Rock, Rap and Modern Scottish Political Identity

In a month when the music for a coronation has been discussed intensively, the BBC broke the news this week of music not heard in that context: that Scottish republican nationalists, The Proclaimers, had been removed from the coronation playlist (BBC, 24/5/23).  I don’t know about you, but I’m now over-analysing the representation of socio-political hierarchy in Shrek (2001): ogres trump royalty.

It won’t have escaped the notice of most of you that contemporary Scottish popular music is political.

Image: Scottish rap group Stanley Odd photographed for a press release in March 2021, reproduced with permission from band member Dave Hook.

OK – this is a mad length for a post.  Boil the kettle and pour a cuppa, because there isn’t one single book that does this, and there should be.  Maybe one is in the pipeline.  If I’ve missed it, please tell me!

Scottish pop music provides insights into modern Scottish political identities, both in lyrics that express explicit political sentiment, and in performance styles that shape both how Scots and the wider world imagine Scottish identity: speaking for the underdog, from the margins.  Folk and traditional music have tended to receive more attention in formal academic writing on historical national culture, for obvious reasons, but if we want to understand the contemporary history of Scotland, there should also be some attention to the nascent literature on pop.   According to Jeremy Tranmer, writing for a Francophone readership, bands such as Runrig and the Proclaimers are ‘vehicles for a contemporary variety of left-wing Scottishness’ (Tranmer, 2016) that both echo national tendencies in that direction, and also, because of their undoubted commercial success, help to shape how we collectively imagine and perform our national culture. Indeed, Tranmer argues, that since the 1980s Scottish reaction against Thatcherite conservatism, bands such as these have helped to reconstruct Scottish identity as distinctly more leftist than elsewhere in the UK.

Are we talking here about “popular music” or contemporary folk music?

It’s reasonable to point out that the line between the two is not completely solid.  Modern Scottish folk is clearly also popular within Scotland, and often significantly influenced by rock.  RunRig, for example, fl.1973 to 2018, had the instrumental line-up of a conventional rock band (electric guitars, kit drum and vocalist) but a repertoire that included a rock version of traditional songs such “Loch Lomond” – their cover version of which is now heard (so my students tell me) at the end of birthday parties as a send-off into the night, making a new tradition of an old form.  Many folk bands can pack big venues with elaborate sound systems and light shows enhancing their performance.

Popular music, it might be true to say, was historically defined by a distinctly more commercial infrastructure than folk or traditional music, which can survive without the bells and gizmos in stripped down acoustic contexts. According to Simon McKerrell, contemporary folk and traditional music is managed in increasingly similar ways to rock and pop (McKerrell, 2011). Nevertheless, ‘pop music’ is more likely to be paired with words such as ‘industry’ or ‘sector’, despite leading artists across all these repertoires relying on entrepreneurial income generation.  Pop and rock music’s reliance on modern technology doesn’t mean that popular music is necessarily light or unserious: indeed, rock music from the 1960s often was associated with counter-cultural aesthetics and ideas.  When the tech-heavy rock band is replaced by digital sound generation in contemporary genres of popular music such as hip hop, the cash-heavy economic divide between folk and pop is further eroded.

In short, while the ‘commercial’ labelling might make it more difficult for popular music artists to apply to public bodies for grant funding than it might be for a folk or traditional music project, the grass-roots or entry-level performance conditions might not always be so far apart. And at that grass-roots level, both might equally be important to contemporary national culture.

Infrastructure debates: to fund or not to fund?

Performance styles that rely on big-production aesthetics are expensive, and to some extent this might limit the capacity of big-stadium artists to use their music at least in the global touring environmental as a political vehicle.  Adam Behr and Matt Brennan found in 2014 – the year of the Scottish independence referendum – that popular music in Scotland remained relatively underfunded by the state in comparison to other repertoires.  Is this a problem?  From the point of view of encouraging a healthy democracy that recognises diverse political opinion, this might be reassuring.  If The Proclaimers or RunRig are popular with ticket-paying audiences sympathetic to the political content of their lyrics, then the domestic marketplace confirms to some extent a political affiliation.  A lot of public funding for particular artists might be seen by some as propagandistic, with partisan connections between artists and politicians compromising artistic freedom to comment and critique political issues.  Nevertheless, Behr and Brennan suggested that, compared with other areas such as Canada, Ireland, and France, and considering popular music as an economic sector contributing to national wealth as well as to culture, the infrastructure supporting pop music in Scotland is relatively underfunded.  Their article suggested that this could be explained by the Scottish sector’s relatively underpowered placement in a wider UK music industry context.  At the time they wrote, the SMIA – the Scottish Music Industry Association, a lobbying group for commercial infrastructure encompassing venues, promotions, recording studios and more – were of the view that popular music’s contribution to Scotland in financial as well as in cultural terms should be recognised by more substantial state funding, regardless of whether or not Scotland was to be independent (the independence referendum outcome was not known when the Behr and Brennan article was written). Since then, a range of financial challenges have squeezed public finances in ways that probably have made this hard to achieve.

But does political pop need high spending to reach its audiences?  The low-cost technologies and internet distribution that make possible production on laptops and internet distribution has transformed the entry-level expenses of pop music.  Yes, these artists and their technical teams would be more financially secular and undoubtedly better known internationally with increased long-term sector funding.  But even without this, they still might have a strong local and regional following, and therefore regional political influence.  Local radio and streaming and podcasting in this world supplement the traditional intimate environments of pubs and social clubs, as both emergent folk and modern pop music artists know well.

Scottish Nationalism and the music of the left: streets vs stadia?

In the 1960s, left-leaning artists such as Glaswegian-born Lonnie Donegan (famous both in the US and at home), and Glasgow band The Poets (lead singer George Gallacher) positioned Scottish pop music to the left of centre with lyrics that spoke at times directly from the perspective of the working and disadvantaged (well, Gallacher supported Partick Thistle football team).  Search for The Poet’s tracks ‘In your Tower’ and ‘Wooden Spoon’ to hear songs that demonstrate how working-class Scots twist the Beatles’s brand of Liverpudlian likely-laddery into a Scottish mould. In the former song, the opening line “Wench, you’d better watch your master” suggests that the lower-class underdog might not have won the girl, but he sure holds the moral high ground.

The 1970s phenomena that was the Bay City Rollers had 1970s schoolgirls around the world sewing tartan ribbons onto their flares.  Formed in 1964 in Edinburgh, but at their peak in the 1970s, the band endured a long, slow decline, with an elderly stub last appearing in a partial line-up in Japan in 2018 before the death recently of two core members.  Bands in the 1970s and 1980s were reliant on the high-cost economics of the music industry in that period, and the political dial was turned down in the interests of reaching a wide, global teenage (and therefore non-voting) market.  Tartan-chic was internationally on-trend rather than necessarily expressive of regional nationalism.  The K-pop of their day, this was a band surfing on lyrics like “Shang-a-Lang” and “Bye Bye Baby” that required little translation to travel. Music, merchandise and what websites usually describe as their “boy next door” image made this band an easy global sell.

In the 1980s, Scottish bands such as Glaswegians Wet Wet Wet were similarly internationally successful, popular rather than political.  They are still touring – listed as appearing this summer in the EdgeFest [festival]  in the Scottish borders, in a line-up that includes both rock and rock-folk bands like Peat and Diesel, and Skerryvore.

But from the 1990s, something began to shift, both in the technologies of music production, and in Scottish cultural politics.

The sound of Scots in Scottish popular music: from the margins to the centre

It is true that those who enjoy the Proclaimers include many who don’t necessarily share all of their political views.  “I’m Gonna Be” / aka “500 Miles”, heard in the Shrek animated films by global audiences with little interest in politics, proves that point, and indeed this was the song that almost made it into the 2023 Coronation playlist.

One thing that is distinctive – to Scots as well as to most Anglophone listeners – in Scottish pop music is the quite distinctive sound of working-class Scottish accents.  In the 18th century, this encoded an ambiguously pastoral identity that did some very cautious political work in a nation traumatised by the outcome of the Jacobite risings and in the 1790s, the French Revolution: Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns knew this and played on the affordances of that ambiguity to steer a path between conservative and radical politics in their day.  The sound of the Scots tongue still says, working class, common man, but the range of political associations is shaped by the ears of whoever listens.   While some might hear ‘green ogre’, others hear radical working-class politics.  Others also hear, clearly, Scottish nationalist political affiliations.  It is quite hard, in contemporary Scotland, to think of any popular artist who uses music overtly to express unionism.  Careful neutrality, maybe.

Being possessed of a Scottish accent makes an artist, in the ears of their audience, a Scot; that is a threshold that allows many whose ancestry may include a range of different ethnic backgrounds to lay a claim on being part of the Scottish narrative.  Singers such as Lewis Capaldi (born in Glasgow, raised in Bathgate, West Lothian) and Paolo Nutini (born, raised and still resident for at least parts of the year in Paisley) – both huge international stars – have surnames that demonstrate the cultural importance of people of Italian descent to modern Scotland.  Working-class Scots identity is core to both these singers.  Viewers of a recent Netflix biopic saw Capaldi inside the garden shed of his parents’ Bathgate house which served as his first home studio and practice room, and learned that Capaldi is a much happier man performing to small audiences in local pubs and clubs than in huge stadia, however lucrative his current international career is.  Nutini made an early move to London, and seems to be much more comfortable with touring, but retains a strong connection with his home fan base.  He has appeared in BBC Scotland’s Hogmanay programming and has released an iconic cover version of Dougie Maclean’s patriotic anthem “Caledonia” (2006), which speaks to the nostalgic Scottishness that is felt most strongly by a Scot touring away from home.  However, neither of these singers identify themselves explicitly – to date – with the Independence movement; cultural Scottishness has a complicated, and often pragmatic, relationship with what they can sing about and express as a solo singer.  There may be more to be said about the individual affective range of Scottish solo artists in contrast with bands, but if that is the case, I haven’t found the relevant reading. Comments and suggestions welcome.

In band performance contexts, the performance of Scottish identity as inclusive and diverse has received attention.  The emergence of this modern political theme, and its links with Scottish music, was discussed by Peter Symon in a 1997 article on the literary metaphor of ‘Jock Tamson’s Bairns’. The Scots (and Northumbrian) popular saying, ‘We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’, all just people, regardless of ethnicity and class, lies at the heart of this sentiment, and reflects the democratic stamp that had folk-singer Sheena Wellington lead a community-sing-song of Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man” in the opening ceremony for the Scottish parliament in 1999. The fantasy that Scotland is a classless community is a fantasy, I would argue, but one that is also a political aspiration of most people sitting to the left of centre, politically.  Pop and rock, argued Symon in 1997, is more easily able to connect with this democratic idea in modern Scotland than folk and ‘traditional’ music.  The article went on to look at this in the context of a folk/rock crossover, pub-and-club based Edinburgh band also called Jock Tamson’s Bairns.  Symon argued that unlike bands like The Proclaimers and The Corries in the 1980s, ‘the Bairns initially did not articulate political nationalist protest through song lyrics’ and described themselves as ‘apolitical’ (Symon, 1997, p.206). Their music began to change, however, in the 1990s, in pace with the affiliations of many other bands at that point active in Scotland, in the run up to a new age of devolved politics. Symon suggests that in Edinburgh at least, the Voices from Scotland radio projects of Scottish nationalist Billy Kay was much admired and encouraged artists to find a more authentically ‘Scottish’ voice for performance, a move that helped to foreground the political context in many folk and popular music acts.

From the 1980s, under the radar, Scottish rap was picking up its paces and emerging as a new and much more explicitly politicised musical force than folk-rock bands like Jock Tamson’s Bairns.  In the early 21st century, Scots-language hip-hop has emerged as a low-cost, home-made genre associated with some of the most left-leaning, nationalist communities in Scotland.

Scottish rap often has a punk-like anarchic energy, and speaks angrily from the margins, often pushing against the commercial mechanisms of the pop music industry.  In the early years of the 21st century, Dundee College students Gavin Bain (born in South Africa) and Billy Boyd (born and raised locally) managed to trick the global hip hop industry into thinking they were a west-coast American rap group called Silibil n Brains. Travelling to London, they overcame initial resistance to their Scottish accents by creating a fake identity, relying on English ears not to be able to detect any residual East Coast Scots nuances within a patina of fake surfer Californian.  It helped that Gavin’s accent was already polyglot.  Gavin explained to the Dundee Courier that the trick was provoked by initial English stereotyping of Scots: “They were saying when people think of Scotland they think of Braveheart, Groundskeeper Willie [the Scottish janitor from The Simpsons cartoon series], nobody thinks of rap, we can’t sell that” (Dundee Courier, 2021).  Donning fake American accents got them a slot on BBC Radio 1, a record label signing from ANR at Sony, a managerial offer from a top agent, and eventually several successful US tours before a highly-public confession shocked their backers and tail-gaters.  A book is out cataloguing their adventures, and a film is apparently on the cards.

Meanwhile, at home with their native identity, other rap artists were using Scottish cultural difference to connect politically with home audiences, particularly in the run up to and aftermath of the 2014 Independence referendum.  Academic writing on the Scottish hip-hop scene and its connection with the independence movement has been led by David Hook, who also performs with Scottish hip-hop group Stanley Odd (fl.2009- ).  Hook’s doctoral dissertation was an ethnographic study on his work with the band and their performance contexts, combining musical analysis with sociological commentary. His journal publications have gone on to explore how Scottish rap operates in both a global and a local framework (Hook, 2021).  Global hip-hop is a dominant musical culture, yet Scottish hip-hop is also able to speak from the social margins.  Hook has also explored how Stanley Odd – whose lead singer is female – along with other modern rap acts are challenging the hypermasculine gender politics of older rap music (Hook, 2020).  The discourse on gender politics in Scotland is currently distinctly more liberal than in other parts of the UK, and further future research might useful look into how popular music in Scotland might be part of the changing narrative there.

Like the Glasgow-based academic-rock band The Tenementals, which Soundyngs covered in a post earlier this year, Stanley Odd combines sophisticated political thinking with popular music performance.  Their songs engage with socio-political topics ranging from the UK coalition government and the 2014 referendum (“Son I Voted Yes”) to social problems such as drug addiction. This band is rooted in the issues that have dominated recent Scottish politics, and this band, and others like it, are going to be in the centre of emerging and yet-to-be written histories of Scottish music in the 21st century.

Conclusion

Nationalist politics are not inevitably leftist.  But since the end of the post WW2 cold war, socialism has focussed on home battles, and in the Scottish context, this combines with a historical sense of ‘underdog’ identity.  This translated to voting patterns in the early 21st century: although the 2014 independence referendum outcome was a narrow ‘no’, the SNP capture of the labour vote in early 21st century elections was indisputable.  Research into contemporary pop shows that these political shifts are reflected in contemporary popular music, particularly rap.  Some have even seen in battle rap a modern analogue of ‘flyting’ – an ancient Scottish politico-poetic tradition (Flynn and Mitchell, 2014) – or rather, these writers analysed pre-modern poetic flyting through the modern medium of rap. Whichever way the chronological arrow flows here, rap clearly taps into something powerful in Scottish oral culture.

In the 1920s, the Scottish nationalist and man-of-the-left Hugh MacDiarmid called for a new kind of mass-appeal Scottish art music that combined the poetic capacities of the indigenous tongue with the best of modern international musical innovation (Macdiarmid, 1925).  What MacDiarmid had in mind was cerebral art-song of the sort composed by Francis George Scott using lyrics written by literary poets such as Macdiarmid himself.  Contemporary Scottish popular music does much to fulfil Macdiarmid’s rallying call, albeit in a very different style to anything that Macdiarmid might have himself appreciated: a genuinely Scottish national music, he argued, “must to a large extent wait upon poetry” (p.34). Runrig, the Proclaimers and Stanley Odd, I suspect, would all agree.

Further Reading

Bain, Gavin, California Schemin’ (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

Behr, Adam and Brennan, Matt, ‘The Place of Popular Music in Scotland’s Cultural Policy’, in Cultural Trends 23 issue 3 (2014), pp.169-177

Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now”, Film Documentary, Netflix (2023)

Cloonan, Martin, Popular Music and the State in the UK: Culture, Trade or Industry?  (2007; Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) – see chapter 6, pp.119-140 on the situation in Scotland post-devolution

Flynn, Caitlin, and Mitchell, Christy, ‘”It may be verifyit that thy wit is thin”: Interpreting Older Scots Flyting through Hip Hop Aesthetics’, in Oral Tradition 29(1), 2014

Forsyth, Alastair and Cloonan, Martin, ‘Alco-pop?  The Use of Popular Music in Glasgow Pubs’, in Popular Music and Society 31(1), (2001), pp.57-78

Hall, Amy, ‘The Greatest hip-hop hoax 20 years on: how two Dundee students fooled music industry and lived out every rappers dream’, Dundee Courier 12/5/2021

Harvey, Aiden, ‘Motivations and Expectations of Higher popular music education in Scotland: student perspectives’, Journal of Popular Music Education 7(1), 2023, pp.69-85 – highlights gaps between education experiences and progression into ‘making a living’ with the activity.

Hook, David, ‘An Autoethnography of Scottish hip-hop: identity, locality, outsiderdom and social commentary. ‘ PhD Thesis, (Edinburgh Napier University, 2018) https://napier-repository.worktribe.com/output/1255222/an-autoethnography-of-scottish-hip-hop-identity-locality-outsiderdom-and-social-commentary

Hook, David, ‘Growing up in hip hop: the expression of self in hypermasculine cultures’, Global Hip Hop Studies 1(1), 2020, pp.71-94

Hook, David, ‘Scottish people can’t rap’: the local and global in Scottish hip-hop‘, in Popular Music 40(1), 2021, pp.75-90

Keenan-Bryce, Ashleigh, ‘Proclaimers say Coronation playlist row passed them by’, BBC Scotland News 25/5/23

McKerrell, Simon, ‘Modern Scottish Bands (1970-1990): Cash as Authenticity’, in Scottish Music Review 2(1), 2011, pp.1-14

Macdiarmid, Hugh, ‘Francis George Scott’, The Scottish Educational Journal 11th September 1925, republished within Contemporary Scottish Studies (Edinburgh: Lindsay & Co, 1976), pp.32-35

Symon, P and Martin Cloonan, Martin, ‘Playing Away: popular music and devolution in Scotland’, in Scottish Affairs, 40 (2002), pp.99-122 – looks at the impact of devolution on pop music and suggests there was a lag in political development and cultural expression

Symon, P, ‘Music and National Identity in Scotland: a study of Jock Tamson’s Bairns’, in Popular Music 16(2), 1997, pp.203-216

Tranmer, Jeremy, ‘Popular Music and Left-Wing Scottishness: Musique Populaire et scotticité de gauche’, in Écosse: Migrations et frontières 18 (2016), pp.133-149

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