ABSTRACT
The suggestion that British pop sensibility is essentially suburban is hardly new. In this chapter, the author does not want to repeat these histories, but pop's suburban sensibility is worth revisiting for three overlapping reasons. First, because the working class remains so significant in the mythology of British pop culture. The second reason for exploring pop's suburban sensibility further is because it blurs distinctions that are otherwise taken for granted in sociological common sense – between high and low culture, art and pop, mass market and subculture. In this respect British pop ties in, perhaps unexpectedly, to another defining British cultural institution, the BBC. And the third reason is for paying attention to pop sensibility, as a particularly fantastic account of the suburban experience. Suburban sensibility concerns the enactment of escape (rather than escape itself) and the domestication of decadence. The affinity of suburbia with camp is obvious.
