It's Time For America to Embrace The Lad

Choose life. Choose Oasis. Choose pre-Madonna Guy Ritchie.

I almost enjoy Liam Gallagher talking about soccer as much as I do seeing another “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall” meme. Just him kvetching about how he doesn’t see Manchester City play live anymore is pure poetry to me:

The last time I seen City I got told to be quiet by some donut who was too busy looking at his menu. I was jumping up and down and he went, ‘Can you be quiet?’ It must have been interfering, like messing with his brain; he didn’t know whether to have the prawns or the caviar”

That quote sums up my admittingly overly romantic view of the British lad. Gallagher is rich, famous, and gets some of the best seats in the house, but he’s over watching his team play at home because of that guy he called a donut, an insult that’s up there with Don Rickles calling somebody a hockey puck. At the same time, Liam will never shake the working-class, Manchester-raised child of Irish parents. He’ll always talk shit, look cool, and do whatever he wants.

I’ve been thinking about the whole stereotypical lad from the U.K. a lot these days. It started with finally getting around to watching Guy Ritchie’s 2019 caper comedy The Gentlemen because I wanted to start the Netflix spin-off that I heard good things about. I’m a pretty big Ritchie fan, and consider his first two features (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch) masterpieces, his pre-Madonna era, as I like to call it. After those two…he did Swept Away. I won’t even talk about that movie, but I will say the next film he did, Revovler, was great and suffered because the previous film was…Swept Away. For the most part, I generally enjoy the hell out of most Ritchie films. But the ones I love lean into the lad. Anything with Jason Statham is obviously going to work for me, same with Idris Elba, who has a small part in Ritchie’s 2009 film RocknRolla as a small-time number-two crook called Mumbles. Even as a Sherlock obsessive who also tends to hate nearly every remake of classic IP these days, my opinion on his 2009 take on the iconic detective was swayed by the bare-knuckle boxing scene. Now I’ll tell you Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is as cannon as anything with Basil Rathbone or Benedict Cumberbatch.

I was rewatching Ritchie’s movies around the same time I caught some of the America vs. Panama Copa América match at a bar last month. I looked around and was reminded yet again while I don’t love watching soccer with other Americans, seeing the bar filled with clean-cut guys all decked out in red, white, and blue, a bunch of ASOS-styled Uncles Sams, each of them looking at their phone while the match was underway. I’m not exactly Mr. Soccer, but I’ve seen my share of matches live and in bars in various parts of the world, and everywhere else the fans live and die by the game. There isn’t time to check the crypto market or look through Tinder while your team is playing! And when they lose, it shouldn’t be Well, time to pay my bar tab and catch an Uber. You drink more! Haven’t any of you dummies read Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs???

This is a very specific, and I’ll admit stupid take, but few stereotypes have kept my interest as long as the lad from the U.K. has. Maybe it started after watching Trainspotting when I was in high school and realizing that if the film or book about a bunch of messed up Scots took place in the U.S., we’d probably label the characters “white trash drug addicts” and it wouldn’t all look anywhere as cool as it does. The bad guy in the film is addiction, but the closest thing to a human version of an antagonist is the psychopathic Begbie. And, let’s face it: Begbie is awesome. I wouldn’t want to hang out with Begbie or be anywhere near him since the chances of getting a pint glass smashed in your face seem to go up a great deal when he’s around, but he’s an incredible character. I’m pro-Begbie and generally a fan of other mindless thugs from the Irvine Welsh universe. Gary McCormack, one-time bass player of The Exploited as Larry in the second section of the 1998 adaptation of Welsh’s The Acid House is also magnificent.

All of these things—Oasis, Snatch, Premier League fans, Begbie—fall into something I like to call “Ladcore.” It isn’t a new thing by any means, but it also evolves with the times, mostly in music. Yesterday it was the Kinks, then the Specials, The Fall, Madness, and Ian Dury. The Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and eventually fellow Mancunians Oasis followed in the late-1980s and 1990s. Then you got into the 2000s and Amy Winehouse, the Streets, Dizzee Rascal, and a few other artists who maybe weren’t rock and roll, but who came up from middle/working-class backgrounds. I know there’s a lot of weight when it comes to the British and class that the American mind can’t totally understand, but I’ve always appreciated that despite maybe not being born posh or educated at Oxford or Cambridge, all the artists I mentioned wrote some of my favorite songs and lyrics. Some of it is nonsensical, drug-addled gibberish (most Happy Mondays songs…), but a lot of it also helped me understand a place I’m not from a little bit better. And there are even modern versions of this. My favorite right now is the band High Vis. The best way I could describe them to a friend was if a hardcore band had come up with the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays during the Madchester days. I know Fucked Up could also be described that way, but they’re Canadian so it doesn’t count. Named after a British phrase for the high visibility gear you see roadworkers in the U.K. wearing, lead singer Graham Sayle explained the name for the band came from “after spending my summer months wearing a high vis(ibility) vest and walking through security into festivals. It’s amazing how what outfit you wear can change people’s perception of you or make you invisible. No one wants to question authority or engage with the working class.”

High Vis

In an extremely American and very unscientific way, I’ve been moving towards a more unified idea of what I like to call Ladcore. Part of my fascination with all of this stems from the way Americans both fetishize and dismiss people from whatever we consider the working class these days. People who spend all day behind computers love to dress as if they have jobs cutting down trees or building houses with their hands and politicians love to talk about how much they want to help working people like it’s their single mission. Then they get elected, and nada. It’s a constant cycle of Vote me for another term and we’ll get jobs back and better working conditions and it never happens. Bruce Springsteen is now a billionaire and J.D. Vance is forever full of shit. It’s funny to see how many politicians who lob the term “elitist” around went to fancy private schools and the Ivy League schools they talk trash about. Funny in a sad way because people fall for it.

I won’t make any big claims about U.K. culture because I’m not from there and I think you have to live somewhere for at least a decade before you can really comment on certain societal topics. All I know is that over here there is a very rose-colored image of “getting back to the way things were” or whatever for the middle/working class in America. I noticed a long time ago that the culture from the U.K. I tend to gravitate towards from over there is people are proud of their working-class backgrounds, but their thinking is more along the lines of “Nah, fuck that, mate. I want to get rich, not go back to working the factory.” I think a big part of the reason why rap has become the biggest form of American popular music over the last few decades is because it turns its back on the corny idea of earnesty as some inborn American virtue. The problem is that we’re not a country of farmers anymore and we haven’t been for ages. Deep down, most of us want to have nice things and more time to enjoy stuff, but we don’t want to be viewed as elitist—whatever that hell that even means anymore.

Obviously this is all about perception, my own take on things from across the pond. And I know the dangers of basing most of your beliefs on the music you listen to or the movies you watch. Ladcore isn’t really a thing. It’s not a single sound, subculture, or style…but it also is all of those things. It’s more of a mindset. You own more than a few Fred Perry polo shirts? That’s Ladcore. Count Mona Lisa or Sexy Beast among your favorite films? Ladcore. E over Molly? Ladcore. Member of a soccer team supporter group? Ladcore. You’re American and go out of your way to say “you mean futball” when somebody calls it soccer? I don’t know if that’s Ladcore. Drinking pints of beer is ladcore. Northern soul and most older Jamaican music is Ladcore. Dismissing all ska as bad is anti-Ladcore. That time Adele showed up to a basketball game in a brown leather dress and leather coat with Louis Vuitton logos all over it? Ladcore. Skinheads in the real, old-school, pre-National Front way are definitely Ladcore. Mods are Ladcore. The Kinks and the Who were; the Rolling Stones weren’t. John Lennon was Ladcore but he seemed ashamed of it sometimes. Old English punk bands that started out as pub rock bands but saw the money was in playing better than the Sex Pistols were for sure Ladcore. Goldie is definitely Ladcore, so is Mike Skinner (aka The Streets), and Sleaford Mods write Ladcore anthem after Landcore anthem, each one a banger.

As I said: Ladcore isn’t a thing, but it definitely is something, and it evolves over time. It’s often pissed off, sometimes poetic. It’s self-aware and maybe a little too honest at times. It’s really everything America isn’t or at least goes out of its way not to be. Instead, we let these things manifest in the darkest ways. To me, it all goes back to the thing missing from American soccer fandom. It’s how the passion bleeds over into just about everything else in our lives. The only sport I see Americans truly freaking out about is our version of football, and that passion is largely contained to a couple of drunk guys whiffing on punches thrown at fans of the other team as they make their way out of stadiums or those stupid viral videos of guys smashing their flatscreen when their team loses on a field goal. Besides that, American football fandom is pretty sad. I say this as a fan, mind you. I’m a fan because I was raised watching it. I feel obligated, but every Sunday or whenever my team is playing I’ll grumble and wonder why I’m still doing it. Why am I watching this truly stupid, ugly, boring sport? American football is a few seconds of large men crashing into each other, then several minutes of commercials, then a few seconds of large men crashing into each other again, and then a Kid Rock cover band playing the halftime show that’s sponsored by a beer company who is trying to reconnect with “real” America because somebody on social media called them woke. If we just embraced Ladcore, then things could be so different.