27 research outputs found
Observing America: what mass-observation reveals about British views of the USA
Since its foundation in 1937, the social research organisation Mass-Observation has systematically documented the opinions of a British public experiencing profound societal change. This includes the most extensive data available on grassroots attitudes towards the USA, from the outbreak of the Second World War to the final phase of the Cold War. Most of the scholarship on Anglo-American relations focuses on the political and diplomatic elites of Britain and the USA. The extent to which their interaction reflected and reinforced public opinion is seldom considered. This article uses the Mass-Observation archive to situate elite interaction within the broader context of public opinion. In so doing, it assesses the extent to which British political leaders have in their dealings with the USA represented the views of the electorate they serve
Class, Youth and Dirty Jobs: The Working-Class and Post-War Britain in Pete Townshend's Quadrophenia
FOS
The Drowning Machine:the sea and the scooter in Quadrophenia
This essay will argue that Mod masculinity is a late re-articulation of the clean, healthy, hygienic male body and subjectivity proposed by some variants of European Modernism â in particular Futurism â bearing in mind Peter Meadonâs definition of âMod-ismâ as âclean living under difficult circumstancesâ (quoted on the back of the film soundtrack double album). The shape of the Vespa â its streamlined and chromed body echoing the emphases of the aviation- and maritime-inflected architectural Modernism of significant buildings of the British seaside, from the de la Warr Pavilion to Morecambeâs Midland Hotel â is a symbol of Mod-ismâs connection to a vision of the future that offered a radical break from the British past. The paper will analyse the scooter as an emblem of a new mobility and promised re-configuration of society away from traditional class structures and towards new modes of sociality and individuation, from youth sub-cultures and Pop music to the development of the new universities in 1964/5. It will also be analysed in terms of symbolising the male body, which, in Mod, was both on display and encased in a kind of fashionable armour: suits, boots, and the Parka. This essay will then develop a counter-reading of Quadrophenia through the image of the drowned scooter on the back cover of The Whoâs 1973 album. Quadrophenia, it will be argued, inherits 1960s impulses towards individuation and difference (not wanting to be part of the âmassâ or conforming to conventional desires and behaviours) while also exhibiting anxieties surrounding that individuation (loss of ties to family, isolation, psychological breakdown). This is most strikingly presented in âCut My Hairâ: âWhy do I have to be different to them/ Just to earn the respect of a dancehall friend [...] Why do I have to move with a crowd/ Of kids that hardly notice Iâm aroundâ. The âneither/norâ imperative of the narrative of Quadrophenia â ambiguously resolved in the image of drowning â manifests the possibility of suicide/annihilation as a means to escape this dilemma, but ultimately turns away from death (the sea), as Jimmy also appears to do at the beginning of the film of Quadrophenia, though this is more ambiguously presented in the photo-booklet in the album. This paper will read Quadrophenia not as a narrative of maturation, but one in which two counterposing imperatives â represented by the sea and the scooter â come together in the image of the drowning machine. Reading through Klaus Theweleitâs pioneering work on masculinities in Weimar Germany, the mirrors and chrome side-pods of Jimmyâs Vespa GS, it will be argued, signify a form of âarmouredâ masculinity (also echoed in the âwartime coatâ, the US Army parka) that defends the masculine subject against the pressures (and pleasures) of de-individuation, of the mass. In Theweleitâs reading of the journals and writings of proto-Fascist Freikorps veterans, the armoured body â clean, pure, armoured, machinic â is the Fascist body, an idealized masculinity that opposes the flux of the âred floodâ: both femininity and Communism â connects together modernity, Modernism and Mod, but the drowning machine, and Jimmy himself, signify an irresolvable tension between the beckoning pleasures of the annihilating flood and deep anxiety about a loss of individuation