Britpop : Time For Reevaluation?

I think we should stick to 90s songs. High would be a good 90s Feeder choice.

making a playlist
http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/0y0gMIOGyKaqj70K3eEprx

hey you put lucky man on there KP so wake up boo is on (its awful)

interesting there are no Elastica songs in the list so far. hard to think of a standout obviously-crap song from their big hits era.

― piscesx

I was just thinking the same about Supergrass. Someone will nominate Alright now I'm sure.

fat les - vindaloo

i changed shed seven to going for gold via popular demand on my fb

Not sure how fair that is, but you are making the rules.

Good call on Fat Les but the Christmas song was worse.

okay a bunch of lesser known songs plus bingo by catch arent on spotify but erm enjoy
http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/0y0gMIOGyKaqj70K3eEprx

Songs can be added to it as they get nominated

Already following.

"Sad little indie boys stil want to fuck lauren laverne" Hey, that has nothing to do with. That first album is a classic and the second one is mostly great too.

ILM was like that back in the day though, DG loved to annoy said people. I wish he still posted.

Was looking forward to hearing Jocasta and Nilon Bombers and Thurman but they're not there. Alas.

yeah,
Ive added the band I really disliked though thats gonna be controversial with everyone else

DUBSTAR.

Disgraceful is a great album. Where's Lex when you need him? He'll have something to say about all this ridiculous Kenickie/Dubstar hate.

oh i liked punka by kenickie and that other single. I owned them. I think ILM is pretty much all love for kenickie.

Ive always been on my own here in dubstar-hate.

btw fun lovin criminals needs a mention. Not britpop but y'know... it counts and we know it

what was their worst track?

along with elastica and supergrass no one has nominated a Pulp track.

Quite right too.

or Saint Etienne.

I kind of like terrorvision oblivion. It's good dumb fun

tequila got the nod. That was truly awful

btw fun lovin criminals needs a mention. Not britpop but y'know... it counts and we know it

what was their worst track?

― ۩, Tuesday, April 29, 2014 2:09 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The one that goes "I've got supermodels on my D!"

I went with the 10cc cover. That was awful.

btw with KP nominating Lucky Mam, I actually saw the verve play that in 1995 at t in the park(the gig they split up at) . they played a few others from urban hymns too (Come On and Rolling People)

'The Rolling People' being a fine blend of Funkadelic and Aphrodite's Child.

or a blatant piece of stealing.

american ilxors need to make a thread/spotify list of really bad mid to late 90s us music to go with this.

Turrican you got anything to add to http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/0y0gMIOGyKaqj70K3eEprx

Tequila was well after Britpop though. One of those terrible novelty singles by rock/punk bands - see also Outkast's Pretty Fly For A White Guy - which blighted my first year of uni. Terrorvision did have some Britpop era hits though with Oblivion and that song about the dolphins. But I never associated them with Britpop - they were a Kerrang! band, fun teen metal stuff I enjoyed listening to along with Green Day etc when I were a lad.
Just to add to the Oasis fan constituency debate... I was discussing this with Kerr on FB, but in Scotland a large part of Oasis's fan base was the dance crowd who'd been going to big raves like Resurrection in the early 90s, and their younger siblings, who were more my age group and had just missed out on that. I remember there was a point when Oasis went from being another band the indie kids and 'moshers' would listen to, to a huge band everyone liked - IIRC it was Whatever wot did it. During rehearsals for the school musical (ha!) at the end of 94/start of 95 that song was on all the bloody time.
There was a sense of excitement and optimism, with Some Like Say coming out and everyone willing the next album to be great. Seems ridiculous now, but Wonderwall was hyped up as having this Portishead thing going on. The album was a bit disappointing when it came out, but I still had good will towards them for a while, although I was moving on to Radiohead and other things.
It was exciting to follow the other new releases too. While I couldn't afford many albums, I got loads of 99p singles. And not just Britpop, but other things I'd read about in the NME, heard on Mark & Lard - Nick Cave, Tricky etc. So I concur with Turrican and others who look back on it quite fondly as a time of discovering music in general, tied in with the giddiness of youth - Supergrass's Alright captures that perfectly. It was nice that all the kids at school shared a certain number of cultural references and for a while I didn't feel like such an outcast, even if that was partly wishful thinking on my behalf. I remember this girl I really fancied who had been a huge Take That fan got into Pulp, which made me think I might stand a chance (haha!). I really wasn't jazzed by all the Weller, OCS stuff that it descended into and I moved on.

Outkast's Pretty Fly For A White Guy

Really?

Outkast's Pretty Fly For A White Guy

:D

Kenickie I don't really associate with Britpop in the strictest sense. They were certainly influenced by Britpop, but I'd associate them more with Pulp and the Manics: that regional indie/glam/glitter thing. At school they were one of the bands, along with Garbage, Hole etc, that all the girls who loved the Manics were into. As my male pals at the time were turning into mardy stoners who listened to Korn I wasn't supposed to like that kind of 'girl' music. God, teenage boys are the worst!

Was it revenge for The Vines' "Ms Jackson" ?

x-post - oh for an edit function. Offspring obviously. Morning brain fail. My coffee hadn't quite kicked in. The shame.

Was just thinking it would actually be awesome.

Well, 'quite good' anyway.

Thought I'd move this over from the worst music writing thread:

The Taylor Parkes piece is too muddled even though I agree that Britpop's aesthetic complacency was related to a larger political complacency that was rampant during the Blair/Clinton years. Don't really understand British class politics so I can't speak to that aspect of Blur's legacy. They sound stressful.

― très hip (Treeship), Tuesday, April 29, 2014 1:09 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

From my own experiences political complacency in the UK was at it's peak in the period that lay between Blair's election and the war in Iraq. That's my own outlook as I was a student during that time and I was horrified at how few students were interested in current affairs. The number of people attending student fee protests on my campus were negligible, and this is Essex Uni we're talking about, a hotspot for lefty sit-ins during the seventies. Ibiza Trance and UKG were by far the most popular styles of music for students at that time.

― 1 pONO 3v3Ry+h1n G!!!1 (dog latin), Tuesday, April 29, 2014 9:47 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I put it here bc I honestly regretted reading it, and it left feeling quite favourable towards Britpop, so

― sonic thedgehod (albvivertine), Tuesday, April 29, 2014 9:49 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Of course a period of prosperity between the Cold War and 9/11 was going to be more apolitical but if you're going to blame Britpop for epitomising vacuous optimism and complacency then you should also blame dance music and nobody seems to be doing that.

― What is wrong with songs? Absolutely nothing. Songs are great. (DL), Tuesday, April 29, 2014 10:04 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's what I'm saying. I'm not blaming dance music for being apolitical (although I remember being dismayed at the time at how dance music had lost its anti-authoritarian stance and was now being used to tout 2for1 WKDs on a Friday). But why is it suddenly Britpop that's being held to account for eliding politics? What were the Smiths, MBV, Ride, the Stone Roses and umpteen other popular pre-Britpop UK indie bands saying that the likes of Pulp and Blur weren't?

― 1 pONO 3v3Ry+h1n G!!!1 (dog latin), Tuesday, April 29, 2014 10:22 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

To complicate things further, 95/96 gave us two great and hugely popular singles about working-class identity, Design for Life and Common People (yes, both were older bands but those songs spoke to the moment). The early 90s were definitely a more political era but, with the exception of the Manics and maybe Huggy Bear, the most outspoken bands (Levellers, Senser, SMASH, etc) are not the ones that are now fondly remembered because the apolitical ones (MBV, Slowdive) made better and more lasting music. God bless the Family Cat and the Senseless Things for making the occasional protest song but they weren't any good.

British culture became less political in the mid 90s faster than British music did and claiming the Criminal Justice Bill protests as proof of dance music's superior radicalism ignores the fact that most ravers by that point weren't arsed about traveller rights or free parties and had happily migrated to legit clubs. I've got no beef with dance music - that was mostly what I listened to at the time - but if you want to talk about the triumph of neoliberalism, Cream and Gatecrasher were more representative than Blur and Oasis.

I seem to remember the roses went on political marches.

I remember there was a point when Oasis went from being another band the indie kids and 'moshers' would listen to, to a huge band everyone liked - IIRC it was Whatever wot did it.

first time they got played by commercial radio in Scotland iirc. You never ever heard anything from the 1st album. Wonderwall was what made them the radio staples though. Remember Radio Forth broke the UK embargo for d'ya know what I mean?

the Senseless Things for making the occasional protest song but they weren't any good

'homophobic asshole' was fucking immense.

i still listen to that track more than anything else mentioned in this thread.

I seem to remember the roses went on political marches.

Stone Roses v explicitly political through to Fool's Gold at least.

Xpost was gonna say, you wanniT?

Was the Roses' music political?

Um, Elizabeth My Dear?? Bye Bye Badman??

I think yes, on lyrical content - Elizabeth, My Dear = destroy monarchy; Fool's Gold/What the World is Waiting For = anti-capitalist; Bye Bye Badman = salute to the riots of Paris 68; I think there are more examples. but I'm not sure it never felt like a really active or practical politics - slightly mystic art-school situationism.

(that was xpost)

The amount of praise this Quietus article was getting on t'Internet was greatly depressing me but then I remembered: it's clickbait, that's all websites want at the moment - be provoked, retweet, increase hits and increase ad revenue. Cameron's Britain where the profit margin isn't the reward but the engine.

Marcello, you might not agree with the article but it's hardly clickbait and it's not as if anti-Britpop resentment isn't at a peak right now, so it's not that surprising it got a lot of praise.

I'm very suspicious of the "clickbait" complaint. If a provocative opinion is sincere then fine. Why would a writer not want readers? My only beef with it is when it feels lazy or fraudulent - a cynical squib about a big news story, a shallow listicle - but whatever my problems with TP's piece he obviously believes in it enough to write almost 8000 words.

That's one of the problems I had reading it. Why on earth is he so angry abt some pop music that came out twenty years ago?

on the article fwiw, I thought it opened strongly – 'who does it serve to flatten or simplify an era?' - but meandered; lots of sympathetic points, & acknowledging its complicity. I think this conversation, for the most part trying to pick a way through yay-britpop/boo-britpop, has been more interesting: it's at least made try to remember more clearly – what was good in the 94 wave? What did I enjoy? Can we distinguish it from the grimmer TFI Britannia era? etc etc

20 Reasons Why Britpop Sucked In '96. #4 gave me brain damage.

Everything that is published on a popular subject is clickbait. You want people to read it. That's the whole point of writing it. Also, as I've said before, the stuff that people deride as clickbait is what buys editors and writers the chance to do the stuff they really care about.

For my Britpop piece, this was the process. The editor of G2 wanted a piece about how Britpop ruined everything. A couple of writers were asked, who couldn't do it. I decided to do it myself because a) By this point, it was going to be quicker than getting someone else to do it and the piece was needed urgently b) The proposition was close enough to what I felt about Britpop that I didn't mind doing it.

But it was an opinion piece, and that means expressing yourself in the most forceful terms, rather than umming and ahhing, so yes, you do end up with something that is overstated (and I regret using the term cultural abomination, especially once it ended up in the headline). However, I've had shedloads of people accuse me of trolling, and I wasn't trolling. That word appears to have changed its meaning. It now seems to be: a strongly expressed opinion with which I do not agree.

remember to subscribe to the bad britpop playlist
http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/0y0gMIOGyKaqj70K3eEprx

That's one of the problems I had reading it. Why on earth is he so angry abt some pop music that came out twenty years ago?

Have any ex-MM/NME sorts stepped up with a 'Britpop: none of it fucking mattered - the music, the music we left out, my writing, all our lives - none of it.' thinkpiece?