuff that happened in the 1990s because it was much more, it was like a community-based. It was basically that the poll tax was like this really regressive tax and every person in the country to replace council tax on a council tax comes in later to replace the rates and it's organized on a sort of like you know on a community level non-payment protest riots all these sorts of things quite intoxicating and in my head they were that that sort of period was mixed up that sort of campaign was mixed up with stuff that was i was seen on tv from eastern europe and and also in china whether it was the tianman square mask in 1989 of course and that was mixed up with a sort of cultural revolution that seemed to be happening, which was, you know,

rave, acid house. You know, to me, it seemed like a period of like huge possibility, basically. So I'll say, I think you're right. I mean, I agree about the sort of declining freedom. It's a good point. In terms of substantial life choices that were available to people and the basic material conditions of life, you know, rent, wages, grants, you know, and education, it's incredibly constrained now. My own experience of the 90s was always conditioned by the fact that I was a pretty acutely conscious of the extent to which that space of freedom, I think, had already narrowed a lot compared to what it had been for people sort of 10 years older than me and 20 years older than me in the 70s and 80s and was in the process of narrowing and narrowing over the course of the

period. So I think I would say you take any point from sort of 1978 really and then draw a line into the future you're going to you know anyone living through that is going to experience that space of freedom narrowing sort of slowly and that sort of carries on right until the present so whether the 90s was a time of freedom sort of depends what you're comparing it to like at the time i suppose i wasn't thinking about what it would be like if it just kept getting worse and worse i was mostly thinking about the extent to which it felt like we'd already lost quite a lot of those sort of conditions i think this idea of the early 90s is a moment when, well, possibly things could have gone differently.

You know, the world we ended up with by sort of the early 2000s when Blair is about to take Britain into the Gulf War, you know, which is sort of the moment, which for a lot of people consolidated the realisation that we just didn't even have a functioning democracy, probably hadn't done since the 70s. The end of history hypothesis was always that, yeah, this can only go one way now.

We're at the start of the 90s. There's only one way this can go. the reason for like the centrist ad cohort that remained such a powerful idea is because that seemed to be proved right. I mean, from their point of view, it was proved correct that that was the outcome. The world described by Fukuyama would be the world they would find themselves growing up in, getting jobs in, having families in. So obviously, it's kind of not surprising in a way that they're really, they still don't really believe that anything about that hypothesis was incorrect or inadequate. And so even

though they don't, I think we have to be clear that, you know, most centrist dads have never heard of Fukuyama, but then nonetheless they internalised a version of his thesis that was widely disseminated in various forms. But so Kier, say, you're going to talk about that why, though, what is a different understanding of the world in the early 90s that might lead to the conclusion that actually those outcomes weren't inevitable? Yeah, I mean, it's a question we've sort of talked about before, and probably not on the show, but we've talked a lot of off the show about it, about whether the early 90s was a lost acid communist moment, basically. It's really quite a difficult question to say, could the 90s have gone any other way?

But I can talk about my own experience of that early 90s. And I thought it was going a different way. And like I said, I was really influenced by the anti-Poltax movement. And, you know, for the early part of the 2000s, you know, I spent that time looking for the next version of the poll tax. What was it going to be? I thought the anti-Poltex movie was the start of a new cycle of struggles. it turns out it wasn't basically. When we look back at it now,

it looks like the end, the capstone to the struggles against Thatcher in the 80s. The other thing that was going on is all of these revolutions in the east, the collapse of the fall of the Berlin Wall is what the event gets put down under. And the way that played out, it wasn't necessarily,

it wasn't written in stone at all. You know, the world that Eastern Europe and Russia ended up with by the end of the 1990s really was not the world that the dissident from those countries wanted by any means. In 1990, I ended up going to Eastern Germany for this conference, quite a small conference, a more of a sort of gathering,

which was like Western radicals meet Eastern dissidents. And it's sort of interesting because it was in, we had to go across, East Germany was still East Germany, the Wall had fallen down, and things were in real turmoil in East Germany. And so this conference is held in this sort of rural conference center, which, you know, six months before,

it had been the venue for the elite of the Communist Party of the DDR to meet, basically. Now, the dissidents had taken it over, and it was like Western radicals meeting Eastern dissidents. And, you know, what both sides wanted or thought was going to emerge was, you know, more libertarian democratic forms of socialism, not the harshest form of capitalism. That's what the sort of initiating demonstrations in the DDR wanted. You know, they were proposing a democratic reformation. of socialism rather than reuniting with Western Germany and how Western Germany just taking it over.

Because when that happened, they realized that Western Germany wasn't particularly democratic either. In fact, what they were going to live under was a world, was not a democratic world, not even democratic capitalism. It's going to be a world of oligarchs, particularly when we talk about Russia. You know, the whole transformation of Russia into a... This is now Tanky Milbin, I think I'm getting...

The whole transformation of Russia into capitalism through this shock doctrine, this sending over these Chicago school economists and they wanted to really accelerate this transformation so the Communist Party could never come back again. And it was so brutal that like so many people died just because, you know, the removal of their living standards, the removal of any sort of state support, etc. It was sort of like the same level of death you'd find in a small-scale nuclear war. So you've got this situation in the Cold War where these two nuclear forces sort of face each other and everybody worried about people sending in the nukes. All you have

to do was send in the Chicago School of Economists and you'd get the same sort of death count basically. Yeah, I think it's really important to be clear about this. The drop in life expectancy in Russia between 1989 and 2000 was the by far, it was the biggest drop in life expectancy in an industrialized country, in peacetime, outside of an epidemic, you know, ever. And also, everybody should know that every single Chinese person knows that. And that is, you know, if you want to understand anything about the politics of China, you have to understand that every single Chinese person knows what happened when the Communist Party left office in 1989.

That's a really great point, actually. No, that is. This is all very, very good points. I feel like my tanky tendencies tend to come out when I talk about global politics from the Arab world rather than these subjects. But I have to say, I agree. We are sounding slightly tanky, but it does all make sense. I mean, the real tank's claim, and I don't know enough about this history to know how valid it is, that if it weren't for Americans of direct over Ankova intervention in the presidential election in the mid-90s,

then the communist candidate would have won. But Yeltsin, you know, wouldn't have won. It's certainly, from what I've known, I've tried to look into that history a little bit. I think the claim that Yeltsin wouldn't have won is very strong. The claim the communist would have won is not that strong. But certainly there was direct intervention to try to make sure that happened. The Americans were worried that what was going to happen in the mid-90s was the Russians were just going to elect a democratically elected communist government

who was going to go all Salvador Allende on them. And they did do whatever, you know, they did go out of their way to make. make sure that didn't happen. And that's one of the bases for this idea, isn't it, that will possibly, there's still a glimmer of hope in the early 90s that the outcome isn't going to be just, you know, complete sort of neo-liberal, neo-conservative global hegemony. I mean, certainly in Britain, at the level of music culture,

I mean, there definitely was the sort of shift in the mid-90s. The early 90s is this, there's this efflorescence of musical experimentation. There's stuff coming out of dance music, there's jungle, drum and bass. There's some things like Asian dance music or Bangra, stuff like that, just building up from the 80s. There's this real sense of Britain's kind of urban multicultural culture finally producing the sort of things that people have been feeling it ought to be able to produce for some time. It's kind of wildly innovative forms of music and culture. And then, you know, there's the big explosion of ambient music. There's all this kind of experimentation and this sense

that the period when like white rock music was just the sort of dominant form. was finally over. From my point of view, at least, all that gets sort of, it doesn't get successfully shut down, but there's a deliberate reaction against all that in the form of, you know, it's a Britpop. I'm not so much the bands themselves

or the people listening to them, but the very deliberate activities of like a certain set of critics, journalists, media operators, especially a bunch of people at the BBC who really break with the BBC's tradition of trying to not promote like one genre of pop music over another, they all kind of converge to try to create this,

this, you know, a discourse, as I called it at the time, which says that, well, actually, there's one form of sort of musical identity which probably expresses what it means to be British in popular music, and that is white men's guitar rock. I mean, even before the notion of Britpop was firmly consolidated, you have this cohort of like, they're like oxbridge educated like indie fans from the 80s

who are really trying to use their positions at the BBC to define their musical taste as central do you remember that band Biss Biss became like the first unsigned band ever to be allowed to play on top of the pops and the reason they were allowed to play on top of the pops is because they sounded like a C-86 indie band of the kind of... Do you want to explain top of the pops

to our listeners who are under the age of 40? Yes, yeah. Sorry, I've gone off on one now. It's slightly on on left, Twitter, this. Top of the Pops was the BBC's flagship pop music program for decades. The policy of Top of the Pops was they would play a selection of music from the top 40 singles charts. And anything that was in the top 40 singles charts could appear in it, and nothing that wasn't in the top 40 singles charts would appear.

And that was also the policy of Radio 1's date, the Radio 1, the National Commercial Pop, not Commercial, the national publicly funded radio station for sort of mainstream commercial pop music. Since its inception at the end of the 60s, they've had a few specialist evening programs where the policy in the daytime had been. All music played will be from the top 40 and anything that's in the top 40 will get played. And then what happens in the early 90s is that the BBC music program is taken over by this sort of cohort, of upper middle class, as I say, sort of Oxford indie fans from the 8, you've been at university in the 80s.

And they decide they're going to change all this. And instead, they're going to leave off the playlist music they think isn't cool. And they're going to heavily promote music they think is cool. So there was a big furori because, like, status quo had like a top five single, but they refused. They said we're not playing it on Radio One because we're cool now. And they put Bist, this like unsigned indie band from Scotland, they put on top of the pops, yeah.

And I think Swade as well before they'd released it, released any records, they let them play. because they wanted to be cool. But they had a very, very specific idea of what it meant to be cool. What it meant to be cool was to play sort of white, slightly androgynous, why indie rock of the kind, the sort of mainstay of the John Peel show in the 1980s. I call it the flinging arms kind of, what's it called, toe gazing, or is it shoegazing, whatever it is. Shoe gazing.

Yeah, kind of. I think we should invent toe gazing as a toe gazing. As the open-toed sandal version of shoe gazing. But that was basically that was the first cultural expression. That along with like loaded magazine which like the original lad mag which maybe I've talked to enough kids

to talk about loadsies in a minute. That was like the first cultural manifestation of what would become like the ideology and structure of feeling of the centrist dads. You know, it was basically the sort of culture and attitudes of a completely depoliticised section of the sort of upper middle class like being presented to the rest of the world

as completely universalisable and sort of completely hegemonic. But the point about all this in relation to the early United is at the time, certainly to people like me, and people like Mark, you know, Fisher was writing about this early on. And people like Simon Reynolds, who was, you know, made his name as the great champion of jungle, like with other kind of white middle class people.

You know, it felt like this was a really deliberate reaction against this moment of radical possibility of the early 90s. It felt like there's a moment of radical possibility had opened up. And the response to that had been no fucking way. Like, you're not having this shit. What you're going to have is 24-7 Landfill Indy. Like, say, a never-ending

boring hour of the John Peel show. It's so good, though. I reckon if you guys were my age, this is my thesis. I know you're going to hate it. But if you were my age, you would feel differently about music from that era because all of the music that you hate, I absolutely

love. I love all of the pop, all of the indie, all of that, that's the sound that I really, really enjoy. So, like, even if there was this master plan to kick out any diversity, I just, I think that music sounds so good. And I'd never heard it before, obviously, because of my age. Yeah, but let's not, let's not slag off cooler shaker anymore. No, you know, it's fine. It's fine that you slag off cooler shaker. We're still playing it, though, because I love cooler shaker. So, you know, that's completely fine. I just think you'd hear it differently because I feel that way the reason I'm making that argument is because

I feel that way about music from 2002 onwards to me it's just like it there's a level of blandness and it's because and it feels like something is recycled and I'm not sure if that's because the cultural argument about the around the long 90s is correct or whether it's that has to do with my age or to do or slightly both. Keep back on the walls. Asian Duff Foundation, just extraordinary musical project. led by the incomparable John Pandit, started producing music in the early to mid-90s.

They were one of the elements of what came to be known as the Asian Underground. It brings together hip-hop, Bangra, to dub, house, techno, a really, really articulate lyrics, really self-conscious political project. And they came out of a community music project that was a kind of legacy-funded project

from the GLC, actually. And for me, they were always like the, They were always the great repost to the whole concept of Britpop. So if your idea of Brit pop, or British pop, popular music, does not include Asian Dub Foundation, and what function is it serving? I think we're sort of agreeing that you can split the 90s up, basically, into, you know, the early 90s was different,

and there did seem to be a potential for something else to emerge. You know, my experience of that was, when I look back at it now, I sort of realize that basically what I thought was happening was getting overdetermined by these really big structural changes on a sort of global level, basically, and that is, you know, the effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall that had lots of effects on the political imaginary, etc., you know, the elimination of the idea that the world is split into two antagonistic poles and all these sorts of things. I think that psychologically has an effect, but like just materially, one of the effects is

between like 1990 and something like 92 or three, the global labour force accessible by global capital doubles, basically. It doubles in a couple of years. And that is just a one-off event, basically. It's never happened in human history before. It'll probably never happen in human history again. And it just has this huge effect, because you know you double the supply of something,

then a negotiating position, the bargaining position of labour around the world just becomes incredibly constrained. And it plays a massive role in the, collapse of the historic left, basically. Just to go back to Tanki Gilbert's sort of analysis, we could put Eric, we could put Eric Hobbesbourne, his book, The Age of Extremes gets published in the mid-90s, and what goes long of the long 90s is his thesis is there was a short 20th century.

The 20th century lasts from 1914 until 1990, perhaps 92, something like that. That's his thesis. You know, basically the 20th century is linked to the end of the first century. World War, the Russian Revolution, the potential for a different form of political and social organisation, and then that falls apart in 1990. And then basically, history loses focus, basically. I think that's his thesis is, you know, that it was the challenge of the left that not only disciplined capitalism during the post-war years, but basically it structured, it was the left's conception of history, which structured history, which structured idea of modernity and progress,

etc. When that falls apart, you know, so many things, so many other things fall apart and we just enter a period of drift and basically drift towards corruption. You'd probably say something like that. You know, in 1990, as soon as the Italian Communist Party falls apart, every single political party in Italy falls apart in a big corruption scandal. And it's never been put back together ever since. You know, that's the sort of, that's the short 20th century sort of idea. It's so, it's really interesting, though, that that's expressed in the point of it being short because so much shit goes down in the 20th century

like so much shit goes down and then I would argue that okay you've got I mean obviously from my age group politically being in the West like the Iraq war is like fucking massive but then it feels like you kind of coast until the financial

crisis there's like five six years where there's not much happening and then you get you get crash austerity Brexit and now the pandemic like a lot has happened

in the last 13 years and now I think that's a really good point I'm going to say one more thing about relating Brit Pop to that note that point about the global labour market changing and everything Brit Pop was also as well as constituting this sort of reaction in the way I've

described it against positive things it was also informed by a sort of melancholic nostalgia for the kind of lost world of full employment that it wasn't an accident Like the historic peak of full employment is 1966. So it's not an accident that it's specifically the historical and cultural moment of 1966, which Brit Pop is most infused by this kind of longing for and its nostalgia for.

So which has kind of reactionary implications if you're a woman, if you're a gay, if you're a black person who doesn't want to go back to a world in which those people were all thoroughly marginalized and subordinated to white men. But at the level of sort of class and a sort of class feeling, there's a certain genuine sort of sadness about the loss of that sort of class power and the loss which comes with full employment which I think is sort of there it's there in the sort of you know tawdry melancholia of oasis it's guitar chords it's definitely true there's definitely something to that because you know cool Britannia

is all that you know swinging London yeah yeah big that sort of thing the thing that complicates the picture that jem sets up is it's things like Loaded magazine and that emergence of new Laddism in the late 1990s. The strapline for Loaded is for men who should know better. It's basically the reinvention of Laddism, but with its tongue and its cheek, basically. It's an illustration of this, of the irony that gets soaked in culture at that point. If you look at comedy and all that sort of stuff, like biographically, James Brown, who was the editor of Loaded when it started and he's most associated with this,

You know, he was a punk in Leeds. He used to do a fan scene with a friend of mine, Ben, sick of war, a tack on Bazag. And so, like, this is somebody who would live through a fairly politicised sort of Leeds punk scene. And he also, his account of the Genesis of Loaded, was it was a specific reaction against the feminizing effects of rave culture on British men.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. That's really interesting. He said specifically, that was what it was reacting against. Yeah, that is really interesting, actually. in fact we should take that sort of the analysis of ladism back a little bit because that's one of the classic stories of early rave is the idea that loads of people start taking ecstasy then people stop fighting at nightclubs etc different sort of football firms take ecstasy and start hugging each other instead of fighting so you couldn't see this sort of this sort of feminization of ladism through the early 90s and then this is definitely a revanchist reaction to that right which all adds to that to that to you your thesis, there's a sort of nostalgia for that post-war period.

The bit that goes against it is this idea of irony that, you know, this is for lads who should know better, right? But, you know, we're allowed to do it now because all of the problems have been solved. We don't have sexism or racism anymore, right? And if you, you know, if you keep going on and banging on about sexism or racism, you're from a different period. You're boring. You're boring.

You're boring. We don't need politics anymore because we solve the problems. That's why the history has ended. There's no racism. There's no sexism. You know, there's class mobility and all these sorts of things. And it was also about interpolating men as consumers rather than as workers. I mean, that was the, what a big problem for capital is that, you know, interpolating men as workers doesn't work anymore.

Because men don't have the kind of jobs that give them a sense of stable identity. And also, we know historically what happens when you interpolate men as workers. They go and join unions and stuff. So Loaded is partly about interpolating men as consumers. that what defines masculinity now, is not having a job, or looking after a family, in fact, or even in a traditional role, what defines being a man is what you buy.

It's like buying shit, buying gadgets, consuming porn. But you could say that that's what the style mags were doing in the 80s, but they still had more of a link to a sort of countercultural style. Well, that's true. They did that in the 80s, but they did it at that moment, that was seen as subversive, and it was tied to a sort of partially queer agenda. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and we just want to be, clear that, you know, if there was this guy from Loaded who was saying, I'm doing this project because of the feminization of like whatever due to, I think you were saying, rave culture, whatever, I'm not accepting that term and we shouldn't accept that term from RM, that feminization, that hugging and not being, not being violent is feminization. Well, I mean, that was how it was experienced. I mean, it was really, I mean, I'm sure we've talked about it on the show before. No, but one way to understand it is, like, basically, people were trying to undo bits of the, of what masculinity meant at a particular time.

And so, you know, if we think about the early 90s as a period in which, in which it was a different possibility, there was a possibility for a different, for a progressive ladism, for a different form of what masculinity meant, basically. And that's what gets undone, that's what gets undone, that's what gets undone in the late 1990s. I think the important point of all that is, you know, it happened then because it was, that was seen as, like, we've done, we've gone through those. struggles and now we live in a post-racial, post-sexist, post-homophobic society. That's what the loaded gambit was. The magazines that come after it, they drop all of that. And now there's a lineage there, which is all just about, you know, the whole banter lineage, which is all just about basically using banter and the thinest disguise of irony in order to assert hierarchies, basically, or to reassert hierarchies. Interesting anecdote. When Loaded first came out of, I was very, very

exercised about it and I was writing about it a little bit. There's a start on my PhD and I did a, I gave a talk of some small kind of left event in Brighton, but it's definitely the youngest person talking and I said, yeah, loaded is a disaster. We should be burning loaded in the streets right now. And they all laughed at me and said, no, it's harmless irony. You're being very naive. You're being very 70s, Jeremy. That is the structure of feeling of the late 1990s, isn't it? It totally is. It was, yeah. But you can also see it in comedy. So like one of the things we have to say in the, in the centrist dad discourse is that 90s comedians are the armed wing of the centrist dads, right? They're the most militant on Twitter and Facebook, well, not Facebook, Twitter and etc.

And in newspaper columns and these sorts of things. You know, somebody, a character like David Bedele, for instance, right, who then did this, you know, fantasy football show with Frank Skinner, which was really sort of taking that loaded sort of masculinity to an even further extent until, you know, basically they run this long-term bullying campaign against this black football in which David Buddy blacks up and puts a pineapple on his head, which he said was probably a mistake now. But like, you know, that slippage between the irony, this finer of irony is so small.

It barely exists. And like 90s comedy, and particularly early 2000s comedy, it's just all punching down, basically. It's all punching down at the week, basically, taking the piss out of people because they're disabled or because they're gay and all these sorts of things, you know, it's a counter-revolution against the whole alternative comedy thing

that happens in the 1980s. But I think what's been happening really interestingly in this sort of clash of the generations over the last sort of five years is this real battle about over irony and naivety. Let me do a little argument here. With irony, there's like two sort of notional audiences. There's a naive audience who doesn't understand a double meaning

and then there's a sort of knowing, complicit audience who understands the double meaning, right? And it's that humour comes from the complicity. So the last five years has all been about 90s comedians and left-wing shit posters trying to have a battle over who is the naive audience, right? Are the young naive because they believe politics can change the world, which is what the 90s ideology is,

or are 90s comedians naive because they can't understand that the world has changed and that their experiences are no longer, and no longer the dominant experience of the world. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'd be interested in whether the phenomenon of the centrist dance has existed in previous, in it, like, have there been other decades? And I'm talking probably before the 1950s where this has happened.

So my dream scenario is that a hundred years ago, this was the same situation in terms of how it could be mapped, is that there was this category of people, And then, you know, then there was the so-called Spanish flu. And then there was a war. And then they had the roaring 20s where culture changed dramatically in the West. We're talking about the West here. And I have, you know, I've got to have hope.

I mean, why else are we kind of doing this stuff? That the 19, that we're now that we could have the roaring 20s again in terms of a cultural revolution. I mean, also because I just really like 1920s cabaret culture. I want that aesthetic back and I want that those kind of freedoms and especially kind of the freedoms that urban women found and not only in the West and also places like Cairo

and I would like to think that the combination of you know Brexit and austerity and the pandemic you know from the ashes we could find some really interesting radical cultural moments coming up well the 20s and the 70s of the

great decades of cultural revolution so they're 50 years apart so maybe personally i think we're 10 years away yet i think we're 10 more years of this shit before it really kicks off the phrase the roaring 20s and interesting though because that's actually that's linked to the idea that the 20s were roaring because there was an economic boom basically leading up to the economic crash in 1929 stock markets go really really sort of gangbusters etc basically that's sort of linked to the culture of like flappers and all that sort of stuff. But the huge innovation in cultural, the huge cultural revolution that's going on that time is much more linked to the effects of the Russian revolution. But people are talking a little bit

now about we will have a roaring 20s again this time and because people are thinking there might be a bounce back from the COVID contraction. It's probably not going to work out that way because the structural deficiencies of the economy are just too big to be carried out by a little boost in spending. Like, you know, a little boom caused by the fact that some middle class people have done a bit of saving over the pandemic, that's not going to bring cultural revolution. Cultural revolution only comes back when if the young left, generation left, assert their interest and become the dominant hegemonic force, basically.

Well, I mean, it's also probably completely out of our control, isn't it? It's going to depend on, you know, at what point in history the Chinese working class starts to organise, or the Communist Party pulls back on full-scale complicity with American finance capital. Yeah, I just want a party. This is what, you know, this is what, I know, I know I've just got to a point where I'm just like, I just want to go raving. I mean, the bigger point that, yeah, of course, you know, Raymond Williams has these terms, the emergent and the residual. The emergent is the thing that's new that it's at any given moment. And the residual is something left over from the past, either the recent or the distant past, but the residual can still be really powerful.

You know, the centre is dads are a residual class fraction, but it doesn't. mean they're not really powerful. And well, have there been powerful residual class fractions before? Yes. Yeah, not only have there been. Like there's virtually no point in history when they haven't existed. Just as people thinking that their experience of the world is the only experience of the world and nothing can be allowed to challenge it is just normal. I mean, it's not unusual really. It's more unusual that you get moments of historic opportunity when those things can really be shifted. But also, I think specifically with the, the example that we didn't expand on massively about like class and class being you know seen as

being over in in the 1990s like when you that's that that that was residual until very recently and how that has interacted residual from the 90s and how that is interacted with you know a individualist uh form of identity politics that has been like a a car crash both of those things together? I think the long 90s is over at the level of formal politics and has been. I think the fact that Keir Stama has been such a disaster so far as leader of the Labour Party just demonstrates to a large extent that it's over. And even if Stama manages to recover his position, he's only going to do it through adopting some strategy which is different from the politics of the long 90s. So I think at the level of politics, long 90s is over. I do also think that, you know,

in some areas of music I'm really interested in. I hear things. I think they're not like the radical innovations of the 70s, 80s, 90s, but I also sort of feel like they couldn't have been made really during the long 90s. There's a lot of really sort of innovative or passionate or jazz, which doesn't sound like the very mannered, sort of stylised jazz of that period. And I think there is something going on that makes me feel that the long 90s is over at the level of politics, it's over at the level of political economy, and at the level of the kind of more radical fringes of culture, it's over. But on the other hand, there's a big, persistent, residual sort of cultural infrastructure,

which includes like friends on Netflix and includes the world, the entire cultural universe in which the centre is Dad's live. On this question of like are the long 90s over, like we shouldn't look at Starmer to work that out, I think you have to look at Biden. There's something going on with Biden's presidency, which is filtering through into institutions like the IMF, the OECD and World Bank, etc. it's still very unclear about how this is all going to play out. But Biden has been much, much more, moved much more to the left

than anybody expected, I think, including Biden. And that's in terms of this huge sort of infrastructure budget. They're basically going to go around and build, like, new railways and repair all the bridges and stuff like that, like to a huge extent, basically, really, really massive. And they've also, like, one of the most significant things is that the moment they're trying to push through, and Biden's really trying to push through the Pro Act,

which is that protect the right to organise Act. If you want to see how diametrically opposed that is to what's going on in the UK at the moment, which is basically to make union organising easier. Biden sort of came out when there was a recent vote at the best of the plant in Amazon about whether to unionise. Biden came out and said, you know, people should unionise at Amazon.

This is such a huge change from what went before from Obama and all these sorts of things. And there's this general recognition that the bargaining power of labour needs to be strengthened. And the only way you can do that is by making unionisation easier. This is just complete, like a real, real intellectual revolution. There was an article by Adam 2's analysing Paul Krugman, who's like this, what you might call a court economist, basically.

And Krugman was like a, you know, real ideologue in the 1990s, real ideologue for neoliberal globalization. He's just moved to this position where he just says, look, we have to recognize that classes exist, that class conflict is what drives society, right? You know, it's just this huge, huge shift seems to be happening. How that plays out, we don't know. You can just say this, that the sort of form of analysis of the left, the form of analysis and some of the policy prescriptions are the things that are driving the direction of travel

in the US. And then that's influenced into things such as the OECD, and they're saying that we need a minimum level of corporation tax. In America, they're going to raise corporation tax. The complete opposite direction of everything that's gone before for the last 40 years. There's something going on, basically. And the Labour right are the ones who controlling the Stama leadership. They're going to be the last ones to notice, basically. I mean, absolutely. I think the funny thing about when you said the bill, I didn't know about the building of bridges and infrastructure. Any Egyptian president will tell you, you cannot consolidate power without building a few bridges. And that literally means

building some bridges, which is what they all do when they come to power. But I think the interesting thing is that I feel like we're living in a very myopic time in the UK. And I mean from everyone's perspective, and I wouldn't be surprised that things are changing in the US, but the way that we relate to power here being very stagnant, that's what there's, yeah, I don't really fully understand the conditions that we're living at the moment here. Well, I would recommend everyone go read

like the 40,000 words I wrote on Open Democracy last year if they want to understand the conditions we're living in here. It's laid out in painstaking detail. Can't you just read it out to us? No. I can do an audio, audio book. Yeah, audio book with tapping and your daughter's

in the background, eating sweet, please. For the full effect. Whoa, that's pretty far out.