Formed in 1977 and arguably the most influential band of the UK’s 2 Tone Ska scene, “Ghost Town”, a skewed ska oddity, was written by Jerry Dammers, The Specials’ keyboardist and released in June 1981. It was their last song before splitting up and reforming as The Special AKA and stayed at the top of the UK charts for three weeks.

Strange music video

Its audio-visual manifestation was also strange. The music video was directed by Barney Bubbles and filmed in the East End of London, Blackwell Tunnel and a before-hours City of London. Opening with upshots of brutalist grey tower blocks to the sound of those Hammond organ chords and flute, it seems as though there is no one in town but The Specials, who are all crowded into a 1962 Vauxhall Cresta, careering through the empty streets and lip syncing.

Not a dance track

So what did those fight-ready Skinheads do in those small town discos when “Ghost Town” came on? Not moonstomping, not smooching. This was not a dance track. It wasn’t the “romantic” one the DJ played at the end of the night.

 Racial Otherness : He studied the significance of black representation. The ‘ There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’ relates back to the race relations from the Second World war. The black community are constructed as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain. He draws attention to ‘Lurid newspaper reports of black pimps living off the immoral earnings of white women’.

– Post-colonial Melancholia : Used to describe the deep-rooted shame felt as a result of the loss of the British Empire. He states that the twin pull of the Empire guilt and the loss of British global power have resulted in a national post-colonial melancholia which is a sort of collective depression that both absorbs and blinkers the British outlook.

-The story of UK race relations post World War 2: In the 1950’s, the black community such as Indians and the Caribbean came to England because ‘we’ were in desperate need of filled job spaces.

Legacy of the empire: In his book ‘After Empire’, which was written in 2004, he suggests that we live in ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’. He argues that the British are undergoing a crisis of national identity.

The search for Albion: Albionic nostalgia is a representation of Englishness that is marked by nostalgia and produces a whitewashed version of an idealised England.

Ghost Town article: No job to be found in this country,” one voice cries out. “The people getting angry,” booms another. Talks about when the music video was released and how it was against a backdrop of rising unemployment.

Racial otherness: ‘Ain’t no black in union jack’- His book

Civilisation:

For Gilroy, the 9/11 World trade Centre terrorist attack in 2001, and it’s aftermath, radically altered both the tone and nature of the media-orientated representations regarding race and racial difference.

Legacy of the Empire:

Gilroy suggests that we live in a ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’ (Gilroy, 2004) He argued that the British are undergoing a crisis of national identity: the loss of the British Empire has forced a collective question regarding British identification.

Postcolonial Theory :

– Racial Otherness : Gilroy studied the importance of black representation. The ‘ There ain’t no black in the Union Jack relates back to the race relations from the Second World war. Thus where the poster-war wave of immigration from the West Indies produced a series of worries and anxieties regarding immigrant behaviour. The black community are constructed as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain. There were worries that immigrant communities would swamp / take over white Britain. These fears were further noted in the news in late 1970s and 1980s and routed the black community with assaults, muggings and other violent crimes.

‘It is not then a matter of how many blacks there are, but of the type of danger they represent to the nation’ – Gilroy 2008

– Post-colonial Melancholia :

-The story of UK race relations post W.W. 2 : In 1950’s, the black community such as Indians and the Caribbean came to England as ‘we’ were in desperate need of filled job spaces.

– Legacy of the Empire : Gilroy suggests that we live in ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’. England couldn’t accept the fact that it was loosing its empire power.

Ghost Town – BBC

Quote – “It was clear that something was very, very, wrong,” the song’s writer, Jerry Dammers, has said.

Quote – “I saw it develop from a boom town, my family doing very well, through to the collapse of the industry and the bottom falling out of family life. Your economy is destroyed and, to me, that’s what Ghost Town is about.”

Quote – “No job to be found in this country,” one voice cries out. “The people getting angry,” booms another, ominously.

 Specials grew up in the 1960s listening to a mixture of British and American pop and Jamaican ska. 1981, industrial decline had left the city suffering badly. Unemployment was among the highest in the UK. The Specials, too, encapsulated Britain’s burgeoning multiculturalism. It expressed the mood of the early days of Thatcher’s Britain for many. 

paul gilroy coined the word ‘racial otherness’ and how this racial otherness caused stigmatisation within the black community.

he also shifts his gaze upon the post british industialism as well as the ‘colonial melencholia’ as a result of englands decline within their global pressence this is a result of WWII

Gilroy’s study of ‘there is no black in the union jack’ where he discusses the post war wave of immigration also known as the wind rush generation this lead to a series of anxiety’s and the rising suspicion that England will be ‘swamped ‘ and that there is no longer a ‘white Brittan’ the rise of these suspicions lead to subjugation upon the black community and the rise of riots and inequality and the rise of neo’ Nazis’ and ‘paki bashers’ the cause of all the turmoil started with the colonial melancholia where people chose to rise against the immigrants taking ‘white British jobs’ and the rise of steady unemployment surfaced the riots and the band the specials created a vision of multiculturalism where they took reggae with pop and turned it into something new called ska a new music of cultural reggae and a mixture of pop creating a unity of the races.

Reggae: the sound that revolutionised Britain:

It was punk’s “Summer Of Hate”, 1977, and the required pose was a sneer, a leather jacket and something hacked about – a spiky haircut, a ripped T-shirt, a sawn-off school tie. And, of course, no flares, the despised flag of hippiedom. But at the cold, concrete roots of Britain a very different aesthetic was also in the ascendant, one calling for an oversized tam, dreadlocks and a display of “the red, gold and green”, the colours of Rastafari.

In reggae terms, it had taken the emergence of Bob Marley to effect the uneasy coalition of rock fans, black youth, lofty Rastas and proto-punks that confronted each other at his celebrated 1975 Lyceum shows. After Marley, reggae was taken seriously as music of substance and innovation, where previously it had been treated at best as a novelty or simply ridiculed.

Key concepts:

● Cultural resistance
● Cultural hegemony
● Subcultural theory

Cultural Hegemony:

• Theorised by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher in the 1930s
• Hegemonic – dominant, ruling, most powerful
• Hegemonic Culture – the dominant culture
• Cultural Hegemony – power, rule or domination maintained by ideological or cultural means

Cultural hegemony functions by encouraging the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate ideology. Their ideologies are expresses and maintained through economic, political, moral and social institutions. These institutions surround the people in their every day life, and eventually influence their subconscious into accepting the norms, values and beliefs of the dominant social group. As a result, oppressed groups are lead to believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.

Context:
● Race Relations
● Thatcher’s Britain

Thatcher’s Britain

• Prime Minister 1979-90
• Militant campaigner for middle class interests
• Extreme attitude towards immigration
• British Nationality Act 1981: introduced a series of increasingly strict immigration procedure and prevented Asian people from entering Britain

Resistance and political protest:

• laws don’t necessarily equal change
• change is much more likely through culture- which is normally more subtle and isn’t always riots and big gestures.
• everyday people
• Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.- doesn’t change public’s opinion