Britpop re-assesed?

this juxtaposition amused me greatly

http://i.imgur.com/HyozHtb.jpg

They should call it "Josef K" then.

You know what we don't hear enough of on BBC Radio? Britpop, that's what.

http://www.clashmusic.com/news/bbc-to-toast-20-years-of-britpop

and so it begins

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/apr/03/britpop-kurt-cobain-20-years-nirvana

oh, and menswe@r have reformed ..

The further you get away from any musical movement, the more the women involved will have been erased from that movement. It's really depressing.

BB : good point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM--uprhvBg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quVaSixLy8U

As this thread has reared its head again, perhaps it's time to post the Britpop Nuggets compilations I put together last year.

https://haonowshaokao.com/2015/09/20/britpop-nuggets-part-one-some-people-are-born-to-dance/
https://haonowshaokao.com/2015/09/28/britpop-nuggets-part-two-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-tolerate-northern-uproar/
https://haonowshaokao.com/2015/10/22/britpop-nuggets-part-three-long-live-the-uk-music-scene/

All I can say is fucking hell at this.
Not a single female artist on this list and I think 2 black people at most

http://charts.radiox.co.uk/2018/

Okay then, what female and black artists would you have personally chosen to include in a list that is predominantly a particular strand of '90s guitar music?

Catatonia? Sleeper? Bloc Party?

6 songs from this decade in the list; 3 of those are by Catfish And The Bottlemen.

women can't play guitars and minorities don't want to, obv

also I would have personally chosen to have anyone who contributed to this list given a full aurectomy

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41RQ61M68EL.jpg

i would imagine that the target audience for Radio X's "Best of British" list will be outraged by this lack of diversity

too many fookin pansy songs

Well yeah, it's a shit list and listening to solely this kind of stuff these days is, like, I dunno, having a "bread only" diet or something. However, it's clear that the audience of this particular station are into a specific type of music, and the simple fact of the matter is that there weren't all that many women or minorities making that sort of stuff.

Yes, the omission of at least Elastica is glaring, but hardly anyone gives a shit about Catatonia, Sleeper, Echobelly, Salad, Powder etc. in 2018.

How many other niche stations would describe their thin slice of songs being polled as "The Best British Songs Of All Time" (their capitals)?

maybe the sort of pompous niche station that would use "for the music fans" as a tagline

The sort of pompous niche station that is under the impression that '90s indie = all British music.

I still give a shit about Salad!

https://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/salad-undressed

15 oasis songs on a best 100 of british music

there's not even 15 good oasis songs tbh (and i like oasis)

An across-all-decades, across-all-genres Top 100 of tracks by bands from the UK would be far more interesting and diverse, but that's not what this list is. It's basically a list for a specific type of music fan that hasn't moved on from the mid to late '90s.

FOOKIN BRITPOP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_KyYs0Ipy0

please watch that

& I still give a shit about Sleeper

Good on yer, me too.

Had one of those Shine compilations and put it on not that long ago. So terrible that I threw it in the bin and I never do that to cds.

There was a 'britpop' theme hour on Vintage last night, so I put it on...

Shed 7, Kula Shaker, Sleeper, Bluetones, Pulp, Boo Rads, oh god who else? I think I sacked it after the second Shed 7 started..

Pulp was good, as were the Boos. Sleeper were OK. The rest were cor blimey pants. Clearly not a best-of, I'd guess it was of a piece with that Shine comp.

Actually, the Kula track (Mystical machine gun) wasn't bad in itself, but then again there were other reasons why they were awful which were not to do with the music as such.

Actually, the Pulp was part of the Sheffield special which was on after, all of which was excellent.

To return to the original thread question, sure:

https://thequietus.com/articles/28775-martin-green-presents-super-sonics-40-junkshop-britpop-greats-review

that looks like a decent comp despite not much of it really being Britpop.

I really wanted to make a 'weird side of Britpop' playlist, but found it was harder than I imagined

a comp of the good stuff around at the time of Britpop that britpop fans ignored would be better playlist

This is why I address the question directly a couple of times in my review, you see. (It's a flag of convenience for this comp in the end, though Green's liner notes make a solid case for each.)

That comp has lots of good ones on there, but really the Britpop tag doesn't belong on it. There needs to be another name for 90s guitar-based indie music from the UK that doesn't sound like the dirge Beatles because that's what Britpop means now. Compiling a "weird side of Britpop" is impossible because if something's a bit weird then it's not Britpop.

#reclaimbritpop

i think we could sort this out by excluding from Britpop any act that didn't appear on the front of a music publication with some kind of Union Jack draped round them

I don't know who half the names mentioned in ned's article are but both bis and Urusei Yatsura are definitely not britpop and weren't considered such at the time

kenickie were so great

feel like anything too influenced by American music can't be britpop

(american 90s indie was much better than uk equivalent and britpop was bad. British indie music in the 90s was better when it was influenced by American music. this is my theory)

I have very mixed feelings about the uk indie landscape in the 90s but no interest in basically any us indie ever, so going to have to disagree with you on this one

Contempt for Britpop is far less widespread in North America as far as I can tell. I always thought it was cool in a mildly exotic kind of way.

there's plenty of good UK indie from the 90s but there's a whole industry built around nostalgically boosting the worst bits of britpop now, so guess it's not worth reassessing until most of the target audience for that are dead or otherwise economically inactive

just revisiting Urusei Yatsura and had forgotten quite how much they were ripping off sonic youth and pavement. almost at teenage fan club-big star levels

absolutely, that was their whole thing. can't remember another group who did that successfully, apart from blur for a bit maybe

as with the fannies/big star, pavement/the fall and gene/the smiths, if you liked them then the similarities seemed insignificant. i still get pachinko and kubrick in town in my head from time to time.

This here stuff was my jam back in the day. I barely had 10p to rub together let alone spend on quirky-looking CD singles so I must have absorbed half of these via mixtape, or retrospectively once Napster etc came out and I wanted to spend a weekend downloading a Velocette b-side.

xp. i am a huge fannies fan and never minded the indebtedness to big star (I heard teenage fanclub years before big star so it was a bit of a surprise when I first heard the latter)