In recent years, that's changed. The high-born have descended in their droves upon what would once have been viewed as "low" culture. Since the millennium, wave after wave of privately educated rock and pop acts have come through, Coldplay, Lily Allen, Jamie T, Jack Peñate, Florence Welch, the Maccabees, Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons being just a few prominent examples.Maybe I'm unusually sensitive to such developments, as a music journalist from a perpetually skint South Wales family, but sly digs at this upper-class takeover began to proliferate in my writing (and my online ranting). This gave Andrew Harrison, editor-at-large of now-defunct music monthly the Word, the mischievous idea of commissioning me to write a column about it for the magazine's December 2010 issue, pegged to the fact that Eliza Doolittle, who had attended Bedales and was the granddaughter of talent school matriarch Sylvia Young, represented something of a perfect storm of poshness and privilege in pop.I knew my argument needed more than anecdotal evidence, so I began painstakingly researching the educational backgrounds of as many artists as I could from that week's top 40 and the corresponding top 40 in 1990. "Forensic Googling", I called it, which basically meant trawling any source I could find – Friends Reunited, Facebook, Wikipedia, local newspaper interviews, actual print-and-paper rock biographies – for the facts. Of the 17 British acts in the 1990 chart whose education could be verified, 16 and a half went to state school, with just one member of one act having attended private school. Of the 16 British acts in the 2010 chart whose education could be verified, three attended private schools and a further two were bands containing members who had. My little experiment had thrown up enough of a discrepancy to at least hint at a cultural shift.However, like a rookie cop in a police procedural, I almost blew the whole case by adding a couple of Brit school alumni to the tally, erroneously describing it as a fee-paying school (a mistake that came back to bite my behind when the school's principal wrote a correcting letter to the Word, resulting in an understandably frosty reception when I next ran into editor Mark Ellen). Selective it may be, but Brit doesn't charge fees.Another error, however, was not my own doing. A pull-quote, in bold black type, screamed: "At the end of October 1990, less than 1% of the UK acts in the top 40 were privately educated. By October 2010, it was just under 60%." Not only had I not written those words anywhere in the piece (as anyone who bothered to read it would have realised), but those numbers cannot be reached from my stats. Someone at the Word needed to go back to school (private or state) and resit their maths exams.The piece itself had been somewhat "buried" in a backwater of the mag, split over two non-facing pages with an obscure Traffic pun for a headline ("The Low Spark of Well-Heeled Boys"), but this baffling 1%/60% canard was eye-catching enough to be repeated by the Today programme, the Sunday Times and that bastion of meritocracy and social mobility, the Daily Mail.My column had taken on a life of its own. I even had the strange experience of being effectively "heckled", a few issues later, by the Word's David Hepworth, who appeared to misunderstand my intent as an attack on aspiration. (On the contrary, I love nothing better than seeing a talented working-class kid done good. My problem was with those born to wealth blocking their path.)Over the following years, that mysteriously exaggerated stat continued to cause ripples. It was repeated twice in the Guardian, in articles by Decca Aitkenhead and Emine Saner. More recently, an article by Sean O'Hagan in this paper, inspired by remarks from Stephen McGann and Julie Walters about shrinking opportunities for working-class people in acting, mentioned the Mail's report of that incorrect figure.A recent blog by music journalist Johnny Sharp dissected this Chinese whispers-like phenomenon, correctly debunking the 1%/60% myth. However, Sharp went on to employ some highly questionable methodology of his own, comparing the 40 biggest singles of 1990 with those of 2010 (and finding little difference in the backgrounds of the acts). If Johnny's smart enough for the analysis of my stats, he's smart enough to spot the flaw in his own: namely that focusing on the absolute toppermost-of-the-poppermost for an entire year does not provide a deeper picture of the music scene as a whole.I remember Johnny as Johnny Cigarettes, when he, like me, was a writer on the weekly music press. He must, I'm sure, have noticed the changes in the social class of the bands covered in his alma mater, the NME. I challenge him – or anyone else – to buy a current copy, and dig out one from two decades ago, for a similar spot of forensic Googling. If he can't find one, I can help. (I have a large, but gradually depleting pile of old NMEs: the cat's litter tray ain't gonna line itself.)The poshification of pop is, I maintain, a reality. And that growing stranglehold is as bad for pop as it is for society. Meanwhile, the repercussions of that Word column have been a salutary lesson, providing a fascinating – and frustrating – case study in the way false "facts" can take hold in the internet age and one incorrect stat can undermine an entire argument.(theguardian.com)ANN.Az