OpinionFlorence + the Machine This article is more than 12 years old

Florence and the Machine feed a bourgeois fantasy of 'folksiness'

This article is more than 12 years oldAlex NivenFATM's popularity reveals how the liberal middle classes have abandoned true counterculture for escapist vintage chic

The music world is buzzing with excitement this week. Against a backdrop of seemingly immovable industry pessimism, the release of the second Florence and the Machine album, Ceremonials, has occasioned widespread hope that its magic formula of style and kooky indie eclecticism might stem the tide of haemorrhaging sales and anoint a new PJ Harvey-style icon in the process.

Yet there is something profoundly odd about the hyperbolic championing of Florence Welch. At a time when a climate of burgeoning radicalism should be reorienting our culture so that hitherto suppressed voices from the margins might be heard, why is the Great British Hope of 2011 a fashion-obsessed, privately educated young woman from a family of privileged metropolitan movers and shakers? In fact, shouldn't the red carpet treatment afforded to Welch make us question the extent to which we are all complicit in a top-heavy system that no longer has any qualms about poshness and ostentatious consumer decadence?

The huge popularity of FATM's hermetic, Bloomsbury-meets-Björk aesthetic is symptomatic of a society that has become almost irretrievably divided without knowing it. Though it often makes the right noises and appears sympathetic to reform, liberal, middle-class Britain has abandoned counterculture and true radicalism for an unfortunate lingering obsession with escapist lifestyle fantasy. While inequalities have mushroomed in the UK in recent years, the British bourgeoisie has increasingly indulged in a way of life that seeks to cover over its affluence with vague gestures at radical chic, pastoral myth, and down-at-heel "folksiness".

Though she is not specifically a member of the "nu-folk" scene that includes similarly hyped contemporaries such as Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons and Emmy the Great, FATM occupies a similar cultural space: collectively, these artists seem to speak of a wealthy urban elite turning aside from the realities of the political system that undergirds its wealth and power to revel in a daydream of vintage Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell records, secret gardens, allotments, woolly jumpers, fairy costumes, cake-baking, and homey, Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On bathos.

In such a way, the most aloof, entitled middle-class since the Edwardian period has become inured to its position at the top of an emphatically inegalitarian social hierarchy. Meanwhile, deprived of its vocabulary and identity, the real "folk" or working class has increasingly receded from view over the past couple of decades, as several commentators this year have noted. And the pervasive notion that There Is No Alternative has been compounded by the fact that the alternative, proletarian, bottom-up traditions of the past (independent music, folk culture, communitarian politics) have been casually appropriated by a liberal-conservative elite that blithely attaches itself to faux-populist causes such as "big society", nu-folk music, Blue Labour, and Green Toryism. FATM's catwalk pastiche of Kate Bush's wayward, subversive English eccentricity is merely the latest in this series of top-down co-options of "grassroots" marginality.

So what is the alternative? Perhaps the point is that we politicians, journalists, academics, and indie musicians are part of the problem rather than the solution, and are likely to carry on being so until substantial reform of the political system allows the genuinely marginalised, alternative sectors of the world a chance to shine. There has been much discussion about the dearth of a musical accompaniment to the recent Occupy protests, but in a society that has been so profoundly unequal and biased in favour of the Florence Welches of Britain for so long, how could it be otherwise?

Change, when it comes, will come from the ground, as the example of all the best folk and countercultural movements from the past teaches us. Here and there, in the politically charged, actually existing British folk music of Chris Wood and The Unthanks, for example, or in the London hip-hop of Akala, or in the conscious, genre-defying music of Rwanda-via-Berlin vocalist Barbara Panther, hints of a revival of a more engaged, radical tradition of alternative pop music can be heard. We need to think seriously about how we can collectively provide the social conditions for this sort of culture to grow, rather than retreating into Florence and the Machine's fleeting world of privilege and weekend escapism.

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