Anas’s Blog

I posted this little rant earlier this year on the excellent media-underground site’s forums, but as Allen is featuring rather heavily in all of the end of year Music polls I thought I’d repost it here (wiv some minor adjustments):

At the moment, in the UK, the latest and hottest young talent to be hyped up to high heaven is 20-year old chanteuse Lily Allen. Lauded by everyone from music journalists to middle-aged, middle class, cultural commentators writing for the broadsheets, the wayward (she’s especially forthcoming about her various cred-boosting drug exploits and likes to boast about having been expelled or suspended from school on several occasions), though not too wayward, sprog of loutish Welsh, England supporting, thespian and professional wanker, Keith Allen, is currently celebrating her second week at number one with a rather lovely little song called Smile. Having established her fan base through myspace (credit where it’s due she was one of the first to really exploit myspace in this way) Allen couldn’t be more sickeningly relevant, more contemporary, and so she’s found herself riding the crest of the zeitgeist just as The Streets and more recently the Arctic Monkeys have done.

In her publicity she likes to come across as smugly aloof, with the affected attitude of bemused detachment that’s so typical of self-absorbed teenagers nowadays. That is not entirely unsurprising: I mean it usually takes a few more years before the childhood conviction that the universe revolves around you and you alone begins to lose some of its grip and, of course for many people it never does. But amidst the predictable bombardment of Lily Allen hype and publicity from media sources eager to profit from Allen’s ascendancy, one thing that did genuinely shock and offend me was the promotional video she starred in for Smile.

Now I’m no prude I don’t usually get offended by things I seen on the TV, but I’ve really started to.

The video is a straightforward visual interpretation of the scenario that the lyrics of the song suggest. The song itself is, as far as I can make out, a celebration of the self-empowerment that comes from maintaining a cruel and dispassionate attitude toward unfaithful lovers — or something like that. In the video poor Lilly has been cheated on by her now ex-boyfriend who being a rather caddish sort then wants to compound the insult by trying to talk to Lily. Lily decides that for this act of betrayal her ex-beau deserves nothing less than to be mugged and beaten in the street, his apartment broken into and vandalised, his personal effects destroyed, so she sends her thuggish friends off to do just this. The kind of callous endorsement and celebration of casual violence that the video serves up left a really rotten taste in my mouth on first viewing; bear in mind that this isn’t just cartoonish Itchy and Scratchy type violence of a sort that would have been ever so slightly more forgivable — though not by much — but in terms of presentation far closer to a reconstruction on Crimewatch, set to a gentle reggae beat.

I know that kids these days have an especial fondness for initiating, then capturing casual acts of violence on their mobile phones, a practice which — as the perpetually hysterical media never tires of pointing out — is known as happy slapping, and that bullying is now far more endemic in schools than it has ever been, but surely it can’t have become this acceptable?

Now, as much as the reactionary in me wants it to, one poorly conceived ethically questionable pop promo does not a trend make, but taken in the context of a culture where violence has become trivialised in general the lack of fuss over the videos content is cause for concern. On the other hand, I suppose it’s not as simple as just condemning the video for wholeheartedly condoning violence because, for example I don’t think a male singer could have appeared in a video in which he presided over the beating of an unfaithful girlfriend. Not even a rapper would dare do that. As Robert Anton Wilson has pointed out violence against men initiated by women in the media is hardly even registered, whereas violence against women in any form is strictly taboo.

In other words the video seems to be saying, violence is OK, just as long as you can get away with it in the eyes of your peers.

Returning to the wider context, you have to ask why have we as a society become more tolerant, or you might say more passive, towards those who commit acts of aggression? I didn’t really have to think for long, the answer came to me at the press of an on-button. Like I said above, I’ve started to get more and more offended by things I see on the TV in a way I never used to, well the number one programme that really gets my blood boiling is the news.

The thing is that I never really used to watch the news before. I think for the longest while I just wasn’t interested in what was happening in the rest of the world; and then I went through a phase where I thought the mainstream news was all lies and I would gain nothing from watching it -– my attitude was one of blanket dismissal. But as I’ve grown up a bit, my attitude has become more nuanced and less nihilistic. Maybe it’s just that I’ve come to a greater realisation of what is at stake in the way events are framed especially when it comes to television news. Where you have such a limited amount of time to put a message across and a cynical attitude towards the attention span of your audience what matters is precisely how you truncate things, what you leave out. What can be at stake and what ultimately is at stake in the current situation is as Chomsky and Hermann point out the manufacturing of consent in a nominally democratic society where the flow of information is vital in order for an population to be able to make informed decisions.

So what kinds of message are the mainstream media (especially the BBC) giving out by following the party line and playing it safe by in effect presenting the official governmental spin and not challenging the assumptions behind it?

Reading between the lines it’s clear that the presentation of the news, especially of the current Iraq war, is telling us that if it’s in pursuit of a noble aim such as the promotion of democracy –- note that the term itself the victim of semantic drift to the point where it starts to become as meaningless in concrete situations as the terms ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘Christian’ etc — and the felling of tyranny, the number of civilian casualties that are likely to be incurred in pursuit of our noble and righteous aim is altogether irrelevant (the Europeans used to use the same excuses about the white man’s burden when they were busy at it 200 years ago ).

As long as they’re the right kind of civilian casualty, we can be responsible for, directly, or indirectly, the loss of countless numbers of lives. These lives are so meaningless that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not even incumbent on those responsible, i.e., us, to count the number lost as a direct result of our actions. The eminently avoidable suffering of the people may be very regrettable but it’s a burden that they have to continue to bear, if they’re ever to progress as a society into the kind of stable democracy that we in the West enjoy, whether they want it or not.

The thinking is along the lines of, if I have to beat you to a pulp to make you a better person then so be it. And if we take the example of the humanitarian disaster that’s gathering fast momentum as I type [the Israeli bombing of Lebanion], it’s clear that the concept of happy slapping can be applied not only to the playground but can take on international dimensions.

In fact the spectacle we’re currently preoccupied with is nothing more than that of Israel relentlessly happy slapping Lebanon as the rest of the world looks on with their camera phones out gawping in awe. We are all sitting back watching the plucky victim Israel bring about the destruction of the infrastructure of a whole country and murder hundreds of civilians basically because with the full complicity of Bush and his flaccid excuse for a hand puppet Blair, it has a free rein too, in other words because it can.

Ah, but make sure all the European citizens are out first, the people whose lives are actually worth something. The criteria by which most commentators given airtime are judging Israel’s current actions are first and foremost Israel’s security, the loss of hundreds of innocent lives has a dismal priority.

Some justifications I’ve heard delivered with a straight face and then unchallenged again with a straight face: the Palestinians send out suicide bombers, therefore their lives mean less to them, so we’re not really doing them a disservice by counting their lives for less, and emphasising the cost in Israeli lives, civilian or combatant (this from the mouth of cuddly British comedic institution Maureen Lipman); it’s the Lebanese civilians’ fault for being situated near Hezbollah positions, it’s inevitable, though “regrettable” that a lot of them will cop it.

Although it’s an imaginative leap beyond the grasp of most of the Oxbridge educated news reporters or editors, it’s interesting to consider what sort of hypothetical situation would justify similar loss of life if the victims weren’t terror-supporting Arabs but white western civilians — even if the justification with regards to the security of a terrorist state weren’t so spurious? One must realise that difference in treatment would be due to the fact that protecting these lives is an end in itself.

Like any good bully Israel cannot and indeed must not tolerate any challenges to its absolute authority, either everything is carried out on its own terms or on no terms at all. It doesn’t matter that in the US/UK sanctioned Israeli acts of terror in Lebanon we have the equivalent of the Madrid bombings or 7/7 occurring everyday or that Britain itself seemed to get through the troubles in Ulster without feeling the need to flatten Dublin.

India recently had its worst single terrorist attrocities in around a decade, with civilian deaths of up over 200 in Mumbai. They had every reason to suspect the terrorists had been aided by or at least had been given refuge in Pakistan. So why didn’t they pull an Israel on the Pakistanis in retribution for harbouring the perpetrators of this murderous act of terrorism on Mumbai’s crowded commuter system?

Oh shit yeah, Pakistan’ve got nuclear weapons haven’t they?

So the moral that our leaders are endorsing on an international level is that it is completely acceptable to use of violence in order to make a point as long as you can get away with it, as long as the victim is toothless.

But that you can be so open about it exalting in your power to cause untold death and destruction, as Israeli spokesmen have been doing, that’s something really obscene. I guess being Israeli means never having to say you’re sorry.

I don’t know how directly we can attribute the cultural attitudes of which Lily Allen and happy slapping are but byproducts to the spinelessness of Tony Blair in the face of large-scale terrorism. But I know subconsciously at least, it must be a profound consolation to bullies, murderers and gangsters everywhere that their actions are mirrored on an international scale in full view of the world by two nations, really one(US) and its lame comedy sidekick, both of which it is claimed represent the highpoint of civilization and the moral triumph of freedom and democracy.

So can you really blame Lily Allen or indeed any gang of hooded teenage miscreants who take it into their heads film themselves randomly assaulting passerbys? Who holds the moral highground here, who has the authority to deliver the sermon on respect?