The Creeping Gentrification of Everything
Some of my friends went to the Glastonbury music festival this year, or just “Glastonbury” as it now seems to be called. Years ago it was a music festival for young people to listen to independent bands playing their own music, and to have a good time. At some point along the way – like anything else successful – it all changed. Zoom forward a decade, and you get what happened this year – where crowd photos are filled with thirty and forty somethings, where half the encampments are filled with children's entertainers, and the half the “headline” acts (of which there should be none) are has-been label artists, or as happened this year – rappers.
I know I'm going to draw flack for this, but this is my opinion, and I can write what I like here. I tend to side with MTV before it became a commercial shadow of it's former self – there was a damn good reason MTV banned rapfor so many years, and why MTV died a death once it let it in. MTV was “Music Television” – not “Smart ass talking fast to a ripped off backing track Television”.
I didn't intend to set out on a rant against Glastonbury – it's just the most recent public event that has been ruined by the wealthy middle class steamroller. I would have argued that the most appealing human experience would be “Burning Man” in the Black Rock Desert, but then friends I know that have been for years say it has begun changing too – and not for the better.
We went to a local music festival last year – where a succession of bands were rolled out that really should have been told to stop about twenty years previously. Meanwhile all the talented kids far and wide wouldn't have a chance of stepping on the stage. The field was surrounded by coffee shops, expensive burger bars, and outdoor clothes shops. Um... nope.
The year before I moved to the place I now live a historic brewery was sold to developers. There had been plans to develop it into a thriving town centre for young people, with a cinema, bowling alley, fast food restaurants, and bars. The powers-that-be (read: people of a certain age) stopped it dead in it's tracks, and the brewery was re-developed into luxury apartments that nobody in the town could afford. The kids then had nowhere to go, so the same people that voted against the re-development started complaining about teenagers in the town centre.
Over the years I have lived here, all the independent shops have gone – bookstores, butchers, fishmongers, tailors – replaced by chain bars, coffee shops, and boutiques for women of a certain age. We can buy a coffee in the high street from a number of overpriced cafes, but we can't buy a washing up bowl.
It's almost like a creeping cancer caused by wealth invades and ruins everything different, unique, independent, or interesting. Anything popular becomes an opportunity to make money that can be branded, polished, and repeated. Suddenly every town has a music festival. Every town has the same coffee shops. Every town has the same eateries. Every town has the same grocery stores.
I can't help thinking the creeping gentrification of everything is an attempt to make us all the same too – wearing the same labels, watching the same TV shows, using the same mobile phones, doing the same jobs... And then I think of Dash's line from “The Incredibles”;
“If everybody is special, nobody is special”.