Previously in Culture and Civilisations…

1759 Voltaire’s Candide

1762 Rousseau’s The Social Contract
1763 Treaty of Paris
1776 Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
1776 American Declaration of Independence
1780 Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism
1789 The French Revolution
1848 Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto
1859 Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species
1861 John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism
1880s European large scale colonisation of African continent
From modern to contemporary times:
Predictions on capitalism
Adam Smith
The wealth of nations would not reach the great body of the people

Karl Marx
Capitalism would growth and liberate people

John Stuart Mill

Free market is but a primitive stage of human development
1870s: From classical political economy to
neoclassical economics
Classical political economics
First years of Industrial revolution
Amelioration of poverty → more production
Landowners, workers, capitalist entrepreneurs → exchanged commodities
Value to women’s labour at home → a missed opportunity
Social and cultural values → work, cooperation, abstinence

Neoclassical economics
From industrial production to high mass consumption
Relative scarcity → multiple consumer choice
Middle class → dominant
More production → more consumption → new values
Social and cultural values → leisure, privacy, subjectivity and choice
 Fin de siècle economic man
“Scarcity became the dominant feature of economic man’s environment. Only multiple
consumer choice made people aware of relative scarcity. In the course of discussion of
economic man, initially defined in relation to production, a new kind of man was
created: one who was civilized by virtue of his technology and whose advanced stage of
development was signified by the boundlessness of his desires. He must choose from a
universe of goods on display, and his status, his level of civilization (his “tastes”), were
revealed by his choices or preferences. Interpersonal comparisons of utility were deemed
unquantifiable, unformalizable, and therefore unscientific, and economists focused their
attention on the “marginal” utility of an addition or subtraction of a good to an individual
consumer. The terms are the terms of twentieth-century economics – rational choice,
revealed preference – and so are the methods: methodological individualism, subjectivism,
behaviourism.

(Wilde and the Victorians, Regenia Gagnier)

Britpop
The rise and fall of
British popular music
 1960s and 1970s counterculture

• Western world, but first in English speaking countries

• “Popularisation” of the goods and evils of modern western society
• After war world II
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyCl3BdlICY cigarettes
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfuMhXcLa-Q Mad Men
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0e8mfHzAjQ “Millions of him”
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc7y8xs6QXw&list=PLQnqU_EDM5QRchfn51v4WM
QXqT5e9Pm83&index=2
“we´re all doomed”
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYYRH4apXDo Space Oddity (1969)
• https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190716-how-david-bowie-was-banned-during-the-m
oon-landing
Ground Control to Major Tom Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
Ground Control to Major Tom I'm feeling very still
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Ground Control to Major Tom (ten, nine, eight, seven, Tell my wife I love her very much she knows
six) Ground Control to Major Tom
Commencing countdown, engines on (five, four, three) Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Check ignition and may God's love be with you (two, Can you hear me, Major Tom?
one, liftoff) Can you hear me, Major Tom?
This is Ground Control to Major Tom Can you hear me, Major Tom?
You've really made the grade Can you "Here am I floating 'round my tin can
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear Far above the moon
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare Planet Earth is blue
"This is Major Tom to Ground Control And there's nothing I can do"
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world Space Oddity
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do
 Bob Dylan
Pop music and counterculture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwgrjjIMXA

John Lennon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ72bYyEtBg
Bob Dylan Blowin’ in the wind
• Inspired by the film On the Beach
• Introduced poetry and “social” issues into popular music
• Questioned the establishment

“Calculatedly heritage ... the campfire harmonica, the old settler’s voice, the
anachronistic imagery (when did these ‘cannon balls’ pose a threat - 1815?).
The music plays its part - the return to the fifth note of the scale over the
tonic major chord at end of lines 1 and 3 giving a plain, folksy feel. The
placing of "The Answer ..." on the fourth note brings a real and sudden
pathos to each refrain.”
Dominic King
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/songlibrary/indepth/blowin.shtml

John Lennon Imagine
Yoko Ono:
“We had a tiny studio at home”
“At the time he wrote ‘Imagine’,
John and Yoko were ensconced in a
massive 18th century, seven-bedroom
mansion set amidst a vast 70-acre
estate near Ascot ... The album,
featuring that famous white piano,
was recorded in the old chapel at
Tittenhurst Park but Lennon - who
was about to get really,
preposterously, political - boasted of
the title track: “it is anti-religious,
anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional,
anti-capitalistic… but because it is
sugar-coated, it is accepted.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/so
nglibrary/indepth/imagine.shtml
 The British invasion
─Pivotal precedents of pop and rock
─American vs. British popular music
─“Anyone can play”
• Liverpool
• Greater London
• Manchester
• Newcastle
• Belfast

• https://www.alamy.es/imagenes/skiffle.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuuOAA9ekbg
&list=PLF25535B221E2E8A3
skiffle
 The British invasion

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvIg9HwUs7
s
beatles

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXVBC5oAaD
c
beatles

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azZZZbSwLQ
g
2012

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQR-JBkw8N
A

• https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-w
ho-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-
 1964-67
“London: The Swinging City”
Time magazine 15 April 1966

• Great Britain:
“You can walk across it on the grass”
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,835349,00.html

• London:
“The place to be seen”
─Loves-in
─Popular protests
─Carnaby street
◦ “Flower power” vs. “fashion power”?
Aristocracy and imperial power vs.
“power to the people”
• Televised Royal Command Performance in November 1963:
“Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands, and the rest of
you [looking at the Queen and her entourage] … just rattle your jewellery”
(John Lennon)

Variety Club Silver Heart Award by Labour Prime Minister Harold

Wilson:
“Thanks for the purple heart – sorry silver heart!”
“good old Mr Wilson should have one” (John Lennon and Ringo Starr)
Elton John at the Troubadour, 1970
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_n4yd4KkpI
• https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-elton-john-t
roubadour-rocketman-20190523-story.html
Sources and further reading
• Gagnier, Regenia. Wilde and the Victorians, The Cambridge
Companion to Oscar Wilde, Raby, Peter (ed.).
• Whiteley, Sheila. British popular music, popular culture and exclusivity.
The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture, Michael
Higgins, Clarissa Smith, John Storey (eds.).