Culture Shock Donald ClarkeThe ghastly Concert for Diana showed just how much rock has become part of the establishment
Some unkind folk have suggested that most music fans attending the Concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium last Sunday cared little for the dead princess. Can this really be so? Surely only those fanatically devoted to the Spencer girl would put themselves in the way of the dismal noises that habitually emerge from the likes of Duran Duran and Status Quo. The ghastly affair came across like a collective act of penance demanded by a particularly cruel deity.
The performances were drab, predictable and, most significantly, eminently respectable. If the event had any real cultural significance it was as a final, emphatic assertion that the musical genres forged in the 1960s - rock and her bastards - have now become irrevocably absorbed into the mainstream.
Rock stars invariably describe their decision to take up a career in music as an act of rebellion. How rebellious is it to warble middle-of-the-road tunes to an audience composed of chinless Anglo-German aristocrats and nice families spending a rare Sunday away from the garden centre? Sid Vicious did not die for this.
Mind you, one could argue that rock ceased to be an outsider art in 1965, when The Beatles accepted their MBEs from the queen, having been nominated by the Labour government. It is, however, worth considering the tumultuous outrage that greeted that award. One distinguished military veteran, after returning his own medal in protest, suggested that Harold Wilson's gesture constituted "bizarre effrontery to our wartime efforts".
Readers whose parents were born after 1945 (or so) will, most likely, have little understanding of the galloping nausea that popular music once induced in older listeners. The outraged father screwing up his eyes at Top of the Pops while wondering aloud if the singer was "a man or a woman" has become an established comic stereotype. But there is no doubt that the vista of David Bowie wearing more make-up than Princess Margaret did genuinely cause many to fear for the survival of civilised society.
That said, the consensus in establishment circles was that the music played by the likes of The Rolling Stones and The Kinks was a passing fad. Within a few years, order would be restored and the young would go back to listening to Mantovani's glutinous strings and the austere lieder of Robert Schumann.
Throughout the 1970s, television was remarkably hostile to the new music. On the BBC you could catch T.Rex on Top of the Pops or the Alan Parsons Project on The Old Grey Whistle Test, but the leading light entertainment shows would be as likely to feature live human sacrifice as contemporary pop groups.
In this country, the key skirmish in the Great Rock Wars came in 1977, when Bob Geldof made his first appearance on the Late Late Show. Newspapers were deluged with letters complaining about Bob's prominently displayed underarm hair and his burning anger against all corners of the establishment. More significant, however, was the general astonishment that the lead singer of a rock group could construct sentences of more than three words. One could detect a genuine sense of unease in these missives. To this point, the enemies of rock music had consoled themselves with the knowledge that the new musicians - Neanderthals to a man - ate their own young and communicated through grunts and acts of violence. If, however, functioning brains lurked within the terrifying haircuts then these slope-headed sociopaths may not, after all, be destined for extinction. Meanwhile, younger viewers, taking note of their parents' bewilderment, dared to believe that the war had just turned in their favour.
Sure enough, as the generation that had grown up on The Beatles and the Stones moved into positions of power, it became clear that, unlike ragtime or boogie woogie, rock music was not going to loosen its grip on the young.
The clash of sensibilities, begun when father and son took differing positions on the acceptability of Marc Bolan's corkscrew perm, had, it seems, resulted in a triumph for the pop phalanx.
Yet, as events on last weekend confirmed, victory has come at a cost. It is, of course, true that the Diana tribute concert featured a particularly conservative array of performers. A few bracing numbers by the Vomiting Bananas or Desecrate My Filth Tube might have gone some way towards shaking the audience out of their stewed complacency. But the simple act of being a rock performer no longer has any power to spread unease among the upper echelons.
How could it? Grinning middle-aged musicians - undeniable good eggs such as Patti Smith among them - willingly confirm their membership of an establishment by allowing themselves to be inducted into the revolting Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Tony Blair carries a guitar into (and, more recently, out of) Downing Street. Paul McCartney upgrades his MBE to a knighthood.
"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Johnny Rotten famously asked a Californian audience in 1978. Last year, The Sex Pistols, Johnny's incendiary band, turned down an invitation to join the Hall of Fame. They were inducted anyway.
dclarke@irish-times.ie
Fintan O'Toole is on leave