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Music

Why Posh People Should Never Make Ironically "Urban" Music

And why we should never speak of the Eton boys take on "Gangnam Style" ever again.

Eton College is one of Britain’s strongest brands. It’s up there with Tesco, Rolls Royce and The Rolling Stones. It represents some of the things the British are best known for: empire, wearing ties, covert sodomy. A certain type of rich family across the globe longs to send their son there. A certain kind of man longs to teach there (I won’t beat around the bush: I’m talking about a man who likes imprisoned underage boys). A certain type of tailor longs to make clothes for there. So when an Eton-made version of Gangnam Style shot out into the world it was no surprise that it became “a viral”.

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The mighty cultural significance of this, though, is that it’s the biggest example of the fact that posh guys now all know that doing “urban” stuff is a sure-fire way of making friends with the world. The world then thinks: “A posh guy! Rapping?! WTF!! But posh guys don’t rap; they sing barbershop, opera and critically acclaimed outsider rock music! And Eton guys? They sing their song about boating. An Eton person rapping is such a hilarious anachronism! It’s like Abraham Lincoln skateboarding or Wiley speaking Latin: it just wouldn’t happen”!

But of course it does happen. The posh guy rapping for comedy affect is now a well-established niche. Guys in boarding schools up and down the country think it’s great #banter to spit a few bars about getting detention and owning castles. Example number one; the “Boris rap”…

Its “Ya, Ya, Ya… Ra, Ra, Ra” chorus takes a man who already makes political capital by being the comedy posho and tries to make internet capital out of it. The kind of capital that this guy, who seems to be a not-posh guy pretending to be posh, failed to make when he delivered his upper class take on Eminem in front of a Scottish flag.

Making fun of your hilarious posh ways has become the default position for 1% teenagers who want to participate in “urban” culture but are either savvy enough or not committed enough to try and pass themselves off as the real deal. They’re young guys pulling out-of-touch old guy moves. They’re doing what disgraced Conservative MP Neil Hamilton and his “battleaxe” wife Christine did when they made this frankly indescribable World Cup song for England in 2006.

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They’re doing what Prince Charles did when he told some “black youths” (as I imagine he referred to them) that he was “digging that crazy rhythm”. The crazy rhythm he really wanted to be digging was the rhythm of his frantically moving legs as he ran from “the decks” to his creepy heritage social experiment.

If Eton Style, the Hamiltons and our future King are playing it for laughs, there’s also a careerist no man’s land between taking the piss and being really, really real. People have tried to make careers out of this. Victoria Aitken, daughter of perjury-loving Tory MP Jonathan Aitken, tried to sell herself as “Vicky from the block”, a posh girl rapper who had gone from “riches to rags” (because her father was a cunt). That didn’t work so now she’s trying her hand at Euro dance credibility and has seemingly had all the songs from her rap era removed from YouTube.

Then there's Mr. Hudson, who before he was BFFs with Kanye had a band called The Library and referenced the fact that it was pretty LOL that a guy like him, who went to Oxford, was part of the rap game. The cover for his first album features our boy Hudson and his Library bros in “hip hop” jeans and “academic guy” jackets. It’s the same principle as “Eton Style”, just done in a cringingly earnest way. A high point for me in this era of music was getting a friend of mine to text a girl he was sleeping with asking her to come round so he could run them a hot bath and throw on a little Mr. Hudson and the Library.

If Victoria Aitken and Mr. Hudson initially saw some humour in their posh urban antics, then there’s a long line of poshos who’ve had the commitment and identity problems necessary to really try and make it in the rap game. So if the Eton Style gang want to know who the original credible(?!) posh rapper is, they should get acquainted with Yungun, a one-time stalwart of the UK hip hop scene. Here’s his big hit “City Breaks” in which he raps about speaking in French, taking girls to the Lake District and getting away from the stress of city life. Note: Yungun is now a very successful commercial lawyer.

But finally, for those aspiring private school reggae singers, there’s Natty, who went to the same fee-paying school as 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and spoke in a fake north London rudeboy accent before he realised singing in a fake Jamaican accent might sell a few records.

Of course, if that all sounds too serious, the hilarious posh route is always open and has a rich history. After all, English Kings used to sing bawdy tavern songs and Fry and Laurie had a good old chuckle over the “dangerous” music of their day…that genre of the hilarious downtrodden working man, metal.

Follow Oscar on Twitter @oscarrickettnow