“You'll Never Live Like Common People” – The Fetishisation of Being Working Class
I may be gazing through a haze of 90s Britpop nostalgia, but I think Pulp’s ‘Common People’ paints an apt pastiche of plenty of the peers I went to university with.
You might know the ones I mean. The ones you’d see on a night-out wearing a unisex North Face puffer jacket meant to give the illusion of ‘credibility’. The corduroy flares robbed straight from their mum’s bottom drawer. The ratty white high-tops that looked like shit but actually cost two hundred quid. The badly rolled cigarettes dolled out on cue, huddled in shivering fire exits.
Those ones.
But then again, maybe not. My uni experience was odd, to put it bluntly. I went to university in Durham, a mining-cum-market town in the North East, and it wasn’t that far removed from my own childhood growing up in the North West- the biggest difference was that Durham had a nicer cathedral. So I found it hard to understand the disparity between the familiarity of my new setting and the seemingly alien social codes and expectations of many of my new peers.
At eighteen (and a young eighteen at that), I thrust myself into a new social setting, determined to start fresh and make new friends. I was pretty lucky in that regard, and will hopefully be bothering them for a long time yet. Yet I was still caught off guard by their sheer difference: how well travelled they were, how interesting their extracurriculars had been, how it seemed like they had arrived at the same destination as myself with a lot more knowledge behind them than me. For a moment, I felt as if the safety-line of my life had detached, hurling me into the unknown where I had no bearing or foothold.
My experience was not unique; the sudden exposure to people who had had a greater experience of the universe than me would always be a jarring one, at least at first, and in the long-run was more beneficial than I could realise at the time. Gradually I settled, found the right combinations of people, and clung to them like a drunk staggering from pillar to post. Not always metaphorically, either. But as I got used to this new environment, some things became clearer. You noticed that as your own groups formed, so did others- they became more uniform, less the tangled, hazy mess of freshers’ week crowds, and more the clearly identified pockets of people with similar ideas and outlooks. The uniforms also began to show up, very literally.
Because on every night out, you could spot a middle-class student without too much work. Always well-spoken, always dressed immaculately shoddily. I’m speaking in stereotypes, of course, and half-remembered ones at that. But I do remember seeing the carry on, the almost breathless attempt to marvel at how twee this all was, how gauche it was to be drinking up North amongst the cheap pints and the locals.
I also remember, apart from the nights’ out, a sense of divide, a certain barrier. You overheard things in the college dining hall. Their worries weren’t yours. Stocks, internships in banking, the summer plans if it all went to ground, and occasionally that rare joke of a thing, the signet ring (although I can’t exaggerate how much of a rarity this actually was- I only met one person who wore one in my three years there). Compared to me, lucky to push from one week to the next staying on top of course reading, this immaculate focus on the future felt like a world away. Granted, this could be chalked up to a difference of experience; neither of my parents went to university, and I never felt like I had a clue where I was heading beyond the next essay deadline. Flying without a rudder would be putting it kindly.
What struck me more than the dress, the cheap baccy, the husky voices, was the attitude that ‘looking’ and ‘acting’ working class was a novelty, something to be picked up and dropped by comparison to their own backgrounds. Which by implication meant dressing like they had no money, drinking to oblivion, and generally treating the idea of being working class as simply an aesthetic.
I’ll own up to my faults here. Towards the end of my first and for a good chunk of my second year, my reaction was one of bitterness. Reading a little more Ted Hughes and Tony Harrison (and still only a very little) gave me some sense that by virtue of being working class, I had something to defend against the encroachment of more refined voices, that the middle class attitude of wanting to appear working class was something to be batted away and scolded. Of course, class isn’t clear, and history doesn’t offer up simple dimensions of right and wrong.
I’m not speaking from the school of hard knocks. While neither of my parents are professionals, money was never a worry- as a kid, I never experienced the fear of problems that could outsize you. Food was never scarce, and I ate like a pig. The house wasn’t big, but it was warm. I didn’t have the subconscious paranoia that when I got in from school, the electricity might not be on. In short, I have been very, very lucky, and I don’t want to pretend that I’ve felt hardship in the way that many people have.
Working in education has opened my eyes to just how fortunate I am and have been. Class in modern Britain is a far murkier business than the simple dichotomy of ‘working or middle’, with subdivisions and revisions far outstripping George Orwell’s evaluation of a strata where one could be placed according to such loosely geographical terms as ‘lower-upper-middle class’. Being ‘working class’ is, in many ways, a catch-all term for a deeply stratified workforce, ranging from the relatively well-off to those on the threshold of poverty.
So far, it may seem I haven’t pointed to anything that roundly highlights any serious flaws- just students kicking off the constraints of home, finding a new sense of place and purpose, and adjusting to new people. All fair enough, and I’d be a hypocrite to condemn that- tattered old jackets and fleeces with fake brands found in Student Union bargain bins are your own prerogative and mistake to make, depending on your eye for fashion.
However, all of this must be taken in a wider context- my alma mater has made headlines recently for all the wrong reasons. One of the standout headlines is that Durham has a class problem. The first-hand experiences of working-class students facing ridicule and a culture of dismissal purely because of their accent or where they are from are hard to read, but not hard to imagine within the context of the university. This is where the issue of middle-class people adopting certain mannerisms and outlooks rears its head.
So with this almost goggle-eyed desire to be ‘on trend’ on one hand, and a more vindictive streak on the other, Durham’s class problem became more obvious. The vindictive streak was certainly there- you might overhear belittling comments towards Durham locals, the off-hand piss-takes of an accent in JCR bars, or catch the half-cocked look when meeting someone for the first time and telling them I went to a state school.
This double-edged treatment of cold dismissal from one quarter, and a strange masquerade from the other as something they were clearly not, never felt like two separate polarities but two sides of the same coin, one which could not exist without the other. Both attitudes tended to treat working class people as something beneath them, something to be picked up and joked about.
We can’t pretend to live in a country where your household income and social position has no impact on where you will end up in life. No matter how lucky or unlucky you have been in the circumstances of your birth and family position, society is no fictive construct around you. Our treatment and attitudes towards one another will always have an impact on each other. So for all the harmlessness of softening an accent to ‘fit in’ or changing up a wardrobe, the process of fetishising people who would never experience the same opportunities into an aesthetic never sat right with me. The rest of the verse from ‘Common People’ might just summarise it best:
“You'll never do whatever common people do
Never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view.”
I don’t mean this to be pitying. Being working class is not a handicap which drags your life to the side-lines, but fetishising and finally commodifying it only detracts from the reality of those who live it. Where you grew up and what you can afford is not an aesthetic or a choice, it’s a simple reality- diminishing that only fuels and reinforces more unsavoury attitudes.
Written by Sam Byrne
Sam is currently enjoying his summer break after a challenging period of not doing very much teaching. He has rekindled his love of being immature and mouthing off. Like his pupils, he desperately needs the routine of being back in a classroom.