Idles v Fat White Family: what the indie showdown tells us about class
On the face of it, two British indie bands being locked in a war of words about class-consciousness might seem like egoistic farce. On deeper consideration – idly scrolling through Twitter, imbibing the day’s beefs and reading various blogposts – it was. But the rivalry that has emerged in recent months between London band Fat White Family and Bristol band Idles also struck me as being indicative of a wider conflict – one at the heart of electoral politics.
Earlier this year, Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi lent his voice in support of Sleaford Mods when the Nottingham duo accused Idles of working-class appropriation. Saoudi went on to elaborate in a Facebook post that “the last thing our increasingly puritanical culture needs right now is a bunch of self-neutering middle-class boobs telling us to be nice to immigrants; you might call that art, I call it sententious pedantry”.
Saoudi’s point might have held more sway had he simply stopped at “self-neutering middle-class boobs”: the implication that pro-immigrant sentiment shouldn’t be expressed loudly and wherever possible was troubling, particularly at a time when the home secretary is scoping out the possibility of transferring vulnerable migrants to the middle of the Atlantic ocean. That’s not to say that Idles aren’t guilty of working-class appropriation, however. The class analysis contained in their music is crass at best. Like Jess Phillips declaring herself a scullery maid in the House of Commons, it’s facile, reductive, but worst of all, it aestheticises an issue that is structural, and can only be addressed by more people becoming aware of its structural mechanisms.
In Never Fight a Man with a Perm, lead singer Joe Talbot ostensibly takes aim at a “heathen from Eton”, but the execution doesn’t quite stack up. In his exaggerated accent he sings: “You are a Topshop tyrant / Even your haircut’s violent / You look like you’re from Love Island / He stood and the room went silent.” Not only do Idles get the characterisation of Eton graduates wrong (try Abercrombie or J Crew), it’s also the kind of thing I might have scrawled across my GCSE art coursework, a sentiment rife with subtle prejudice: a smug upstart ridiculing people for a perceived lack of cultural capital.
Then there’s Danny Nedelko, an admirable effort to inject the pantheon of indie anthems with an explicitly antiracist message. It opens with the lines: “My blood brother is an immigrant / A beautiful immigrant.” It ends with the lines: “He’s made of bones, he’s made of blood / He’s made of flesh, he’s made of love / He’s made of you, he’s made of me / Unity.” The spirit, I’m fully on board with. The nursery rhyme lyrics reducing a man to a sack of bones and blood? Not so much.
I get that Idles are trying to use the idiom of disenfranchised masculinity to peddle a more progressive message. Fine. The problem is that the execution is so cartoonish that, if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect the involvement of the Home Office: Idles forming part of a new Prevent scheme to tackle far-right radicalism among young white men. Assuming this isn’t the case, and Idles are a band operating entirely under their own steam, then noble intentions alone can’t put their ham-fisted politics beyond reproach.
Fat White Family at least seem aware of their own anachronism. Consciously presenting as a band out of time, they navigate a quagmire of class discourse, sexuality and mental ill-health and draw some fairly nihilistic conclusions. As a generation of overly self-aware authors such as Ben Lerner and Ottessa Moshfegh have suggested, perhaps the only way to successfully navigate your place in a system of oppression is by owning your dirtbag credentials. But is this anything more than a third way out of confronting difficult home truths? To answer that question would require a whole other essay.
What’s interesting to me is that despite their differences, both bands consider themselves to be of the left. Fat White Family’s 2019 album Serfs Up! ruminates on the middle-class trappings sold to us by the ideology of social mobility. Tastes Good With the Money is particularly resonant for its wit and catchiness, and features an incisive interlude from guest vocalist Baxter Dury: “Gotta fathom your own legacy / Slimming shakes / Bathing on the right side of surprises / And a big mushroom cloud/ For the middle classes / Leaves a beautiful shape / For you to project your fears on to.” Show me a funnier and more withering summation of the red scare and status anxiety that defines today’s centrist factions.
It offers a more material reading than Idles are able to offer, whose music, by contrast, often attacks the perceived bigotry of the Tory-voting masses. To put it crudely, if Fat White Family’s music hinges on the “haves versus the have-nots”; then the latter hinges on the “towns versus cities” debate. Idles’ Model Village even contains the lines: “There’s a tabloid frenzy in the village / ‘He’s not a racist, but’, in the village.”
I have a strong aversion to reducing whole communities to one large racist lump. But Saoudi’s own diagnosis hardly avoids the same mistake. His recent blogpost (the second, after the initial Facebook post and a retaliatory interview from Idles, if you weren’t following), elaborates his thinking:
In writing about incidents of racial abuse that took place during his childhood spent in the small town of Cookstown, Northern Ireland, Saoudi is generous to apply this rationale. But there can be no socioeconomic justifications for racism. Not only because it harms non-white people when we permit it, but also because it harms the people falsely attributed to a nondemographic coined by the right and perpetually scapegoated for the country’s ills. There is no such thing as “the white working class”. The working class in this country has always been composed of people of all races.
Arguably more fundamental is the mistake we make in assuming that racism is the inevitable expression of financial insecurity and disenfranchisement. Owen Jones himself claimed in Chavs, a book I greatly admire,that “the rise of the far right is a reaction to the marginalisation of working-class people”. But this reading, which we hear time and time again, overlooks the intimate, historic connections between racism and social mobility. It’s not that I don’t believe inequality has played some role in the rise of farright nationalism, but that I think it is far better characterised as the incensed outcry of an entitled mindset that sees itself as being superior to others.
Lynsey Hanley’s Respectable, her standout work on the experience of class and social mobility, is clear about something I have witnessed first hand: the “warped equation of respectability with racism”. Growing up in a workingclass area of south Birmingham, it was the friends’ parents who were low-level management staff, or the housewives with grand ideas about bettering themselves – rather than their manual labouring husbands who worked among Jamaican and Pakistani men – who were most likely to express egregious views towards their non-white neighbours. Individualism coinciding with the residual influence of empire created a cultural climate in which the country’s aspirant classes depended on the belief of a second-class citizen. It is their descendants, I believe, who drive the far right of today.
It touches on one of the more complex and stubborn aspects of inequality – that few of us actually identify with the class to which we belong and are therefore loath to be dictated to on how to vote – and speaks of an enormous oversight on the part of the media when individuals such as Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) pass as a symbol of the disadvantaged. When I look at photos of far-right marches and see men wearing Stone Island and Fred Perry, I don’t see the deprived, downtrodden people reduced to humiliation by abject poverty, but the bullyboys of my childhood, no different in their sense of entitlement to the ones from Eton that I encountered years later, whose delicate egos were scared by the growing consensus that they might no longer dominate the local scene. Yaxley-Lennon’s trajectory, as a graduate of an engineering apprenticeship from a working-class background, is no different to most lower-middle class people in Britain.
Circling back on the subject of electoral politics, while thinking about all of this I was reminded of a conversation I had with a former political adviser not long after Labour’s defeat last December. I was looking for answers as to how the left might successfully land the message that extractive capitalism is bad with people living in former industrial heartlands that had pivoted to the right. Perhaps it was a naive line of questioning. The strategy should be no longer to bother, he said, to abandon the Red Wall and double down on efforts to recruit more people from university towns, following Labour’s relative success in places like London, but also Liverpool and Bristol. I have several misgivings about this approach, not least because that demographic alone still doesn’t constitute a majority, but also because it abandons the party’s essential reason for existing.
It brings us back to the feud between the two bands: Idles peddling the idea that everyone outside of a university campus is a presumed racist and bigot; Fat White Family saying that while that might be true, it can be justified or at least explained along lines of economic degradation. The former leads to the kind of thinking that justifies abandoning former industrial heartlands, and the latter the current message of progressive patriotism being peddled by the current Labour party leadership. Neither side is right. Racism can’t be explained along straightforward lines of class or geography and has far more to do with the residual effects of empire as they intersect with an insidious culture of individualism, social mobility and keeping up with the Joneses than either of these fatuous arguments are able to grasp. It is inhumane to reduce millions of people to feckless byproducts of inequality, and does a huge disservice to the vast majority who remain generous, open and kind.
While the debate has evolved past the lurid, caricatured terms of Blur v Oasis, indie fandoms are still no path to enlightenment. The white, male guitar band has fallen out of favour since the mid-noughties and for good reason – though to Idles’ and Fat White Family’s credit, both are bringing a collectivist spirit to pop music that’s been absent for several decades. And they’re not alone. Richard Dawson’s album 2020 was a requiem for the northern working-class communities decimated by Tory rule. Burna Boy’s Twice As Tall, released in August, was a clarion call for members of the African diaspora to unite and rise up. Nadine Shah’s music often sounds like a direct instruction to those facing racist persecution in their communities.
In Respectable, Hanley cites the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant in 2011 lamenting pop and rock’s turn towards individualism: “We’ve lost the sense of the communal that pop used to express,” he says. “The shared experiences. Instead, pop music is wrapped up in itself – about Me, not about Us, which is the way it should be.” If indie bands of the noughties were lamentable in their mawkish, self-aggrandising sentimentality, then both Fat White Family and Idles should be recognised for their efforts to connect to something bigger. Pop may well be political again; the question now is how it gets it right.
• This article was amended on 14 October 2020 to clarify that Baxter Dury performs the lyrics cited from Fat White Family’s Tastes Good With the Money.