Britpop : Time For Reevaluation?

oh and if katherine interpreted what i said the way Camaraderie at Arms Length thinks then I apologise. Not what was intended.

Sleeper's The It Girl was and is a great album

Britpop : Time For Reevaluation? [Started by Langley in March 2003, last updated forty-one minutes ago] 71 new answers
The Britpop one hundred hall of joy! - Classics only. [Started by mark grout (mark grout) in January 2004, last updated one hour ago] 8 new answers

Is there Sleeper love on that too?

you don't win friends with dismissive posts about Salad

I couldn't give a toss about Salad.

Sleeper's The It Girl was and is a great album

― she started dancing to that (Finefinemusic), Tuesday, 21 February 2017 14:07 (three hours ago) Permalink

I like the singles from it, and 'What Do I Do Now?' is a genuinely great song. Elvis Costello did a version of it, iirc. That record keeps cropping up in charity shops a hell of a lot.

Most of the Britpop era albums do for some reason

It's not hard to fathom the reason: a lot of not-so-great bands being signed on the back of the success of great bands + people buying records by the truckload = lots of not great records being donated to charity shops later on. It happens.

But there was some great guitar music made in the '90s and I'd rather talk about that. Sometimes conversations on this subject are like, I dunno, going into a synthpop discussion expecting to talk about Soft Cell or The Human League or Depeche Mode and evrryone going "lol Kajagoogoo" ...

*everyone

middle-aged people no longer want stacks of CDs they never play shitting up their interior decorating schemes

i feel like the shit level of discourse regarding brit pop is fairly understandable because

a) it's too amorphous and wide a genre term to be meaningful (best example - roll with it and country house as two 90s british rock songs are not very similar whatsoever), leading to apples and oranges comparisons, arguments about what counts as britpop etc.
b) a lot of britpop was hugely successful and inescapable music for a huge chunk of the 90s and this inevitable generally tends to lead to extreme reactions and evaluations - britpop is some of the most widely decried hugely popular music while conversely being hugely overly-mythologized, anthologized, and analysed.
c) the concurrence of britpop and the 1997 labour landslide, the cool britannia thing, could not seem more lamentable, gross, and horrific in hindsight and in light of what has followed

x-post:

Or going into a discussion about '90s electronica expecting to talk about Orbital or Underworld or FSoL or Aphex Twin or Autechre and everyone going "lol Apollo 440! wasn't electronica shit?"

the concurrence of britpop and the 1997 labour landslide, the cool britannia thing, could not seem more lamentable, gross, and horrific in hindsight and in light of what has followed

Oh hi, John Harris!

That people were buying shitloads of guitar music is pretty moot - Labour would have got into power anyway.

yes but this was painted as a moment of cultural and political resurgence and rebirth. which... is you know, unfortunate as hell. especially as really this was the arse end of britpop and as a high schooler in the late 90s everyone was listening to dance music and r'n'b and hip-hop until like the strokes and shit came out and guitar music became cool again for our generation

It's like this whole ridiculous John Harris theory that guitar music became morose overnight thanks to the death of Princess Diana... fuck... off! It was more that more and more people were finally discovering how good Radiohead were, if anything, and were wanting more of that.

The idea that the youth of the UK gave a flying fuckaroo about the royal family in '97 is beyond amusing.

while not backing john harris's views about 2/3s or british people are currently monarchists so yes, probably young people in 97 did care

yes but this was painted as a moment of cultural and political resurgence and rebirth. which... is you know, unfortunate as hell.

Well yeah, I agree, the tabloids and suchlike (and John Harris, by the looks of things) certainly got more than a little over-excited about it. UK-based guitar music had already moved on though, even by this point. A lot has been said about this period, but what ultimately happened is a lot of popular bands ran out of creative steam and people started listening to other bands/artists, like what happens all the time.

i definitely have a sense, false or not, that indie bands were more popular in that certain point of the 90s than they were before (i can only remember as far back as late 80s and very early 90s) or since

It certainly did feel that way, but the bigger bands of the period that got most of the attention (Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Suede etc.) were also, to varying degrees and in some cases for a spell, genuinely great bands and deserved their success. Because these bands ended up selling so well, it ended up with a lot of smaller, not so great artists being signed. The same thing happened with grunge, but the fact that Silverchair happened doesn't prevent Nirvana from being brilliant.

<i>Making a list of bands that are "shit" with no further explanation</i>

pretty much, and the list of bands that are "shit" both a) not correlating to quality, particularly when compared to non-shit (like fucking Oasis, any canon that calls Oasis anything but shit is completely incomprehensible to me) and b) following the same pattern that exists in virtually every rock genre. just coincidentally though. because they just happen to be shit, right?

I do agree that the mythologising of this particular period of UK guitar music gets on my tits, though. Like I said earlier, sometimes I read articles on this and it feels like memories of radio stations playing stuff like The Boo Radleys, George Michael, Oasis, Everything But The Girl, The Fugees, Manic Street Preachers, Jamiroquai, 2Pac etc. back-to-back just didn't happen and the mid '90s were some weird vacuum where everyone was listening to British guitar bands all of the time.

Oasis were genuinely great from 1994-1996, IMO. Their success at that time was entirely deserved.

xp. oh for sure the 90s charts were definitely not dominated by britpop, eurodance was huge, american pop and r'n'b. wet wet wet being number one for 3 months ;_;

similar to how the 60s are typified by the summer of love, beatles, stones, psych rock etc. and yet the biggest selling single of 1967 was the green green grass of home by tom jones

tune.

wet wet wet being number one for 3 months ;_;

Oh shit, don't remind me! Still not quite as annoying as Bryan Adams stint in '91. Which also reminds me: Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard were still selling records in '95-'96...

('The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You', These Days, 'When Love and Hate Collide' etc.)

eh Oasis had 4 pretty good singles off the first album and then became unbearable over the course of the next 6 albums

Sleeper had 4 pretty good singles off the first album and then became quite annoying over the course of the next 2 albums, so that's better than Oasis

Salad had 1 great single and 1 pretty good single off the first album and I don't remember anything else about them, including any other singles or album tracks off the 1st album which I'm pretty sure I have, so they win

in conclusion, Oasis: just another boy-fronted band

oh for sure the 90s charts were definitely not dominated by britpop, eurodance was huge, american pop and r'n'b.

Of course! Michael Jackson was still having number one hits, Toni Braxton did 'Unbreak My Heart', Simply Red were still big with 'Fairground' etc., Blackstreet with 'No Diggity', stuff like Robert Miles... there was a fuckton of stuff going on.

...and we're just talking about the "visible" stuff.

xps. well here's a thing about the britpop thing that i complained about = i had never even heard of salad until yesterday reading this thread and so it's weird to lump them in to a "genre" which is generally associated with chart topping bands (in my head)

Salad weren't really that visible even at the time. My memories of them during the '90s seem to extend to an acoustic cover of 10cc's 'I'm Mandy, Fly Me' on some TV show and an appearance on that Help compilation.

(xps) yeah, there was a lot of other stuff on the radio which was more ubiquitous at the time and probably sold better than Britpop, and then yr evening radio shows were full of British guitar music I'd rather listen to than Britpop (the aforementioned Urusei Yatsura, Prolapse, Scarfo, Stereolab, Six By Seven, Ligament, Quickspace Supersport, I could make this list 60 screens long but nobody would care so I probably won't depending on how much I drink tonight...)

plus obviously all the great dance music of the era, from yr Underworld, Orbital, Chemicals, EBTG, Goldie who were beloved by everyone I knew who also cared about Britpop, to the more dancefloor purist stuff or the more John Peel end of electronic music

so yeah, maybe we should not ask "Britpop: time for reevaluation" so much as when are those other categories due for their top 10s in the Guardian etc?

(a mostly rhetorical question but let me know when it happens so I can be there to bleat away about Flower Shop Records, my delight at receiving "64 Slices Of American Cheese" Ché records press release/fanzine through the door every however often, and teenage epiphanies induced by bassdrums spaced at 3/4 of a beat instead of a whole beat apart)

Also I remember thinking that Salad was a really awful name.

I liked Salad but never thought they were part of Britpop and not sure anyone else did either tbh

so yeah, maybe we should not ask "Britpop: time for reevaluation" so much as when are those other categories due for their top 10s in the Guardian etc?

Or an article detailing what UK music in the '90s was actually like instead of clinging to this stupid fucking "Britpop" word. To deny that the likes of Blur and Oasis etc. were huge would be silly, but to omit everything else that was going on and create this false idea that nothing else got a look in is equally silly.

Don't get me wrong: I like Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Suede etc. but they still were merely part of the mid '90s I remember and not the whole.

xp to "I liked Salad but never thought they were part of Britpop" tbh I did not either, but they were on that there festival poster so I got a bit fixated on them

not sure why but Salad inc. "Drink the Elixir" (Feb 95) seemed like they were before my time and hence before Britpop, but Elastica I was already anticipating the album ahead of its release in March 95... all some time after I bought that notorious Select magazine. which I mostly remember for introducing me to Vapour Space, Warp Records and the Wipers but anyway

for some reason this thread has led to me listening to Molly Half-Head on youtube and it's not very much fun

When I think of early '95 I think of R.E.M. who were still really huge around that time. Also a lot of memories of magazine adverts for Post by Bjork.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1446-10-albums-that-prove-1997-was-one-of-uk-rocks-best-years/?mbid=social_facebook

A hot new one for y'all.

Thing with Britpop is that it is massively over-represented, and it is a conservative, reactionary force when there was much better around. But for better or worse it was my thing at a very impressionable age, and something I'm always going to have an opinion about. If we're going to talk about it then "Britpop was shit" or "there were a couple of good bands and lots of shit" is just not the level of debate I expect around here.

a passing spacecadet - I would LOVE to talk about those bands instead, especially Quickspace, and especially all the Glasgow scene bands round 96, TBH that is of much more interest to me, but I don't see the thread on the page, so here we are. Would people be interested in a Glasgow scene listening thread? I would love to do one of those instead.

i played the shit out of ganger in '97

ha, not sure how many el hombre trajeado fans there are on ilx but i suppose this era is interesting to some people

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-39038595

There's a cracking evening session thread (and a fun kerrang/rock show equivalent)

This is the thread where we reminisce over not particularly good Evening Session bands from the late 90s

How do the various members of Terrorvision spend their time these days?

i saw el hombre trajeado in brighton, they were okay iirc. played at a festival with magoo, hood, kreidler, pram, plone, bis, movietone, blanking on who else. good times!

i think i spent more of '95 listening to the first telstar ponies album than any britpop record

Many xps, but Compulsion were great. 'Mall Monarchy' and 'Rapejacket' especially:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyUD5cyEcZk

I actually have a list of albums I bought in 95 but I doubt anyone would be interested in seeing it.

Leftfield was right at the top of it though along with Aphex/Autechre/Chemical Brothers/Tricky/The Young Gods

xp yeah I loved Compulsion too

oh shit, i just bought the scarfo album from amazon for £1.03, i blame a passing spacecadet