Sorry Nick but great pop music isn't a side effect of youth unemployment

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I suspect that Nick Cohen is somewhere in the same age group as I am, which means that the edgy and tough popular music of his youth was, without a doubt, fuelled in part by the willingness of some to layabout on the dole playing with guitars. But this statement from Nick isn't true:

If you want to know why British pop has lost its rough energy, you should blame the Department for Work and Pensions, not a plot by the record label executives. 

I know this because arguably the greatest age of British pop music wasn't in the 1970s but was in the first half of the 1960s (it pains me to say this as a teenager of the 1970s but it's true). Those bands and performers weren't created by kids on the dole but by kids at school or college - John Lennon set up The Quarrymen while still at school and Paul McCartney and George Harrison joined the band as a 15 year old and 14 year old respectively. The same story can be told for the Rolling Stones, for Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and a host of others - most were, in effect, professional musicians who made money from performing - not a great living but not the myth of 'kids on the dole making music'.

I'm sure there are examples of bands that started because the members could take dole money and muck about in dad's garage but mostly bands started because kids wanted to make music. If British pop has 'lost its rough energy' (and I'm not so sure it has, unless you deem the X-Factor manufactury as definitive of current pop) it's for reasons other than the availability of benefits. When those British bands that changed popular music in the 1960s started out there wasn't much in the way of unemployment - even in Liverpool. So it is odd that this myth persists - music is created by musicians and, much of the time, those musicians worked as musicians before getting famous.

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Myth...

We make a great deal of myth and myth-making. But only in condemnation, in the denial of myth.

Yet myth is more important than we think. It guides us more than we ever admit. And, it is that thing making us human, fallible and wrong:

I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

We dismiss myth at our peril, for there is truth in it. A deeper truth about ourselves maybe, a truth of longing, of desperation for something finer, but still a truth. By all means stir the air with contending facts, argue away about percentages of this and ratios of that. I will join you knowing, as you know too, that beneath it all lie our culture’s myths – the myths of trade, the legends of business and the stories of England.

To lose all this in some fit of argued rationality would be to lose something grand. It would be to lose the myths that define us, that tell us who we are:

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-pattened; and no earth,
unless the mother's womb whence all have birth.

The sense of wonderment that Tolkein captures here is intended -absolutely - as a defence of myth-making. Its says that without myth, our exploration ceases, the "truth" is settled and man dies.

So let's hear it for myth...

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