Just in case it's removed. Here it is in all it's glory.....
"SGM doesn't promote Sam Fender.
Although he is from North Tyneside, Sam Fender promotes a trend we might describe as "the geordification" of the North East, which defines the region and its identity purely around Newcastle and then makes NUFC an integral part of it, alienating and excluding Sunderland.
Yesterday, I saw a photo of someone from South Shields wearing a 1995 NUFC shirt and bemoaning that "wor Sam" had cancelled his concert, the person has no interest in football, yet has seemingly bought into the idea that "this is what we have to do, to see him as geordies". This got me thinking that Fender is actively promoting a "regional belonging" associated directly with the club, and is appealing to the third party towns, particularly young people.
Geordification generally takes popular figures, music and entertainers and reappropriates them as part of the NUFC mythology, thus pitting them into the "us vs. them" dynamic between Newcastle and Sunderland fans. It also becomes problematic when southerners, not understanding this, continue to use "Geordie" to define the whole region.
This is a trend that began in the 1990s with John Hall and his "Geordie Nation" rhetoric. Before this, the term "Geordie" was not really controversial in Sunderland at all and nor was it antagonistic. There are still stories of "Sunderland Geordies" chants in the 1980s at Roker Park, although happy to be corrected on that.
The Geordification of the North East is a stumbling block to regional unity, and it has been a key driver in promoting "Mackem" culture in response. Publications such as "the Mackem Dictionary" and "the Mackem cewkbook" are amongst the most successful cultural items used to reassert local identity and indirectly resist a "NUFC centric" narrative of North East England and its culture."
