Is the current war of words between the anti-immigrant, Hitler-worshipping fascists of the BNP and culture-hopping pop vocalist Lily Allen a silly season special? Well no, it in reality cuts ripe to the heart of the superlative threat facing rock'n'roll: the generation that kicked it off is getting old and pop its clogs. And unless Western culture gets a massive inflow of fresh young blood soon, our music is going to get old and die with them (along with the entire economy).
According to a series of reports, the world as we know it is about to come bloody to a halt because white Americans will be a minority by 2042. And a European birth rate in terminal wane means that pretty before long there'll be nobody around to rub the bottoms or pay the pensions of the rapidly retiring baby boomers. Plus, some daffy think tank in the UK says all northerners should go to Slough because northern cities are beyond revival meeting.
So, to recap: Our formerly industrial cities are in heroic need of fresh origin. We aren't having enough babies, and the counter culture spawned in the 1950s and 60s and the medicine most associated with it is cough its lungs up (spell muttering bitterly about how you never hear an English accent in Knightsbridge anymore) in Spanish retreat villas, old folks homes, indie blogs, dad-rock mags and other urine-reeking bolt-holes where the living dead gather to conspire against the young. It's this last fact that should particularly terrify those of us world Health Organization like our popular culture loud, vivacious, dynamic, radical and noisy.
Because here's the thing - the baby boomer population spike that spawned rock'n'roll is about to start gasping its last-place but won't actually be dead for (medicinal-pot-and-Viagra-sustained) decades. Which means we grimace a cultural zombie scenario where the desires and energy and instinctive radicalism, anti-racism and multiculturalism of the whitney Moore Young Jr. are swept aside by the need to provide to the festering white conservative walking-dead baby boomer biomass.
Meanwhile, the developing creation is bursting at the seams with babies, toddlers and teenagers, many of whom would love to come to the West but can't because of bizarre racist immigration policies and the absurd and morally and intellectually indefensible (not to mention anti-democratic and anti-free enterprise) notion that workers shouldn't be allowed to live anywhere in the world they damn easily please.
The solution is obvious. The West needs immigration like the deserts indigence the pelting. To rung off ethnic brain death and save rock'n'roll we must throw open the floodgates of immigration. By doing so, the young will at one time again outnumber the most dead - totally renewing music and providing "us" with a new generation of both avant garde artists and audiences for avant garde art. Music in especial would receive the dizzying and elating rush of input from dozens of other cultures, hopefully drowning out the dull, self-satisfied, self-referential, post-Smiths indie/hipster monoculture once and for all.
As an added fillip, an entire generation of developing world youth would be removed from the cockpit of religious fundamentalism (presuming they don't make the repulsive mistake of moving to the American bible belt) and would be uncovered to the irresistible distractions of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. They would be won all over forever to the light-colored side of the personnel (the nirvana, liberalism, atheism, sexual tolerance, punk rock, disco dance, ice thrash, real ale, books, pup dogs and all that good stuff).
That's why I am so looking frontwards to a browner, more polyglot rock music Britain. It's a add up win/win situation. Or it will be if "we" can curtail our racism.
Published last workweek was a New York Times interview with British playwright Hanif Kureishi. The first paragraph referenced Kureishi's 1997 film, My Son the Fanatic.
Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver, watches his increasingly devout college-age word Farid betray his electric guitar. "Where is that going?" Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. "You used to love qualification a horrific noise with these instruments!" Farid looks at his father with irritation. "You always aforesaid there were more important things than Stairway to Heaven,' he says in his thick northern English accent. "You couldn't have been more than right."
I actually saw that happen to the British-Pakistani kids I was at school with. Two brothers in particular. They furious their Tory-Muslim dad by embracing punk rock and sexual liberation and liberal politics and one of them went on to turn an internationally famous careen musician. Then, like so many of their generation, they both (to variable degrees) embraced Islam and conservatism. Talk to either gloriously Bradford-accented brother and the conversation soon turns to their bitterness virtually decades of spirit-crushing racism. The senior brother lost count of the multiplication he sawing machine faces fall when he entered a job interview room.
We had them and we lost them. And tens of thousands like them. We can't afford to screw up like that again. Because without mass immigration "our" culture dies and our music dies with it.
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