Antonio Gramsci
Key Terms:
● Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
● Hegemonic culture: the dominant culture
● Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
● Ideology: worldview – beliefs, assumptions and values
When writing in the 1930s Gramsci researched why so many people followed and believed in fascist Germany.
It became the idea about hegemony, where more powerful people would change peoples views and imbedded their own political views deep into their culture as the easiest way to make someone believe in such extreme views is to access their emotional and mental state and to get them to truly believe in what they are told, which is done through this hegemony. —–>
- Cultural hegemony functions by framing the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology - The ideologies of the dominant group are expressed and maintained through its economic, political, moral,
and social institutions (like the education system and the media). - As a result, oppressed groups believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and
inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.
Do you remember the good old days before the Ghost Town? – Magazine
Context:
- The Specials, a band of the immediate post-punk period.
- It was a track which bottled the discord, racial tensions and societal breakdown happening in the UK that summer.
- GT music video was directed by Barney Bubbles
- Day before GT reached no1, Britain erupted:
- Had been riots in Brixton the previous month, sparked by a new police stop-and-search policy named Operation Swamp 81 after Margaret Thatcher‘s 1978 assertion that the UK ‘might be rather swamped by people of a different culture‘:
- 943 people – majority black – were stopped by plainclothes officers in 6 days.
The music video as said by Horace Panter: an original Special
- I think the music video works (a) ‘because it was done in the middle of the night with all the brooding and menace that comes with the dark.
- (b) ‘when dawn finally broke and we drove through the City district, there was nobody else around. The political/social context of the song didn’t really materialise until the Brixton/Toxteth/Handsworth riots in July 1981, by which time the song was No.1 in the singles charts.
