Chumbawamba - The Boy Bands Have Won.... (No Masters, 2007)

Chumbawamba - The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won
Perhaps the problem's not the "winners" but the contest, and maybe the extent to which you believe such myths matter is a measure of your alienation from true political struggle.

When competing for cultural capital, it helps to have moral righteousness on your side, natch. If it doesn't exist, however, you have to invent it for the occasion.

You advocate yoking art to mere tawdry ownership? Wow. Cobwebby romanticism and sacred bourgeois property rights, together at last!

You dare to defend "authentic" underground culture against the dreaded 'N Sync? To rebuke the decadent majors and demand real, undiluted, uncut art? On a rock CD? What a bloody battle! What brave, cheeky tactics! What dreadful hazards you weathered unbowed, brethren! Way to build your brand, dude!

What a joke. This machine doesn't kill fascists; it buys them villas in the south of France.