This article by no means represents the views of White Heath as a whole. You can probably find the ideas expressed in it articulated by better informed and more eloquent people. But, bless, it means well.
The news right now is focused strongly on the debate around the economic case for independence, as Alex Salmond begins the long game of political chess with the folk in London. But whilst the stress builds towards fiscal autonomy and indy-lite, I’d like to set out what I believe to be the core justification for separatism, which is the cultural question of the Scottish dichotomy; more importantly I’m going to argue what this means for us as pop musicians.
Being a small country tacked onto a large one has not created a particularly virile compost for Scotland’s culture to take root. Always reeling within the shadow of the vague and totalising concept of ‘Britishness’, as well as the nearby power of those many strong identities housed within ‘England’ (thought not, necessarily ‘Englishness’), poor auld Scotland has had a fair hard time coping. Whilst England’s London builds The Shard and embraces a new, dynamic identity comprised of it’s rainbow multiculturalism and futuristic optimism, Scotland’s Edinburgh continues to wallow in the wet muck of folk music and Burns night. By the way - did anyone see the editorial in the Scotsman the other day about modern architecture? Jesus! You see what I mean? They'd have us living in huts!
There’s a simple way of summing this up: it’s the difference between a ‘dynamic’ culture and an ‘essential’ culture. By always being the little brother in the Union, Scotland has been forced to define itself against ‘Britishness’, with the result that it has to opt out from, and indeed almost be seen to resist, the fast changing and often hugely exciting landscape of contemporary England. Our imaginations are plagued by the 'Haggis Culture’ which has been developed by our wish to, quite literally, ‘see ourselves as others see us’. That is, we have been quite happy to encourage the idea that we are the provincial backdrop of the UK: we have embraced debasing ideas as forms of resistance to larger powers in our struggle for identity. While Britishness and Englishness come to represent the greater conceits of Empire such as civilisation and progress, Scotland has taken up regressive ideas that debase our culture by making it something static and false. We are the pastoral feminine energy to England’s civilising imperial drive.
This is obviously changing, and Scotland is moving towards a national, cultural and political self-realisation that will culminate in Independence. These three factors are inseparable. There is a distinct connection between Dundee allowing the new V&A building and the election of Nationalist politicians. These are the signs of a country taking itself seriously for the first time.
As Scottish musicians (ie musicians living and working in Scotland) we have a responsibility to aid this changing climate for the better.
We must engage in dynamic ideas of national identity that refute the disgrace of ‘The Scotland Shop’ and ‘Ceildh Culture’. Any nation defined by it’s past is damned to remain there. We need to engage with our vibrant tradition of poetry and music through new, modern means: ones which succeed in taking age old ideas into a present context, and so re-invigorate them and bring them to life.
This is already happening. We just need to get on board.
James MacMillan is a composer who has brought this new, dynamic Scotland to the attention of the world stage. By engaging ancient Scottish musical tropes with the language of modernism, he has created a style of music which is as evocative of the sublime as it is the post-modern: you hear peaks of corrie crags alongside the confusion of cities and industry. Listen to this, one of his earlier pieces:
MacMillan fuses such ideas as Gaelic monody and folk ballad form with exciting new developments within the western classical tradition to create a picture of Scotland that is worthy of a brave new country. But perhaps the thing that makes MacMillan such an enormous presence is his refusal to limit himself to Scotland. True, it was ‘The Confession of Isobel Gowdie’ that made his name, but he is a composer that is equally at home in this re-energization of both plainchant and the drum solo:
What a guy. We can all learn a good deal from his dynamism. And though, as popular musicians, the luxury of the further reaches of his avant-garde experimentation are perhaps not afforded to us, we can still perhaps take inspiration from the way he has gone about finding his own art somewhere between the essential and the dynamic.
This has been a characteristic of the tradition of 20th century Scottish poetry also. Folk like MacDiarmid and Morgan are emblems of what we should strive for as artists struggling to reinvent our tradition in a fast changing and falsely homogenous world. MacDiarmid's idea that the Scots language hid a wild reserve of energy which could be harnessed into a modernizing literary force is a potent one: in his creation of a poetic 'synthetic Scots' he was able to transform the potential of the Scottish dialect to be something as shocking and innovative as the experiments of guys like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The important thing to learn from this is that when one's cultural heritage is in such dire straits, it is not enough to simply reference and pay homage to tradition: you've gotta smelt down and re-forge it anew.
As you can see, none of these are new ideas. It’s all there for you. It can be done. We need to find new approaches towards self-representation through bold experimentation. It’s not enough to just dress up folk music with modern instruments, which will no more cure our condition than the atrocities of bag rock. It’s happened in other genres. Let’s make it happen in rock and roll.
The first step to creating an intelligent and fair nation that one can be proud to be a member of, is to lay the cultural groundwork. Though perhaps this seems to be primarily the job of writers and architects, one should not underestimate the importance of the role of popular musicians. Ours is an art that can reach into every home and hook the repetitions of every radio device in the land. With the approach that asserts “I Can” rather than “They Did”, we can start the road to creating something that is totally fucking awesome.
ROCK AND ROLL
Al.
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