Consumption Markets & Culture

ISSN: 1025-3866 (Print) 1477-223X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmc20

Creative industries and Britpop: the marketisation

of culture, politics and national identity

Betsabé Navarro

To cite this article: Betsabé Navarro (2015): Creative industries and Britpop: the
marketisation of culture, politics and national identity, Consumption Markets & Culture, DOI:
10.1080/10253866.2015.1068168

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1068168

Published online: 04 Aug 2015.

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 Consumption Markets & Culture, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1068168

Creative industries and Britpop: the marketisation of culture,

politics and national identity
∗
Betsabé Navarro

Department of English, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago, Spain

Do contemporary governments adapt to rising social movements or do they actually

cause them? This paper endeavours to argue that although it is often difficult to
determine the origins of social transformations, there are reasons to believe that
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there exists not only a co-option but also a conscious shaping of social changes
by political projects or governments for their own benefit. Building on other con-
tributions that state that popular culture and youth consumerism are used in
favour of nation branding, the present study moves beyond this to analyse the
active role that governments play in the marketisation and consumption of
culture, thus artificially multiplying the effective impact of some cultural waves
that ultimately serve political purposes. In particular, I examine the so-called
“Cool Britannia” phenomenon that, founded on the flourishing of new creative
industries, with Britpop in the lead, had a significant historic impact in Britain.
Keywords: consumerism; national identity; politics; music; Britpop; creative
industries

Social identity becomes a question of what we consume rather than what we produce.
(Storey 2006, 63)

Introduction
Do contemporary governments adapt to rising social movements? Or do they actually
cause them with the ultimate aim of remaining in power? How do they achieve this
aim? This paper is an attempt to argue that although it is often difficult to determine
the real causes of social movements, there are reasons to believe that there exists a
co-option of social changes by political projects, thus artificially generating and
shaping the real impact of the cultural movement in question. That is to say, govern-
ments sometimes seem responsible for creating and instigating social/cultural phenom-
ena for their own benefit.
How that happens may inspire different analyses, for contemporary Western
societies are run by complex associations between the discourses of politics,
∗
Email: betsabenr@gmail.com

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 B. Navarro

consumerism, national identity and popular culture, among others. For some authors
(see Micheletti 2003; Micheletti, Follesdal, and Stolle 2004), there is a political connec-
tion between consumer choices and relevant global/social issues. There is a growing
awareness of the political power of consumer choice; this phenomenon, which has
been defined as “political consumerism,” demonstrates the politicisation of consump-
tion habits and understands “the market [as] an arena for politics” (Micheletti 2003,
2). Additionally, other authors (see Kerrigan, O’Reilly, and vom Lehn 2009; Crawford
2010; Hesmondhalgh 2013) have written on the marketisation of popular (patriotic)
culture, namely, governments have made cultural industries central to their political
schemes, thus showing how commercial interests are related to cultural and social
changes, and proving the close connection between consumerism, nation and
popular culture (Crawford 2010, 44).
Building on these authors’ observations, this paper aims to defend how some gov-
ernments, by deploying recent strategies in the politicisation of consumerism and the
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marketisation of popular culture, are responsible for the eventual impact and effective-
ness of some cultural movements, thus intentionally contributing to culture-making and
shaping collective behaviour. That is to say, governments ultimately provoke the
blooming of cultural movements and intentionally create a particular cultural Geist
by making use of the influence that national identities have on the citizens and promot-
ing the consumption of those cultural products that are associated with the national
character, all with the aim of retaining popularity and remaining in power. Hence,
this paper makes a contribution to understanding both the politicisation (Street 2000)
and marketisation (Hesmondhalgh 2013) of popular culture, music in particular, in
favour of a government or a political party, and states that beyond this self-interested
assimilation of cultural products, governments ultimately implement mechanisms of
cultural modelling and social control.
This phenomenon will be analysed in the specific historical context of Tony Blair’s
New Labour in Britain in the 1990s. The “Cool Britannia” phenomenon (1996–1998),
understood as the flourishing of the so-called creative industries such as British art,
fashion and music – with Britpop in the lead – was intimately linked to the modern-
isation of the Labour Party and the British national identity. Although the politicisation
of cultural and consumer products – music in particular – is not a unique case in British
history (i.e. Margaret Thatcher appearing on a daytime pop radio station – The Jimmy
Young Show on BBC Radio Two; David Cameron confessing he is a fan of the Smiths),
or in worldwide politics (i.e. Bill Clinton playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall
Show; Barack Obama choosing Beyoncé to sing the American anthem at the 2013 pre-
sidential inauguration), it can be said that the “Cool Britannia” campaign of Tony Blair
was a particularly effective movement that has not been repeated since in Britain. This
became a successfully marketised socio-political phenomenon that generated a cultural
movement by connecting politics with music, art and fashion. In this sense, even though
Clinton, Thatcher, Cameron or Obama have also used popular culture to raise their
profile, that did not cause a multiform artistic trend, and they were, instead, isolated
instances of how politics co-opted popular culture.
Endeavours to link popular culture with politics have not always produced a distinc-
tive cultural vibe and have often failed to generate the desired political result. Here, in
order to provide a more current perspective on the successfulness of Blair’s movement,
it is necessary to mention, as a comparative reference, the opening ceremony of the
London Olympics in 2012, and “Cool Britannia II” in 2014 under the conservative-
led government of David Cameron. These are considered in this paper as a
 Consumption Markets & Culture 3

representation of how political parties sometimes use nostalgic discourses in their

benefit (Jobson and Wickham-Jones 2010), and how Cameron’s strategy merely
became a replica of the popular “Cool Britannia” years of the 1990s that launched
British music on the world scene.
In closing, this study suggests that youth consumerism and popular culture are uti-
lised as a crucial economic and political driving force in favour of party or government
interests, thereby politicising consumer habits and commodifying cultural products.
Beyond that, governments seem responsible for shaping the eventual impact of some
successful cultural movements, thus proving their ability for modelling culture and
controlling social trends. With that intention, this paper starts by developing the
conceptual issues at stake dealing with the theoretical associations between pop
culture, consumerism, politics and collective identities. These premises will be
studied, as previously stated, within the historical contextualisation of Tony Blair’s
“Cool Britannia,” a subsequent section that exposes a brief outline of how Blair’s
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rebranding of the Labour Party and national identity was intimately linked to the
rising of Britpop. In this respect, and in order to show how the government contributed
to the configuration of culture, I have chosen to explore Blair’s scheme for the creative
industries as a whole, and more specifically Britpop as one of the most prominent of the
decade in the following two sections. The discussion later holds the emphasis on how
the above-mentioned conceptual issues are applied to the precise phenomenon of
Blair’s “Cool Britannia,” highlighting the effectiveness of this cultural movement
in historical retrospective. Eventually, the conclusion shows general insights for
nation branding, understanding consumption markets and culture beyond the British
context.

Conceptualisations of pop culture, consumerism and politics

The present study examines the essential role that governments have in shaping social
and cultural conditions through the politicisation and marketisation of popular (patrio-
tic) culture. In recent years, several authors have highlighted the connection that exists
between popular culture, politics, consumerism and collective identities. John Street, in
his Politics and Popular Culture (1997) and in “‘Prime Time Politics’: Popular Culture
and Politicians in the UK” (2000), proffers the intertwined relationship between politics
and popular culture. Street expounds that politicians and governments have “instrumen-
tally” used popular culture in order to promote “further particular political goals” (87).
For the author, “contemporary politics is itself conducted through the language and the
formats of popular culture” (1997, 6), that is to say, the political elite has assimilated
popular culture in a need to achieve its aims and remain in power, to the point that
“popular culture has to be understood as part of our politics” (4). Street observes a
reinforcement and complementation between the deployment and configuration of
popular culture movements by politicians:

The same politicians who exploit popular culture are also engaged in shaping popular
culture, and, in doing so, making possible some experiences and denying access to
others. Copyright laws, trade policy, censorship, education policy, broadcasting regu-
lations, all these things produce a popular culture that profoundly affects what is heard
and seen. (1997, 6)

Other authors have analogously determined that governments and governmental

agencies approach pop culture products to benefit from their aesthetic connotations,
 4 B. Navarro

achieve nation branding and develop tourism strategies (Crawford 2010, 43). There is
consequently an intrinsic relationship between popular culture and consumerism, the
latter being understood as the aesthetic emotional response that pop culture products
elicit in the consumer. For authors such as Finola Kerrigan, Daragh O’Reilly and
Dirk vom Lehn, popular culture is used as a key element in the production and con-
sumption of art (2009), thus showing “the ways in which commercial interests have
intersected and interacted with broader cultural and social changes” (Crawford 2010,
44). As will be shown in the present analysis, the marketisation of popular culture is
used as a decisive economic driving force in favour of political and economic ambi-
tions, as governments promote the making of money out of culture through legislation
and policy-making:

Governments all across the world altered their policies in the direction of marketization –
that is, the view that the production and exchange of cultural goods and services for profits
is the best way to achieve efficiency and fairness in the production and consumption of
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texts. (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 403)

The expansion of neoliberalism invites political parties to apply market mechanisms to

culture (126), which eventually impacts national – and also international – policy-
making bodies (153 –155), such as the Creative Industries Task Force in Britain.
Finally, art and popular culture – understood as contemporary commodified pro-
ducts – are transformed into tools that generate individual and collective associations
and which are ultimately attached to political and institutional activities. Aspects of
popular culture thus seem to be used for commercial purposes due to the emotional
associations that they provoke in consumers; indeed, critical literature suggests that
consumption of cultural products ultimately defines individual and collective identities
(Hesmondhalgh 2008). As far as popular music is concerned, it has been considered a
“collective public experience” that “provides a particularly interesting example of
modern relations between consumption and self-identity” (2008, 329). Music shares
aesthetic meanings and represents “socio-cultural values for its consumers” (Dolfsma
1999, 1020) becoming a product particularly vulnerable to politicisation (Hesmond-
halgh 2008, 330).
According to the above-mentioned criticism, our societies, understood as political
structures, ultimately depend on the emotional associations that individuals have to
specific cultural goods (such as popular music) and their consumption, which is
used, in turn, as a marketing strategy. In this regard, popular elements are utilised
“to make audiences feel better about themselves and, indeed, the advertised product”
(Crawford 2010, 47), whether this product be a specific commercial outcome, or
other more complex commodified constructs such as national identities. However,
beyond this interpretation of how political projects assimilate extant trends of culture
consumption for practical benefits such as nation branding, promoting tourism or
winning votes, there is a pressing need to understand the co-option of certain cultural
elements by political projects or governments as an inverted phenomenon, that is, pol-
itical power appears to participate in the very construction of these movements by
making use of the generalisation of consumerism – and its association with national
identities – thus determining individual choices and shaping social changes. On the
one hand, many political projects benefit from the emotional associations that individ-
uals have to specific cultural goods (such as popular music) and their consumption, and
they deploy national or political identities to legitimise their governments and make the
 Consumption Markets & Culture 5

population feel identified with some collective (national) features that are associated, at
an emotional level, with the party in question. It seems merely a strategy to create
shared signs, as “modes of attachment compose the affective bond which characterises
a given culture” (Angus 2000, 78).
On the other hand, however, there are some governments that manage to invert such
phenomenon, and are ultimately responsible for shaping effective cultural waves that
without their mediation might have remained on the margins of commercial culture.
Even despite the fact that the marketisation and consumption of popular culture are
founded on the notion of “free market,” they have ultimately become instruments of
social control through which shopping and voting preferences are subtly shaped and
constructed. Thus, many Western political projects – beyond their apparent defence
of economic liberalism and freedom of choice – seem to eventually mould social
and cultural currents through the aforementioned politicisation of consumption and
marketisation of popular culture.
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Historical contextualisation: “Cool Britannia”

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in May 1997, his New Labour government
fostered the well-known “Cool Britannia” slogan (1996–1998), which contributed to
the never-ending debate on national identity. The phrase “Cool Britannia” was first
used in 1967 as the title of a track by Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in a satirical portrait
of Harold Wilson’s government (Lucy and McClure 1999, xi), and it was recovered in
1996 by American journalist Stryker McGuire in the Newsweek magazine to describe
London as “the coolest city on the planet” (McGuire 2009). Blair and his government
later endorsed the “Cool Britannia” campaign and fostered a new conception of a
young, dynamic and multicultural Britain by bringing pop culture to the foreground
and activating a market-driven economy. The use of the so-called “youth culture”
encompassed not only a consolidated middle-class bourgeoisie, but also well-off
youngsters who could afford spending money on consumer goods such as music, art
and clothing – what in the recent years has been called the development of the cultural
or creative industries. In this context, the phenomenon of Britpop was suddenly inter-
woven with the political scenery of the decade, and bands such as Oasis and Blur par-
ticipated in the cultural and political renaissance of New Labour.
Nearly two decades of political conservatism under the Thatcher and Major govern-
ments seemed to have favoured a cultural traditionalism rooted in their conservative
“back to basics” philosophy, which promoted conventional moral values such as
self-discipline, responsibility and commitment, respect for law and order and a neolib-
eral economy within the free market state (Reitan 2003, 147). When a young and aspir-
ing Tony Blair became the leader of Labour in 1994, a deep transformation began to
take place in the principles and nature of the party. The realisation of the new social
spectrum in contemporary Britain led the new leader to emphasise the need to
address an extensive well-off middle class and abandon its traditional link to the
working class and the trade unions. A change in direction towards a more central elec-
torate, detached from left- and right-wing loyalties, was thought to be a political strat-
egy to win the coming elections in 1997, but most importantly it was Blair’s campaign
to stress a new and modern national identity that connected the widely frustrated British
voters with the image and principles of what New Labour was meant to be. Blair’s mod-
ernisation programme, embodied in his slogan “New Labour, New Britain,” promoted a
new vision of the country that opposed the conservative and traditional Thatcherite past
 6 B. Navarro

with a forward-thinking future. As Seldon states, Blair “wanted to change the lingering
perception that Britain was still too rooted in the past, and his task was to project Britain
as a ‘model for a twenty-first-century developed society’” (2005, 284). Blair’s intention
to rebrand the country’s image in cultural and political terms was constantly projected
through public speeches and national conferences; he was particularly committed to sti-
mulating a modern and vibrant Britain, for “countries wrapped in nostalgia cannot build
a strong future” (Blair in Norman 1998).
The “Cool Britannia” phenomenon that Mark Leonard suggested officially lasted
from 1996 to 1998 (1998a) represented the Zeitgeist of the 1990s, and was hence con-
sidered a large advertising campaign used not only in promotional benefit, but also and
mainly as a creation of the Labour Party, gradually becoming a broader social and cul-
tural movement that aimed to reinvent and update national imagery and project Britain
as a society of the millennium. In this context, British youth culture played an essential
role in, and became the economic driving force behind, this modernisation of national
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identity. “Cool Britannia” was the catchphrase used to attract youngsters to a political
“national rejuvenation” through an attractive “renaissance in British art, fashion, design
and music” (Osgerby 2005, 127).
It was well known that pop stars such as Noel Gallagher of Oasis were invited to
Downing Street, making politics a popular (or populist) strategy aimed at making the
government likeable. In this respect, some authors have suggested that Blair’s artifice
to approach British youth was not only related to his idea of creating a positive image of
his party, it could have also been based on a utilitarian goal of using the consolidated
middle-class bourgeoisie and well-off youngsters – who were stimulated by the
recently forged national identity – as a driving force to activate the economy and con-
sumerism (as shown in the multibillion profit market targeted at young consumers [see
Moses 2000]). Osgerby also suggests:

Youth culture had come to represent a valuable economic resource. With the rise of the
media and culture industries as economic mainstays, the youth market had developed
into a key business sector, with British pop music and style exerting a global cultural influ-
ence. (2005, 127)

Therefore, “Cool Britannia” was similarly used for commercial purposes: “The old
image is bad for business. Three out of four of the world’s largest companies
(Fortune 500 companies) say that national identity is one of the key factors that influ-
ence them when they buy goods and services” (Leonard 1998b).

Creative industries under New Labour

A nostalgic view of “Cool Britannia” recalls that the 1990s and early 2000s were the
decades of leisure culture par excellence, the decades of cultural consumerism with
football, television, the media, pop music, festivals, pop art, fashion, magazines, celeb-
rities and films (such as those starring Hugh Grant and René Zellweger: Notting Hill
1999, Bridget Jones’s Diary 2001) inspiring and defining a young generation.
However, as Stephen Driver and Luke Martell explained, “Cool Britannia” was not
only about consuming culture, it was most importantly about promoting the production
of influential industries in Britain: the industries of music, fashion and art. As the
authors pointed out, “many of the areas of cultural concern for Labour are those in
which young people are perceived to be the key producers and consumers, such as
film, broadcasting, pop music, fashion and the new media” (2002, 148). These were
 Consumption Markets & Culture 7

the so-called “creative industries” that became a determining political and economic
strategy in Britain after Blair’s electoral triumph in 1997 (Hesmondhalgh 2013,
168). Accordingly, Blair’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), aware
of the positive effects of the creative industries, established the well-known Creative
Industries Unit and Task Force, whose function was to inspect “generic issues which
impacted on the creative industries and . . . [make] recommendations for change in
areas such as skills and training, finance for creative venture, intellectual property
rights, and export promotion” (DCMS 2001, 4). The role of the government’s Task
Force was, therefore, to measure the creative industries’

contribution to Britain’s overall economic performance and identifying policy measures

that would promote their further development. . . . [The government] identified the crea-
tive industries as constituting a large and growing component of the UK economy,
employing 1.4 million people and generating an estimated £60 billion a year in economic
value added, or about 5% of total UK national income. (Flew 2012, 9)
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The Task Force fostered economic wealth creation by developing cross-departmen-

tal policies “in areas such as education, regional policy, entrepreneurship, and trade”
(10) thus fomenting new British exports (11) and contributing to the eventual market-
isation of culture. However, the recent emphasis given to creative industries was not
only ingrained in their economic assets, but also in the close connection that the
former had with the making of a new national identity. The utilisation of creative indus-
tries and the marketisation of culture belonged to a global plan of national modernis-
ation whose main aim was to project Britain as a young and dynamic nation, for, as
Terry Flew put forth, “Cool Britannia” meant to replace the traditional manufacturing
Britain with a new modern and creative country (2012, 14).
Blair’s local and nationwide promotion of the creative industries showed how “cul-
tural policy has moved from viewing the arts in terms of the funding and administration
of certain kinds of artistic and heritage culture to viewing them as a tool for social
inclusion, community development and urban regeneration” (Kerrigan, O’Reilly, and
vom Lehn 2009, 203). Consequently, this economic reactivation originated in the mar-
ketisation of the cultural aspects of a particular nation, and was rendered possible
because the emotional connotations of particular national emblems – such as cul-
tural/historical motives (i.e. the “Keep Calm and . . . ” slogans) and patriotic elements
like flags (i.e. the Union Jack) – were intentionally commodified, turning them into
commercial goods themselves. The value of a nation is not what it produces, but
rather what inspires and provokes in the consumer – thus ultimately becoming the
object of desire in terms of its aesthetic significations. In contemporary societies, the
“aesthetic experience,” understood as “all forms of sensory experiences relating to
arts, painting, and other visual forms,” becomes the object of both marketisation and
“aesthetic consumption” (Venkatesh and Meamber 2008, 45).

Britpop: youth culture, consumerism and national identity

Britpop was among the most significant creative industries of the decade and became
the shibboleth of cultural consumerism in Britain. Bands such as the Stone Roses,
Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, Portishead, Pulp, Massive Attack and the Spice Girls (with
Geri Halliwell in a Union Jack dress at the 1997 Brit Awards) became the emblems
of the new British trend and the modernisation of national identity. This seemed to
be the late stage of popular culture in which industries such as music and art became
 8 B. Navarro

not only the aim of consumption by a young, wealthy generation, but also the symbols
of a rebranded patriotism ingrained in a collective optimism and the feeling that “things
can only get better,” as D:Ream’s song proclaimed (a song that became Labour’s
anthem during the 1997 electoral campaign, associating the party’s “New Dawn”
with the pop movement of “Cool Britannia”). This enthusiasm initially called for
new social values intimately connected to a new national and political identity that
went on to promote cultural consumption, which ultimately activated the economy.
As the wave of optimism grew, the perception of the New Dawn seemed to be real
for many and gave hope to a whole generation, the generation of the young and the
working class that had traditionally voted Labour. Oasis’s song “Some Might Say”
(1995) illustrated how music caught the spirit of the time, how the brightness and posi-
tivity of that age symbolised the end of a political era (Dower, Life Forever 2003) and
suggested that things were going to get better: “Some might say that sunshine follows
thunder . . . some might say that we will find a brighter day” (Oasis 1995).
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In this respect, Oasis would be the band that best embraced the commodification of
culture rising in parallel with the marketisation of Blair’s New Labour. Alan McGee,
Oasis’s former manager, and lead guitarist Noel Gallagher were the most politically
committed figures of the band. Blair’s speeches inspired them, and they had the
hope that things would change for the better under a New Labour government
(Seymour 1996, 6). McGee was especially mindful of his role and of the band’s
power to influence the masses and help their admired Labour candidate reach power.
McGee, of working-class origins, knew what it was like to be underclass, and was
aware of the importance of health services and the protection of pensioners, the men-
tally ill and the disabled (6). McGee’s contribution to the cause was to transmit this pol-
itical enthusiasm to Oasis’s fans with the hopes of winning Labour votes: “If I can get a
million kids to vote Labour because Noel and Liam have endorsed them then I’ve done
my bit” (Seymour 1996, 6). Correspondingly, the government later appointed him as an
advisor to the aforementioned Creative Industries Task Force (Koenig 1998; Osgerby
2004, 76), sign of the government’s willingness to promote the rising cultural indus-
tries, and of the close relationship that politics and the pop industry had during those
years.
The affair between Britpop and New Labour consequently became a phenomenon
with multiple effects. On the one hand, bands such as Oasis embraced the new govern-
ment with hopeful expectations and optimism, and adhered to the view that this politi-
cal and cultural renovation would represent rupture with the Thatcherite past. On the
other hand, the Blair project made use of these creative industries in favour of his
party – renewing its image and winning voters – and once in government, favouring
a dynamic economy stimulated by culture industry and its consumption.
For that reason, Blair focused, first of all and as mentioned above, on the creation of
a Task Force Unit, a unit comprising Oasis’s manager Alan McGee to promote “the
economic potential of the creative industries” (Koenig 1998); and second, on an
image-making strategy by interacting with pop stars and the music industry, this
becomes a subtle manner of creating a modern appearance and even lobbying celebri-
ties to attract voters. For instance, we can highlight the moment when Tony Blair and
Alastair Campbell invited Damon Albarn of Blur to the palace of Westminster in early
1995 to see if he could help win young votes for Labour, and to ensure that he was not
going to fickly betray the party (Harris 2003), or when Blair attended the 1996 Brit
Awards and presented the Outstanding Contribution to Music to David Bowie. In his
brief speech, Blair stated: “It’s been a great year for British music, a year of creativity
 Consumption Markets & Culture 9

by talented energy, British bands storming the charts, British music back once again in
its rightful place at the top of the world” (Blair at the 1996 Brit Awards). Blair also
invited Noel Gallagher to a Downing Street reception in 1997 (Walden 2005, 23)
where they were taken up to “do pictures with Lenny Henry, Maureen Lipman
[actors], a few others” (Campbell 2007, 225). In reference to this, Peter Mandelson,
member of the Cabinet and one of the architects of New Labour, declared:

New Labour by definition was really young, I mean Tony Blair was young, he was a guy
who played rock music when he was at University. . . . Tony was trying to generate a new
politics, a freshness in politics and he needed ways to symbolise that freshness . . . getting
to know Gallagher. (Peter Mandelson in Dower, Live Forever 2003)

Even the Prime Minister had been a modest rock musician in his 20s, which he pub-
licised in order to emphasise his young and modern image – many people remember
the first time Blair entered Downing Street guitar case in hand. It was precisely rock
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“n” roll and guitar playing that had constantly been considered a symbol of rebellion
“embodying the cultural values of the youth movement,” and more specifically, of
the marginal, “unsophisticated, lower-class warriors” (Ostberg and Hartmann 2015,
5–6) such as the working class that Labour previously represented. Now it was time
for a new era, a time when the government invited rock bands to Downing Street or
made them advisors in governmental units, a “call-me-Tony” style that made the
elite approachable and the margins integrated in the mainstream culture. New
Labour’s affair with popular culture was consequently a reciprocal relationship, and
both sides benefited from the marketing operation that was the result of their mutual
support. The music scene and the political establishment suddenly found a common
interest, and bands that had previously revolved around peripheral circles were sud-
denly at the right-hand of the Prime Minister. In this regard, Jarvis Cocker – singer
of Pulp – noticed that the marginal Britain that had been isolated in the Thatcherite
1980s “suddenly moved to the centre of stage, so that felt exciting and felt like a revo-
lution was in progress” (Jarvis Cocker in Dower, Live Forever 2003).
The growing prestige of mass popular culture seduced every sphere of British
society, including pop/rock bands that realised that there was a pressing need to be com-
mercial. It is, consequently, important to analyse the 1990s Britpop as a consumerist
centre-stage mass phenomenon, especially if we compare it with its predecessors, the
independent punk rock of the 1970s and bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash
who were characterised by an anti-establishment, sometimes anarchistic attitude.
Later bands of the 1980s, such as The Smiths, Joy Division and Happy Mondays, con-
tinued the subculture of obscure non-commercial rock, often political and anti-Thatch-
erite. However, the unexpected commercial success of Blur and Oasis turned the
previously independent and anti-commercial rock into a marketable mass movement.
In his book Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock
(2003), John Harris suggests that the change of direction of English rock at the end
of the twentieth century was also connected to the new cultural and political panorama.
The Prime Minister was a product of his time, and therefore he acknowledged that
popular culture, arts and rock in particular were an important part of British culture
and of its economic industry: “Rock’n’roll is not just an important part of our
culture, it’s an important part of our way of life. It’s an important industry; it’s an
important employer of people; it’s immensely important to the future of this
country” (Tony Blair in Harris 2004, 191). It was widely acknowledged that, after
 10 B. Navarro

Thatcherism and under New Labour, living standards would improve, while the growth
of a commodified popular culture and the increment of mass consumerism made the
aforementioned creative industries a pivotal commercial product.

Discussion
In view of the above, can we say that governments use or actually shape cultural move-
ments? It is perhaps difficult to draw a line between the causes and effects of political
power, yet, it seems clearer that governments or political parties are sometimes respon-
sible for magnifying social and cultural trends and making of them commercial mass
products that would have otherwise remained as sectional actions. As this paper
shows, the Blair government endorsed the growth of creative industries, and more
specifically Britpop, as part of a new aesthetic of national modernisation that generated
employment and created wealth. The new national identity, intimately linked to “Cool
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Britannia” and Tony Blair’s project, was intentionally associated with the emotional
connections that cultural industries inspired, consequently building a sense of commu-
nity, and benefiting the image of the Labour Party. In broader terms, this phenomenon
shows how Blair’s government eventually forged a complex and distinctive cultural
movement through the manipulation of British national identity and the promotion of
certain consumption products, thus demonstrating both the politicisation and marketi-
sation of popular culture in benefit of party interests. Hence, Blair’s sympathy towards
the creative culture of the decade, as rendered by his support for the creative industries
and Britpop, is “symptomatic of a now familiar and increasingly discussed phenom-
enon: the use of popular culture to promote politicians and their parties” (Street
2000, 77). For the Blair government, fostering creative industries and the consumption
of Britpop was not only a means of fomenting economic growth, but also mainly of
gaining political acceptance and prestige:

This is a tradition in which popular culture presents itself as a kind of “trophy” to be used
in the enhancement of reputation. Its modern incarnation is the way in which political
leaders attend high profile events in the popular culture calendar (football cup finals,
awards ceremonies) or when they invite pop and film stars to receptions at the White
House or 10 Downing Street. . . . cultural success is appropriated for political gain.
(78 –79)

However, whereas the deployment of popular culture by politicians or political

parties to boost their image is not exclusive of Blair’s New Labour (i.e. Bill Clinton,
Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, among many others) it can be argued that,
when analysed in historical retrospect, “Cool Britannia” and Britpop have been
regarded as a revolution in British cultural life for “its uniqueness, and if Britannia
was cool, it was because it was different” (McGuire 2009). Together with Blair’s
New Labour, they represented “that breath of political fresh air that comes along
once in a great while and defines an era” (2009). It inspired hope and change, and sig-
nified the beginning of something that has not been repeated ever since in Britain.
This uniqueness was, perhaps, understood in terms of its cultural idiosyncrasy and
international projection, thus showing that Blair’s affair with the popular art scene went
beyond a one-time strategy focused on an election or a major political event (i.e. Mar-
garet Thatcher’s appearance on The Jimmy Young Show played an important role in
the struggle for votes, and Barack Obama’s interview on the Between Two Ferns
Show in 2014 aimed to win support for his healthcare proposal) and was projected
 Consumption Markets & Culture 11

as an iconic cultural movement that, over and above Blair’s victory at the 1997 election,
framed politics, music and art as part of a new wave of cultural identity. As Neil
Spencer stated: “Every pop movement has its climactic moment when the music,
imagery and attitudes suddenly add up to more than the sum of their parts and a
golden age flickers, tantalisingly, into wider reality” (2003). In this way, New
Labour and Britpop shaped a one-of-a-kind upswing in British cultural life – with
its most immediate antecedent in the Harold Wilson government and the so-called
“Swinging London” of the 1960s to which “Cool Britannia” is often compared (Huq
2010, 90).
A more current example of a government attempting a co-option of popular culture
can be seen by the conservative-led government of David Cameron (2010–2015), and
yet, Cameron’s strategy has not had the same effect and repercussion of his predecessor
Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” Briefly, it is necessary to foreground the inaugural cer-
emony of the London Olympics in 2012 on the one hand, and Cameron’s celebrity
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reception at the headquarters of the British government in 2014, on the other. The
opening show, that entailed a celebration of national emblems and some of the best
music hits, aimed to project the image of Britain overseas presenting British celebrities
like David Beckham and Mr Bean, and boasting about Britain’s successful music tra-
dition with old classics such as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Who
and Led Zeppelin, and many Britpop legendary bands such as Blur, Oasis, Muse, the
Verve, Radiohead, Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand. The ceremony represented a
tribute to heritage, “a hermeneutics of recovery” (Tzanelli 2013, 39) and proved a
“structural nostalgia” (65) through “the fusion of older and new hits by famous
artists” (62). In this respect, the ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle but funded by
the government of David Cameron and administered by conservative Olympic chief
Sebastian Coe, aimed at attracting universal chic and young British talents that put
Britain at the international forefront. Despite any attempts to emphasise the twenty-
first-century British identity, Cameron’s “patriotic” ceremony, by retrieving Britpop
hits, represented no newness in terms of a musical upsurge and instead reflected the
“cool” nationalist essence of recent past decades.
Moreover, Cameron’s gala at Number 10 Downing Street in June 2014 to celebrate
Britain’s booming entertainment industry – which had proved to positively contribute
to the economy during the previous era – became to be known as “Cool Britannia II”
(McTague 2014) and urged “pop stars, actors and media luvvies to ‘fly the flag’ for
Britain around the world” (Mason 2014). Still, many declined to express political
support for Cameron, and many others who had been invited did not appear at the
reception (Mason 2014), thus reinforcing the idea that Cameron’s strategy of socialis-
ing with celebrities and pop stars was merely a fruitless copy and recreation of Blair’s
“Cool Britannia” (Singh 2014).
Despite Cameron’s efforts to look modern, he was instead reproducing nostalgic
discourses of a successful patriotic past, not the Victorian and traditional past that
his party had previously held, but the cool and young recent past that the Labour
Party had forged and which was closely related to popular youth culture. Nostalgia,
and any kind of emotional or self-interested attachment to the past by political
parties, prevents countries, as Blair pointed out, from building a strong future (Blair
in Norman 1998), which seems to support the idea that Cameron’s revisitation of
“Cool Britannia” missed the energising triumph of contemporaneity that New
Labour represented and advocated.
 12 B. Navarro

Additionally, Cameron’s assimilation of this movement had more to do with the

message he was trying to communicate, that the Tory Party could also be young,
cool and successful: “Cameron, of course, is well known for his fixation with Tony
Blair and the manner in which he rebranded the British Labour party in the 1990s
. . . Cameron aspires to do something similar for the British Conservative party, render-
ing it, if nothing else, ‘nicer’” (Jones 2014). And yet, despite his efforts to change the
party, Cameron’s failure to appear young and hip, and on some exceptional issues also
“green” and left-wing (i.e. Cameron’s environmentalist attitude to climate change, his
defence of the NHS, and his openness to the Scottish independence referendum), could
be rooted in the intrinsic associations of his own party with an outmoded vision of
Britain, and the inescapably pejorative stereotypes of a party that systematically
raises new grounds for rejection in the progressive young. Also, the popularity and suc-
cessfulness of Blair was perhaps driven by the fact that the British are often considered
“naturally” conservative (Phillips 2013), meaning that the country early on admired a
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charismatic young and cool Labour politician turning to the right, but not a Conserva-
tive politician turning to the left.
Regardless of Cameron’s victory on the 7 May 2015 general election – which must
be read in the context of economic recovery after the financial crisis – he continues to
be detached from a unique and young cultural movement that characterises his era. His
electoral triumph has been eventually owed to a wide electorate that is not particularly
enthusiastic about the style of the Prime Minister but instead is more worried about the
dangers of inverting Britain’s fragile economic recovery (White 2015). In equal terms,
not even Labour candidate Ed Miliband, who resigned after the devastating results at
the 2015 election, managed to be inspirational, and many within the party have thus
claimed that the new Labour leader must be “a young challenger” who could reconnect
with the voters and “return to aspirational Blair years” (Feeney 2015).
All in all, post-Blairite failing attempts of the co-option of popular culture highlight
the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the creative upsurge during the New Labour
years, and the apparent void of cultural idiosyncrasy – or the lack of a distinct cultural
movement – of our era (Hancox 2013; Petridis 2014). Therefore, not only the 2014
Downing Street reception, but also the musical repertoire of the Olympics 2012 – refer-
ring to rock classics and legendary Britpop songs of the “Cool Britannia” – show the
relevance of the Blair period not only to study the mutual implications of politics and
cultural movements, but also the ability of some governments to effectively shape
culture and social trends intimately linked to a new and unique contemporaneity.
As has been emphasised in this paper, governments’ inclination to socialise with
popular culture is based on the necessity of marketising their image, and also, on
New Labour’s context, on promoting certain fashionable consumer goods, those
recently-born creative industries that guaranteed them remaining in power and extend-
ing their political influence. In this respect, it is possible to describe Blair’s Britain and
his support of creative industries as a boom of pop culture consumerism with economic
and political aims. How do governments (or political parties) make use of markets (the
discourses of production and consumption) and cultural (youth) movements to their
benefit? “Do the cultural industries ultimately serve the interests of their owners and
their executives and those of their political and business allies?” (Hesmondhalgh
2013, 5).
It seems that there exists an immediate effect of government’s labour market pol-
icies on the eventual impact of cultural movements. More specifically, Blair’s rebrand-
ing of Britain and New Labour’s manipulation or control of British national identity
 Consumption Markets & Culture 13

(through political rhetoric or even through specific economic policies of culture con-
sumption schemed by the Creative Industries Task Force) directly forged the signifi-
cance and effectiveness of “Cool Britannia” as a unique cultural movement. In this
regard, “policies are responses to, and products of, sociocultural, economic and techno-
logical conditions, but they are also fundamental in triggering and/or inhibiting trans-
formations in the cultural industries” (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 156). Consumerism of
popular (patriotic) products seems to be constructed, on the one hand, upon those
emotional and aesthetic associations that buying these products provokes in the consu-
mer, and, on the other hand, upon certain political and economic interests of a political
elite that seems to have relinquished past ideological ideals and is now more interested
in the marketisation of its own image, and the popular culture that surrounds it, to
achieve political power: “Parties can not rely on traditional ties; they have to sell them-
selves. The mass media represent a key forum, and advertising a key language, for this
salesmanship” (Street 2000, 80 –81). The marketisation of popular culture ultimately
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serves as a subtle means of social control, for governments promote and direct
market strategies that help them remain in power.
Finally, as has already been argued, the marketisation and advertising of cultural
products strengthens audiences’ sense of nationalist pride (Crawford 2010, 48).
Blair’s slogan “New Labour, New Britain” aimed to reflect a political modernisation,
but far from securing a new ideological debate, it contrarily focused on the marketing
effects of the rebranding of the Labour Party. The ability of commercial products –
such as music – to promote individual and collective associations to national identities
was at play in Blair’s advocacy of creative industries, a political strategy that was com-
mercialised as part of Labour’s advertising campaign and its promotion of a new
national identity.
The consumption of cultural goods (or the products of some of the most popular
creative industries), such as the Britpop of the 1990s, associated consumers with a par-
ticular social identity, and, at a particular point, with a precise political tendency. The
rise of Britpop under Blair’s Britain was an example of how contemporary governments
not only use, but also forge and construct convenient cultural movements in which con-
sumerism of popular (patriotic) products determines collective identities and creates
social identifications that are intentionally used in favour of a specific political party:
“Such associations enable the politician to connect – often temporarily – with the
achievements, activities and attributes of others, and to share in the ‘cool’ image
they are believed to project” (Inglis 2010, 65). Music and Britpop were symbolic cul-
tural products that embodied more complex conceptual events. The consumption of
British music turned into a nationalist movement of assertiveness, “personal branding,”
“identity construction and self-making” (Cluley 2009, 373), anchored in the reciprocal
promotional interests of the music industry and a specific political party.

Conclusion
This study has examined the interrelation of the politicisation and marketisation of
popular art and how contemporary society is determined by commercial factors such
as the commodification and advertising of popular culture – music in particular –
by analysing governmental schemes of nation branding, consumption incitement and
cultural promotion. We have seen that governments use national policies, rhetorical
manipulation in public speeches and advertising campaigns to stimulate a particular
image of themselves, the party and the nation for their own benefit. This paper therefore
 14 B. Navarro

states that political parties and governments consciously contribute to modelling culture
and are eventually responsible for the actual impact of some successful cultural move-
ments: whilst some governments (or governmental agencies) join latest trends of mass
culture to promote nation branding (Crawford 2010), others do not join, but actually
instigate, manipulate and shape social and cultural transformations by lobbying
artists, formulating policies of culture consumption and fostering advertising cam-
paigns for their own political purposes. This paper understands the branding of the
nation not as a goal, but as an instrument in the process of achieving and consolidating
political power. Behind some governments’ apparent defence of free market and the
neoliberal politics of consumption, the branding of national identities and the commo-
dification of popular culture are ultimately used as a means of culture shaping and social
control.

Disclosure statement
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Betsabé Navarro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1410-2791

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