I was just watching BBC Breakfast News as usual, and came across something which really, really got on my nerves. They were running an item on Pulp, Jarvis Cocker and Britpop, about how it was so influential and the legacy it left, especially on places like Sheffield. Towards the end of the piece, they quite predictably interviewed a few fans: what I found so annoying was how such fans saw themselves as outsiders. They were saying how, to be into a band like Pulp, you had to be a bit weird, strange or unusual, gleefully emphasising how different and abnormal they thought they were. The thing is, the people saying this were white, male, able-bodied and (I assume) straight. Sorry, but I couldn’t help getting rather wound up by that. They obviously belong to the most mainstream, advantaged cohort of people there is; one which faces the least discrimination of all. Liking a certain band or genre of music does not make you an outsider, yet they seemed to regard theirselves as oddities swimming against the mainstream current.

As someone who faces various kinds of discrimination every day, down to being unable to get where I want to go due to places being inaccessible for wheelchair users, to hear such a person trumpet how ‘different’ he felt he was, really felt like a piss-take. He would know nothing of the kind of persecution a member of any real minority faces. But then, these days it seems to be culturally fashionable to be a member of a minority: nobody wants to be seen as a member of the advantaged, privileged few, so rather like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen will jump at anything that makes them seem hard done by, persecuted or different. The thing is, liking the music of a certain band, and being educated in a special school alongside seven or eight quite disabled young people, are hardly the same thing.