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The death of Queen Elizabeth II has elicited empathy from some British pop artists. Elton John, for instance, paid tribute to the queen at a concert earlier this week.
But the relationship between British pop and the late monarch has long been much more fraught.
Until the 1970s, the Queen of England pretty much only made innocuous cameo appearances in British pop songs. The Beatles’ «Penny Lane» is a case in point, with the whimsical lyric, «Penny Lane, there is a fireman with an hourglass/And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen.»
The sentiments changed after The Sex Pistols released «God Save the Queen» in 1977.
The song, which the punk band released in tandem with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, equates the monarchy with a right-wing dictatorship.
«It really is an indictment of the system,» said Paul McEwan, a professor of media and communications at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, where he teaches a class on pop music history. «By using the title, ‘God Save the Queen,’ obviously you’re invoking the national anthem and making it about more than just her.»
McEwan said a slew of songs that followed in the 1980s — a time of high unemployment and unassailable class divides in the UK — continued to attack the queen for her symbolic status.
Including a comical scene that references a real-life break-in at Buckingham Palace («So I broke into the palace with a sponge and a rusty spanner/She said, ‘I know you, and you cannot sing’/I said, ‘That’s nothing, you should hear me play the piano'») «The Queen is Dead» by The Smiths pokes fun at Elizabeth.
