Global village

A young band in Norfolk was formed in 2004 called Faintest Idea, specialising in ‘Agricultural Ska Punk’. They played in village halls and fields, this being the era of raves held in alternative rural locations by and for young people who wanted to avoid the commercial and expensive manufactured music common in town clubs. They revelled, as their name, and particularly their strapline, suggests, in their cultural hybridity, assimilating global influences from Caribbean music and city avant-garde, with a spark of invention rooted explicitly in the countryside. This phase of their overtly rural association was, in fact, short-lived and, perhaps inevitably, they urbanised, becoming ‘Rude Boy Street Punk’. ¹ However, this little story exemplifies the potential complexity of what is perceived as ‘local’ and ‘other’. Playing with a sense of hybrid identity has become commonplace and, at a time when so many global influences are ubiquitous, coming at us through all conceivable media, multiple interpenetration of cultures potentially is as much a condition of contemporary countryside life as anywhere else. One of the points made by David Crouch, is that the ‘othering’ of peoples is as much a rural as an urban phenomenon, and as much a complex matter of geographical orientation as it is cultural. ² And, as Adam Gopnik declared on a BBC Radio 4 broadcast in March 2016, hybridity is a constant in culture, rather than the exception. ‘We are mixed in nature, to be human is to be hybrid,’ he declared. ³