Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg

Author:Billy Bragg [Billy Bragg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571327768
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

While academics argue about who first came up with the term ‘Pop Art’, most recognise that Just What Is It … was the first work to crystallise the idea in the mind of the wider public. That such an Americanised art would emerge in post-war Britain should be no surprise. Artists working in the US sought to draw attention to everyday objects that most Americans would be familiar with, like Andy Warhol’s soup cans. For those who saw his work in New York galleries, Warhol’s gaudy screen prints of Marilyn Monroe merely underscored how Hollywood had come to represent America to the world. In post-war England, however, Marilyn was a seductive siren, threatening to lure British culture into shallow waters from which it might never escape.

Seen through British eyes in the summer of 1956, Just What Is It … promised a future that was full of exciting new gadgets and attractive people, yet the overall effect was a trashy aesthetic at odds with the cosy conformity which often passed for, if not happiness, then at least contentment in the British advertising that was the equivalent of Hamilton’s American source material. Our housewives were depicted as homely, while theirs looked inviting; our cars had matronly curves, while US autos displayed futuristic fins; and where our businesses stressed their traditional methods, corporate America seems to be not only looking to the future but actively creating it.

On 18 June 1956, while Lonnie Donegan was playing his five-night stand in Detroit backed by the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio, Time magazine devoted a page to rock ’n’ roll, declaring that ‘it does for music what a motorcycle club at full throttle does for a quiet Sunday afternoon’. Among the advertisers in that particular issue were Norton Abrasives, whose two-page ad was captioned ‘A Job That Reaches from Death Valley to Outer Space’; the Continental Can Company, who boldly claimed to ‘open another door on the future of packaging’; and Moraine Products, whose ad for engine bearings depicts a four-lane highway teeming with fast, finned cars. No British ad agency of the time could give such a futuristic dynamic to tin cans, ball bearings and abrasives.

In later years, Hamilton recalled that when the trunk of ephemera that John McHale had collected while studying at the Yale School of Fine Art arrived in the UK – the raw material from which they would construct their exhibit – he and the other members of the group found a collection of Elvis Presley singles interleaved with copies of Mad magazine and were initially unsure if they had just been put in to keep the records from breaking or if they too were part of the treasure. This was culture as cargo cult: young people in the UK waiting for the latest new sounds, images, media or ideas to come from America and grabbing hold of them with both hands, even if they were only packaging.

One of the most vital manifestations of this anti-authoritarian youth culture was the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle, which had drawn huge audiences of teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic.

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