Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender by Jones Rhian E

Author:Jones, Rhian E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780997070
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2013-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Good taste is death, vulgarity is life: Shampoo and Kenickie

‘To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being- as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre... The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement.’

– Susan Sontag , ‘Notes on Camp’, 1964

‘If anyone’s manufacturing us, it’s ourselves. We knew what we wanted and set out to meet the people who could help us create it – a raw punky glamorous band.’

– Jacqui Blake (Shampoo)[35]

Achieving the ‘correct’ kind of femininity has never been easy for women in the public eye, and their presentation is further complicated by issues of class. Kenickie, a 90s pop-aspirational indie band with wit, swagger and style to spare, were on one level examples of Delingpole’s ‘pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers’ too. Both they and Shampoo, a mock-delinquent duo from the London suburb of Plumstead, seemed more fully their own created cartoon, more at home in their proto-‘chav’ drag, than Jessie J or Lily Allen later appeared. Contemporary interviews often found half-baffled, half-seduced middle-class male journalists in awe of the bands’ offstage inhabiting of their onstage personae: rather than stereotypes of exoticised others, they were opting to play the pantomime versions of themselves. Both Shampoo and Kenickie were grounded in appreciation of the Manic Street Preachers’ escapist proletarian-glam aesthetic, both were able to articulate the experiences of suburban or provincial girls in fearless, loving awe of what the city and the future had to offer, and both embodied one music writer ’s identification of ‘that terrifying stage where teenage girls are half-human, half-rat’.[36]

Shampoo, remembered mostly for the bubblegum-punk perfection of their third single Trouble, were snottily disdainful of anyone over twenty-one and of anyone ‘still hanging out in Camden Town’. Jacqui Blake and Carrie Askew (their individual names seemed secondary to the impenetrable united front they presented) were informed by protective self-parody rather than stereotype, pouting and glowering in clashing styles and colours, a kitsch riot of fluorescent wigs, peroxide, high ponytails, dark sunglasses, animal print and glitter. Their songs were equally cartoonish, an escapist anatomy of the inane and mundane, staying out all night and staggering home at dawn to face the music, ‘running wild in the city’ and, in a line of splendidly evocative economy, ‘throwing up your kebab in a shiny taxi cab’. Hyper and combative where Elastica were laid-back, Shampoo’s music and image nevertheless evinced a similar kind of unimpressed and half-amused self-possession, offering no entry point for the vulnerability of sentiment or idealism. Their defensive, misfit outsiderdom lent itself to laconic lyrical viciousness: on Dirty Old Love Song they casually skewered the very clichés which teenage girls were meant to swallow whole, and Skinny White Thing derided proto-hipster culture with all the bored, bitchy observational accuracy of the playground and the small-town shopping centre sharpened into cutting critique.

‘Girl power ’, before that term’s hijacking by the Spice Girls, had featured in the work

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