FROM THE ARCHIVES:Columnist John Waters bemoaned the loss of a media counter-culture. – JOE JOYCE
AT THE start of the 1980s, Paul Morley, the brilliant young British pop writer, came to Dublin to write about U2. Morley was enthused by U2, but rather less taken with the country from which they had emerged, a country whose “musical artificiality and stagnant stupidity drably undermine the development of its youth”.
Anyone of my generation reading his New Musical Expressarticle would have thought it an unexceptional summary of the state of the cultural climate in which we resided. How sobering, then, to reflect that Morley had descended into what in retrospect reveals itself as the golden age of Irish pop culture. This was as good as it was going to get.
What’s at stake goes beyond fashion or youthism, to the core of cultural determination. In those days, the mantras “Our young people are our greatest national asset” and “Do you realise that half our population is under 25?” tripped from the lips of every politician who knew the score. The alleged recovery of the Lemass years had created a society with all the appearances of west European normality. The Sixties had arrived 10 years late, but we were fast catching up.
Back then, Ireland actually had, for example, an alternative media to speak of. There was Hot Press, In Dublin, Hiberniaand Magillwhich, in their different ways, provided not just an alternative perspective on Irish society, but a different way of describing it. This minor print revolution was matched by the growth of a broader culture, centred on music. Pirate radio stations had already shaken up Irish broadcasting, providing an anarchic backbeat to the emerging counter-culture.
Over the past decade, practically all of this has evaporated. The Irish media have narrowed in scope and style to a slim mainstream providing a distorted and miserly version of this society and its possibilities. Despite the increasing number of stations, radio is worse now than a decade ago.
The national newspapers, meanwhile, have relinquished any radicalising or even questioning ambitions except in a couple of limited areas, and seem content to fight for circulation on the basis of gossip, sensation and celebrity-watching. The agenda of almost all media is conservative to a frightening degree.
This is due in large part to the premature death of the counter-culture, whose influence on the mainstream media was far greater than its direct influence in the wider society. Hiberniaand Magillhave disappeared, and In Dublinhas gone back to being a listings magazine.
While it is true that many superficial aspects of the Magill/ In Dublinapproach have since been adopted in a neutered manner in the mainstream press, and that many of the writers from the fringe media now work in the mainstream, this merely fuels the climate of complacency. The lack of an alternative sensibility has added to the sense that this is no longer a country for young women or young men.
http://url.ie/dbj3