Britpop : Time For Reevaluation?

hahahaha!!!!!!!

this thread is a gift!

Yeah, cheers Gareth, it turned into The Powerhaus for a bit after the one in Angel shut down. Saw The Make Up and The New Bad Things play there but not much else.

Ohh I never liked SMASH or These Animal Men. No matter what they said were still too much like Camden Lurchers for me.

Silverfish to thread! Whatever happened to Milk, anyway?

Mr Shields was misquoted, there - he was in fact talking about the early sixties trad jazz movement.

Yes and no. Skiffle, in its original form, was certainly over by 1958. BUT... Skiffle's main performer, Lonnie Donegan, started the 60s by releasing heavily Music Hall influenced singles like "My Old Man's a Dustman" and "Does Your Chewing Gun Lose It Flavour" - songs that were a lot more typically English-sounding than skiffle ever was. The Music Hall influences that were later to appear in the music of The Kinks, The Beatles, Queen and Madness (and, ultimately, Blur) may not have happened if it wasn't for those hits.

Sure, the British has Music Hall top hits like Mike Sarne's "Come Outside" and Temperance Seven's "You're Driving Me Crazy" in the early 60s too, but those were seen as one-off novelties, while Donegan was actually a major and important innovator name in pre-Beatles English popular music.

1) Dog Man Star - Suede
2) Different Class - Pulp
3) Vauxhall and I - Morrissey
4) The Masterplan - Oasis
5) Elastica - Elastica
6) Parklife - Blur
7) The Sound of McAlmont and Butler - McAlmont and Butler
8) Tellin' Stories - The Charalatans
9) 1977 - Ash
10) The It Girl - Sleeper

1. Free Peace Sweet - Dodgy
2. Radiator - Super Furry Animals
3. Homegrown - Dodgy
4. The Great Escape - Blur
5. Parklife - Blur
6. It Doesn't Matter Anymore - Supernaturals
7. (What's The Story) Morning Glory - Oasis
8. Moseley Shoals - Ocean Colour Scene
9. Fuzzy Logic - Super Furry Animals
10.Coming Up - Suede

Note that I don't count Radiohead as Britpop. If I did, then "OK Computer" would be at the very top of the list - beating even Dodgy at their best.

in America the only people who possibly cared about these acts effected bad English accents and dressed badly

Have we met?

You mean, just like several of the earliest Nuggets bands 30 years earlier?

But those guys were emulating the Rolling Stones, not bloody Blur.

Not at the start. The earliest Nuggets bands were emulating The Beatles. Listen to The Knickerbockers, The Gants or The Choir. Not a lot of Rolling Stones there, for certain.

not bloody Blur.

Sadly not, as 93-95 era Blur was clearly much better than 63-65-era Stones. :-)

Anyway, the Britpop bands didn't emulate Blur either. In fact, apart from obscurities such as Menswear and Octopus, no other Britpop bands sounded quite like Blur.

There were a lot of Oasis copycats around though.

The silver age was 1988-1991 My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive, etc.

After the death of shoegazing, lo there was a famine in the land of British pop. And into the valley of death stepped the Melody Maker, with their feeble attempt to manufacture "Suedemania". But the kids saw that Suede were shit, and a feeble attempt to copy the Smiths to boot, and then Bernard Butler quit the band, and the future of British pop looked bleak indeed. And into the valley of death stepped Blur, whose debut album was a weak blend of shoegazing and baggy/Madchester. But then Damon bought a Kinks album and declared that modern life was rubbish. And then Oasis appeared. And Blur and Oasis begat Pulp, and Sleeper, and too many other boring bands to count. And then an era of mediocrity reigned across the isle of Albion from 1994 - 1997.

Hopefully future generations will look back and realize that Massive Attack, Bjork, the Chemical Brothers and the entire dance scene was what was really happening during the Britpop era, and not the idiotic "feud" between Blur and Oasis.

*hums "Losing My Edge"*

shoegazing is getting much better press

Goddammit! I should have written that article! But that would have meant pitching to Hilburn and there are things I will not do.

I'd actually forgotten about The Bends. I'd have that in my top 10. so scrap Sleeper from my list.

who are you and what have you done with Calum?

No, I've settled on "you weren't"

No, I am completely indifferent when it comes to the rhythm section (unless it gets so dominant that it starts dominating - then I hate it). A drummer's only job is to keep the pulse.

Dodgy was the best band of that era, not the worst.

However, saying that Dodgy was a product of Britpop is wrong. They started out before Britpop started, and it would be more natural to compare them to acts like Lightning Seeds, Crowded House and Jellyfish - bands that already in the dark ages of music (1987-91 was the first period for music since before The Beatles) decided that they disliked the current unmelodic trend and settled for something classically melodic and influenced by the great 60s music.

I am not trying to defend Cast, because Cast just didn't have good enough melodies. Their choruses didn't stick in one's head like they should, and they were too harmonically boring too, sounding more like The Searchers than The Beatles.

The Levellers started out already in 1991 or so, and were never Britpop.

Duh!

I am not saying I dismiss all music from that era (for instance, Crowded House and Jellyfish made their best records then)

But out of the ones you mention Primal Scream, and to some extent Massive Attack, are the only ones I like. Generally the 87-91 era was too much about rhythm and noise and not enough about melody and harmony.

Dodgy never changed their musical style. Blur did. Blur more or less "invented" Britpop on "Modern Life Is Rubbish" (although Suede should get some credit for that too)

As for Pulp, well, maybe they weren't really Britpop. In fact, they were just playing the kind of Bowie/Roxy Music-influenced style that was so popular when they started out in the mid 80s, and for some reason they never broke through until that kind of music became fashionable again because of Britpop.

Someone may already have asked this but do you tap your foot or nod your head at all when you listen to music? If so, why?

(I am playing find the unconvincing, hastily concocted pseudonym)

Your definition of what was "really happening" in the mid-90s couldn't be any more Britpop if it tried...