Lemmy gambled and won – but kids, don’t try this at home

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/01/lemmy-gambled-won-more-unusual-than-excess

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The French newspaper Libération announced the news that Lemmy from Motörhead had died by putting it on the front page, with the headline: “Fuck!” You can’t help feeling that Ian from Stoke-on-Trent would have found that quite funny. The solemnly repeated news on Radio 4’s Today programme, part of a 24-hour frenzy of broadcasters doing their best to explain Lemmy’s significance as a musician and cultural figure? You can’t help feeling that Ian from Stoke-on-Trent would have found that hilarious.

Because it is quite funny how the mainstream has become accustomed to acknowledging the importance of countercultural figures, expressing affection and admiration, while simultaneously maintaining its own position as a bulwark against everything they stand for.

Phrases such as “life of excess” have become fond, indulgently amused code for stuff like “massive drug use”, as the actual music press made clear. Significance of iconic life marked, then it’s straight back to reporting the “war on drugs”, as if it’s perfectly sane and sensible to use every means possible to stamp out the evil of people a teeny, tiny bit like Lemmy, who aren’t Lemmy.

The liberal establishment set out its exceptionalist stall some while before Motörhead existed, with William Rees-Mogg’s famous 1967 Times leader arguing that imprisoning Mick Jagger for possession of drugs would be wrong, for “who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” Breaking on wheels is for little people.

Related: The Guardian’s alternative New Year’s honours: we salute you

Jagger, of course, has since then moved as sinuously as he always moves from counterculture to establishment, accepting a knighthood for services to popular music in 2003. Which could lead one to believe that Britain and its values have changed in the last half-century. Not so, says the Times. Research carried out by the newspaper on the eve of the publication of the New Year honours list “shows that nearly half the recipients of honours ranked at knighthood or above had been privately educated, the same proportion as it was 60 years ago.”

Looking on the bright side, this doesn’t mean that things haven’t changed at all. Women now get half of these gongs. Ethnic minorities get 7%. Some members of those cohorts no doubt went to private schools. And, of course, there’s preferential bias to consider as well. The sort of people who don’t want honours are the sort of people who don’t want to be seen as part of the establishment. I don’t suppose Lemmy died weeping because he’d never been given a knighthood for services to Motörhead music.

Nevertheless, these changes to the weave – women, ethnic minorities – only serve to emphasise how the cloth is still cut the same way. Archetypal success in Britain (in England) still means private school, Oxbridge (which continues to figure strongly) and, eventually, an honour. You went to a comprehensive school, your dad was a mysterious and absent Nigerian and you got an OBE (as my friend Tony Ageh did last year, for services to broadcasting)? Well, it’s so unusual that it barely computes.

Ageh’s story is good. It’s great. Not much school. No university. Then a career full of blue-skies thinking, innovation and accomplishment. But it simply doesn’t bolster the story of how to be a success that established England likes to tell itself and its children. He too is the exception who proves the rule. Anyone who succeeds without following the rules always is.

And if one thing has changed in the past 60 years, it’s that many more people now believe that school success, university success, professional success is the be-all and end-all of life. Anything other than that is falling short. If you can’t quite manage the archetypal route, then you have to fashion a rough approximation, as best you can. There’s not much else, and you have to be brave to believe that there is. Even the kids from X Factor are brave, in their way.

Related: New year honours 2015: the full list

It’s unbelievably crazy: a system that takes an expensive, elitist, highly specialised experience as the rule and insists that playing by this rule is the only way to win. No wonder the same people keep on winning, generation after generation. Feminists call it the patriarchy. But it’s just plain old elitism, biased towards Eton-and-Oxbridge men simply because it was built that way. The inclusion of Lynton Crosby, the Tory election guru, in this year’s honours list simply illustrates how complacent these men have become in their knowledge that they’ve got it all sewn up.

I thought the Guardian’s investigation into the Harley Street sperm-donor clinic that was turning away potential donors with dyslexia illustrated this mindset very well. Conventional brains that generate conventional success are prized. People who think differently are a risk. Successful, creative people endlessly give interviews explaining how they were miserable at school and later discovered they were dyslexic; few as touchingly as the film director Steve McQueen. Yet still people perpetuate the idea that a mind that doesn’t excel in a way that can be measured in teaching to the test is an inferior one – or even, as this clinic put it, a “diseased” one.

Transgression can be tolerated, even celebrated, in the gifted and the exceptional. Lemmy’s life of drug-taking can be saluted with a wry smile, even if it can’t be made explicit that without the workings of his chemically altered mind, his music wouldn’t have been so distinctive and influential. He gambled, and he won. While he’s admired for doing so, the underlying message is very much against gambling: “Don’t do this at home, kids. We’ll put you in jail and wreck your lives forever. You’re not butterflies. You’re not even bats, like Lemmy.”