1/9/2024 0 Comments Wigan young soulsAt the same time, some of Andrew Wilson’s interviewees – mostly long-term participants in the scene – did express casual racist views and while these might have been unremarkable in the 1970s, this was less the case in the 1990s, when he conducted his research. In retrospective interviews, some black participants do attest to the welcoming atmosphere at venues like Wigan, but they were clearly in a small minority. It’s my impression that this is especially the case in the more traditional, ‘oldies’-oriented end of the contemporary scene as well. The scene was also very predominantly white: this is acknowledged by most commentators, and I have noted very few instances of black dancers in all the footage I have seen. Nevertheless, all the leading DJs, record collectors, promoters and other ‘experts’ on the scene – and (more arguably) the large majority of the most celebrated dancers – were male. Some have suggested that the lack of emphasis on heterosexual coupling meant that gay participants could feel more comfortable, even if they were unlikely to be ‘out’ – although Northern Soul was a long way from disco in this respect. As we’ve seen, some people argued that the more athletic style of Northern Soul dance allowed young men to display a different, less aggressive style of masculinity. Meanwhile, all the evidence I’ve seen would suggest that the scene was also very much male dominated. Like other scenes before and since, it was about ‘living for the weekend’. One common explanation that was offered here – for example, in Tony Palmer’s 1977 TV documentary on the scene – was that the scene offered a kind of temporary escape from the grind of mundane unskilled and semi-skilled labour. Most of the participants who have written memoirs of the scene, or been interviewed in books and documentaries, were in manual or low-grade clerical jobs at the time. It’s hard to deny that the Northern Soul scene was predominantly working-class, although it did attract some more middle-class followers as it gained more media coverage. Adherents of the Northern Soul scene sometimes maintain that it did, just as the ravers of the following decade tended to claim that ‘club cultures’ were inclusive and welcoming to all: everybody, it seemed, was equal on the dance floor. It’s often claimed that this purity and authenticity – and the sense of solidarity among the participants – transcends social boundaries. Unlike the crowd-pleasers at Motown, the soul singers who were favoured were somehow expressing ‘real’ emotions, rather than fake sentimentality: they were singing about genuine suffering and pain. According to its followers, Northern Soul was ‘real’ music: it was imagined to be somehow outside the capitalist music business, or at least to have been rejected by it on the grounds of its lack of commercial appeal. In the case of Northern Soul, there is an insistence on authenticity and even purity that is crucial here – although again, it is far from unique in this respect. However, as for many other committed ‘subculturalists’, it often seems to have a highly personal, almost mystical dimension. This is partly a matter of collective solidarity, of good times spent with like-minded people. As I’ve noted, older participants in the current scene continue to talk about ‘keeping the faith’: they have an intense identification with the scene that has proven to be of enduring significance – and perhaps even the most important element in their lives, well beyond their teenage years. It is something that ‘gets in your blood’, a ‘movement’, even a kind of ‘religion’, with its own set of values. In documentaries and memoirs, it is routinely described as a way of life, or a lifestyle. In this respect, Northern Soul seems very different from much more dispersed phenomena like punk.įor some of its adherents, however, Northern Soul represents much more than this. I’ve tended to talk about ‘scenes’ partly because of the geographical locatedness of these phenomena, the fact that they involved large groups of people gathering together in specific settings for limited periods of time. There has been some rather tiresome debate among youth culture scholars as to the validity of these (and other related) terms. However, I have tended to employ the word ‘scene’ rather than ‘subculture’ here. Yet to what extent can Northern Soul be seen as a subculture? It was certainly subterranean or ‘underground’, in the sense of being hidden from wider public view for several years and it was to some extent subversive, in that it might have seemed to embody a different set of values and priorities from those of the mainstream adult culture. The ‘homology’ of elements I’ve identified here can easily be compared with those of other youth subcultures.
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