Roger Scruton is a name Charles Dickens might have invented to describe some not altogether sympathetic character - an intolerant old vicar perhaps. There is little doubt that the real Roger Scruton is a bit of a character himself: whether you find him sympathetic or not will depend greatly on your politics. Scruton, once professor of aesthetics at London's Birkbeck College, is what might be called a right-wing academic with views on all manner of things, including pop music which, according to him, shows that there are new spiritual forces at work.
"We find ourselves," he says, "in a world of superstitions, ephemeral cults, fantasies and enthusiasms which spring from a lack of a common culture . . . " This is Scruton's beef throughout a book entitled The Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. In it, he contends, among other things, that this is "a world after faith", something which explains a youth culture that thrives on a particular type of pop music which he doesn't like. Typical of the type he has in mind are REM, The Prodigy, Oasis and Nirvana, purveyors of music which lyricises "the transgressive conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the days when disapproval was permitted". Behind it all, according to Scruton, is inarticulateness. The message of these groups, he says, is all to do with what they find impossible to say "words float free of grammar, and become flotsam on a sea of noise". To prove it, he quotes a few ungrammatical lines from the pens of Cobain and Gallagher. Back of the class boys! We can't have bad grammar in rock 'n' roll! In his chapter entitled "Yoofanasia", while correctly acknowledging that there is more than one type of "music of youth", he goes on to ignore whatever those other types of music might be. He wishes instead to concentrate his brain on the music which he sees as a protest against the inability to protest. There is, he says, a huge void at the centre of modern music and he knows exactly what is missing. Most evidently absent, according to him, is music itself: melody, harmony, rhythm etc. These ingredients he sees as "externalised", and he blames machines for much of it. He says they distort and amplify sounds and lift them out of the realm of human noise. Electric guitars are the sounds of machines singing. Techno music is the sound of the machine "as it discourses in the moral void". It's jawdropping stuff.
As for paying money and going to see any of these modern groups, Scruton has several things to say about fans and their heroes. The singer, he says, is projected as a force beyond the music and which visits the world in human form. The singer is a tribal totem and a real presence which is greeted by "a release of collective emotion comparable to the Dionysiac orgies depicted by Euripides". The music therefore, according to Scruton, who certainly sounds like he has been to some great gigs, has no other purpose apart from dramatising the performer's appearance or "recurrence" as he puts it. Certainly the dramatisation factor is correct to some degree of the more theatrical appearances of Bowie perhaps, but what he's forgetting is that most groups are just playing songs they wrote in their bedrooms; songs written, for better or worse, out of a genuine creative impulse.
But Scruton contends that modern pop fans aren't dealing in proper songs anyway. He insists that it's almost impossible to sing a typical pop song unaccompanied, and while that may be correct in some cases, I'm not entirely sure it's of any importance other than to aspiring soloists. Pop music has many functions and, these days, dancing is often the main one - whether Scruton or anybody else can dance to it is neither here nor there.
He nevertheless makes a distinction between the sort of modern performer he has in mind and other performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong whom, he says, we love for their music rather than the other way around, pointing out that theirs is a music that we can perform ourselves. He obviously hasn't heard me trying to sing Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered at half four in the morning.
What Scruton is also forgetting is that people enjoy different types of pop music in different ways. Pop music, after all, is attractive to young people for many reasons: it can provide a certain lyrical comfort; an inspiration to create for oneself; a sheer musical pleasure; an energetic release and also a basis of common interest among peers. Moreover, their parents probably don't like it. Certainly, at a certain age, pop music can fill a void, but it's a void which is very much a regular element of being a adolescent. I remember that I wanted to be like Phil Lynott and the reason was simple enough. He was a lot cooler than me. The particular void I was in was one of spots and no girlfriends and so, of course, I wanted to be in Phil Lynott's gang. But I also liked the music and the energy and the spectacle, and now at 33, even with a girlfriend and fewer spots, I still do. Maybe things have changed, but I doubt they have changed that much. Liam Gallagher might not be as impressive a sight, to my mind, as Phil Lynott, but he's probably just as cool to today's teenagers and for the very same reasons.
Scruton reckons that young people wish to be relieved of their isolation and so they see the figure on stage as themselves and a kind of transfiguration takes place as he "fuses with the totem". It's also about "joining" a broader group, but becoming a member of this particular kind of tribe, according to him, need not involve any discipline or real effort unlike "armies, schools, scout troops, churches and charities". He believes that modern adolescents have no experience of membership because they exist in a protected world and have been spared "elementary" experiences - "in particular the experience of war". So take your pick young people - war or Oasis?
He also contends that the heroes of youth culture are no different in the end from you and me and that they are famous simply for being famous. This is quite wrong. Performers are not like you and me. They perform. They have talent and they are using it, they write songs, they sing and they play instruments. Some of them might not seem particularly talented to Scruton but they are not like you and me. For one thing they are on the stage and people have come along to see them. Why would anybody give real money to see somebody who is just like you or me?
Performers, be it Maria Callas or P.J. Harvey, are all people with special abilities and that's what makes them extraordinary. Certainly the idea of the totem is interesting. But even here Scruton draws a line, pointing out that the totem must be young, sexually attractive and possess the voice of youthful desire. And while he accepts that it has ever been thus, he contends that Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Cliff Richard all "grew up" and became "mellow, avuncular and religious". The modern pop star he says does not grow up but "grows sideways like Mick Jagger". If Scruton is asking me to make an informed choice and that choice is between Mick Jagger and Cliff Richard, I'm afraid there can be no debate.
The Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture by Roger Scruton is published by Duckworth at £12.95 in UK.