A midweek cultural deep dive
Hello, and congratulations for making it through the first half of the week. To celebrate, we bring you this week’s cultural digest - a selection of cultural bits that we have enjoyed discussing.
Fade-in Out
As hoards of people clad in bucket hats, football shirts and parkas pile into Heaton Park this weekend, you’d be forgiven for wondering if we’ve entered some kind of time warp. Alas, no - Keir Starmer is still Prime Minister, and a Freddo will still set you back at least 30p. But Oasis are back.
After 16 years of fraternal feuding, the Gallagher brothers have laid down their swords in the name of, well, cash. The Financial Times reports that their comeback tour, which kicked off last weekend with two shows in Cardiff, could make them around £50m each.
Putting aside any judgment one might have on the genesis of this whole enterprise, the hysteria around securing tickets and the media hype surrounding the shows is slightly baffling. Apart from anything else, the band hasn’t released a decent album since 1995, which is particularly shocking given the numbers of teenagers at the Cardiff shows. As the i Paper reports, many of Oasis’ 22 million monthly listeners are Gen Zers who were born after the band’s peak.
And it’s not just Oasis. This year’s Glastonbury Festival saw Neil Young (79), Sir Rod Stewart (80) and Pulp hit the Pyramid Stage in what seemed like an unexpected extension of the Legend’s Slot. Meanwhile, 22-year old former Disney star Olivia Rodrigo’s position as Sunday headliner was met with scepticism and dismay by many. Perhaps that’s why she made the incongruous decision to bring out The Cure’s Robert Smith (66) for a duet of the 1992 song, “Friday, I’m in Love”.
So why are young people listening to so much old music?
One theory is the 30-year nostalgia cycle. This posits that popular culture tends to revive and romanticise the era from roughly 30 years earlier in a recurring generational pattern. These cycles are supposedly driven by the fact that at around 30, young adults become cultural tastemakers, and these same adults feel nostalgia for what was popular when they were children. The result is a wave of retro revival that dominates music, film and fashion. The 1990s and early 2000s are now in the sweet spot of the 30-year nostalgia cycle. Although many young people weren’t alive then, they’re still drawn to that era’s music because it’s been revived by cultural tastemakers who are highlighting the things they loved in childhood, thereby shaping trends that Gen-Zers pick up on.
That’s all very neat, but what if the answer is simply that popular music is becoming increasingly crap? There’s plenty of causes to point to. The TikTokification of music has a lot to answer for, from favouring viral hooks over full length storytelling, to shortening our attention spans for songs and shifting the industry’s focus towards algorithmic success. See also, the Taylor Swift effect: the dominance of the polished, brand-driven pop music shaped by superstars like Swift, which creates an industry that prioritises commercial strategy over rawness and risk. Even in the midst of Brat summer 2024, Charli xcx was unable to compete with Swift’s corporate prowess. On the week that Brat was due to debut, Swift flooded the UK charts by releasing six UK-exclusive deluxe variants of her album, The Tortured Poets Department, all of which counted towards chart totals. In total, Swift has released 34 versions of the album, which was originally released in April 2024. The effect was that Brat was essentially blocked from reaching No.1. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the global rise of K-Pop stars whose glossy perfection is meticulously crafted by entertainment agencies through years of hot-housing in training camps.
In the face of this, who wouldn’t crave a bit of Cigarettes and Alcohol.
John Singer Sargent’s American Heiresses
Speaking of nostalgia, is there anything better than a period drama? Kenwood House certainly has something to offer. As if Robert Adam’s neoclassical villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath wasn’t evocative enough, its exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s portraits of American heiresses will transport even the coldest heart to 19th century England. Think: Henry James, Edith Wharton and… Alisha Boe.
The exhibition (on until 22 October) is contained within 2 rooms, which is sufficient to make you forget you are just a couple of miles from the A1, or the nearest McDonalds. The portraits themselves are a mixture of intimate charcoal drawings and grandiose society paintings that would barely fit under the ceiling of my living room. It’s gorgeous stuff, and Sargent was clearly just as comfortable with a paint-brush as he was with the charcoal stick. But it’s the curation that really brings these portraits to life.
Cora, Countess of Stafford (from The Times)
Between 1870 and 1914, 102 American women married into the British peerage, and many more into the wealthy upper classes. Sargent made portraits of over 30 of them. The exhibition purports to resurrect Sargent’s reputation as a “flashy, quick-wristed, heiress-hunting society lapdog, who strolled about the fashionable salons of Europe in white linen sniffing out the money” (see The Times) by reconsidering these subjects in full context.
Take, for example, Blanche Rathbone, who moved from Staten Island in New York to Chelsea, London, to marry the Liverpudlian banker William Gair Rathbone VII. The description informs us that the lady with the wry smile and coiffeured head was one of the original members of the Invalid Children’s Aid Association, and founder of a school for physically disabled children in Chelsea. Consider also Mary Crowninshield Endicott Chamberlain, from the old Massachusetts families of Peabody and Endicott, who married the politician Joseph Chamberlain at the British embassy in Washington. While your eye might be drawn to her white and blue silk dress (from the House of Worth in Paris), we are also told that Mary was her husband’s principal political secretary and hostess.
Mary Crowninshield Endicott Chamberlain (from The Times)
Or take a look at a personal favourite, Consuelo Vanderbilt. The “little duchess” had an unhappy and short-lived marriage to the Duke of Marlborough before settling into a life of “complete freedom” with her second husband, the French aviator Jacques Balsan. It is recorded that she worked as a London County Councillor for Southwark, and helped to secure a minimum wage for women in ‘sweated’ trades. She also published her own autobiography, The Glitter and the Gold, in which she wrote that her first husband informed her on her wedding night that he had married her purely to save his ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, from ruin. Well, if that won’t get things going in the bedroom…
And that’s not the only bit of bedroom antics in this exhibition. Several of the women in the room are recorded to have resisted confining their sex lives to their pale and stale husbands, whether through lovers or later marriages. Perhaps the highlight amongst these is the Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, who managed a “complicated” love life involving Sir Matthew ‘Scatters’ Wilson, and Oswald Mosley (of BUF fame). The latter was also the lover of all 3 of her stepdaughters.
Consuelo Yznaga del Valle (from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
There’s another Consuelo in the exhibition - godmother to the little duchess - Consuelo Yznaga del Valle. This Consuelo, half Cuban half American, married Viscount Mandeville in 1875 before moving to England where she was renowned for singing the songs of the plantation workers she grew up around on her banjo as she partied with the Marlborough set. She has been immortalised as the inspiration for Edith Wharton’s character, Conchita Closson, in her unfinished novel The Buccaneers, which is now a two-season Apple TV series.
The exhibition ends with a quote from the historian Hilda L. Smith:
“When women are lumped together as a unit, while men are studied both as individuals and members of groups, historians come to view men as historical actors and women as a group which merely reacts to historical events.”
If that doesn’t do it for you, go for the sake of the art - you won’t be disappointed either way.