Working Class Musicians Have Disappeared - What's Left Is Bland and Safe

The proportion of working-class actors, musicians, and writers has halved since the 1970s.

Recent UK findings revealed something demoralising about modern music. A 2022 study found that the proportion of working-class actors, musicians, and writers has halved since the 1970s. Another, published in 2024, found that fewer than one in ten arts workers in Britain now come from working-class backgrounds. Top-selling musicians are six times more likely than the general population to have attended private schools. Nearly a third of artistic directors and creative leaders are privately educated.

These are not marginal skews. They describe a wholesale class re-sorting of cultural production, one that has unfolded quietly, and almost entirely without commentary.

What’s striking is not just the scale of the shift, but its emotional flatness. No editorials about the loss of working-class voice. Just a faint sense, shared by many listeners, that something has thinned out. That the music is technically accomplished and oddly bloodless. And when working-class participation wanes, what disappears is not just representation, but hunger.

The great musical explosions of the twentieth century were not polite affairs. The British and American 1960s were not golden ages because the artists were nicer, better educated, or more sensitive. They were golden because they were socially combustible.

Working-class musicians brought with them instability, erotic charge, resentment, longing, bravado, humour, boredom, desperation, and a sense that music was not self-expression but escape. It was a way out of the factory, the estate, the dead-end town. That pressure produced sound.

Joy Division’s sound and aesthetic have often been described as almost preternaturally evocative of the industrial decayed landscape of post-industrial Manchester. The Stone Roses evoke braggadocio, swagger but also yearning and tenderness and ecstasy.

That doesn’t mean this was the dominant route. Mick Jagger went to the prestigious London School of Economics. It encompasses a kind of stymying conventional lower middle class – cramped two-up two downs, the kind of homes that Paul McCartney, Elton John, David Bowie et all emerged from.

But fast-forward to the present, and the economics of cultural participation are very different.