Britpop : Time For Reevaluation?

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?

A lot of my problem with comes from the sheer number of strawmen he throws up, especially in the opening paragraphs. All this assumptive 'Of course Britpop wasn't about Britain was it? It was about Camden, wasn't it, wasn't it?' - which simply isn't true: Manchester was still an indie music stronghold, Pulp were very much from Sheffield, Blur did admittedly go for a cheeky mockney thing despite coming from Colchester, Dodgy and Bluetones were from Hounslow IIRC. It feels more like Parkes is having a pop at the perceived concept of 'Cool Britannia' than the music of Britpop, at least for the first half. After that he picks apart the individual tracks on Parklife, but again I want to know why it's suddenly Blur's job to be kicking against the pricks?

He implies that the Manchester and Sheffield bands mostly relocated to London. I think it's more about location than origin.

That's been the case for years though, and it still is.

Also, Parklife names a number of UK locations in its lyrics, none of which are even tangentially related to Camden. You can't base an argument about an entire music genre on the life & times of a bloated post-fame Alex James.

I think if you zero in on the Camden clique that enabled Powder and Menswear to get signed then yes it does seem pretty rotten but that's a tiny sliver of the music of the mid-90s. No doubt it appeared larger if you were a journalist drinking in the same pubs.

Was the Roses' music political?

Since when did anyone care about whether music is political or not? Did I skip a meeting or something?

You may have skipped the Taylor Parkes piece in which Britpop is blamed for conspiring to turn Britain into a nation of apolitical neoliberal zombies.

I ask because I recently read an old piece by Rob Young (of Electric Eden etc) about C86 where he lambasted the bands for being devoid of funk (yeah, so?) and "apolitical" .. like does he really care about music being political that much? I doubt it.

http://britpopnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/MBVClinton.jpg

Shoegaze and American indie were also collaborationist genres

I don't know a single person whose record collection is predicated on whether bands are political or not but it's often used, cynically and inconsistently, as a stick with which to beat the ones you don't like.

Precisely

It's the weak card in the whole argument - why should it be Britpop's job to be political? Especially in light of a pan-generic, pan-global music scene that was suffering from severe post-agitprop embarrassment. I'm sure DL can school me better on this but it feels like we're only just starting to see a re-emergence of the protest song after twenty years in the wilderness. I don't think Britpop is the cause so much as part of the effect of this.

Can you remember where the R. Young article was, Tom? I'd like to read what he had to say. A brief google failed to turn anything up. No doubt his lambasting had the zeal of the convert.

I don't know a single person whose record collection is predicated on whether bands are political or not but it's often used, cynically and inconsistently, as a stick with which to beat the ones you don't like.

My suggestion is that we abandon this approach and just use real sticks instead.

It's the weak card in the whole argument - why should it be Britpop's job to be political?

Britpop was politicised by politicians. There was a clear attempt to bring it into the Blairite narrative of a bright, new, confident, hip, meritocratic, liberal Britain. Some deeper interrogation of that might have been useful, in retrospect. Britpop was the arguably first era of British indie rock that actually had to make a decision about whether it stood with or against the government. The number of indie stars accused of being aligned with Thatcher could be counted on one hand. Labour surrounded itself with people from the culture industry.

More broadly, some deeper interrogation of the mild nationalism that went along with would have been useful as well. We were constantly told at the time that the revitalised pop-culture industry spoke to what it meant to be British and feel proud to be British. As Parkes points out, that kind of fell apart when you tried to look at specifics.

The difficulty is that it's hard to pin that on any particular band, though. It's not specifically Blur's role, more than anyone else's, to pick apart some of those ideas. It's easy to say that "Britpop" was politically loaded and politically naive but if you take the view that it was a media invention rather than a coherent movement, who can you really call to account?

The media?

Oasis played Blair's game and got their photo taken with him at Number 10. Labour for a very short time were seen as the good guys thwarting the Tory forces of evil and I guess this PR move was good for both sides, not too different to Stevie Wonder and friends singing at Democrat rallies in the States etc. But yeah, this was the media's fault, a media thing. You could just as well blame cricket for boosting John Major.

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.

You know how some people start out. They want to do something they really love, something they really believe in. But they can’t because it doesn’t pay enough for them to live on. So they do something else. It might not be what they want but they think to themselves: OK, this is not ideal, this is maybe not what I was put on this earth to do, but if it puts a roof over my head and food on the table I’ll keep at it for now and carry on doing what I actually enjoy doing as a sideline.

But as time goes by and circumstances change you find that you gradually have less and less time and resources to subsidise your own passion, and so reluctantly – SADLY, TRAGICALLY – you knuckle down without necessarily realising that you’ve just turned into a robot, a machine of habit, like everybody else. And whatever OTHER was inside you is now buried deep, too deep ever to be reclaimed or reused.

So it is with writing, and with clickbait. Wanting people to read something is not the same as writing something you know people are going to read, because clickbait is set up to annoy people deliberately in order to maximise revenue – that “pays” sticks out like the sorest of thumbs, and it has to be said; pays for what? Toynbee saying we should be nice to a right-wing “Culture Minister” who thinks that ticket touts provide a vital service to the market (as a for instance)?

“The editor of G2 wanted a piece about how Britpop ruined everything”; there’s your problem right there. Not a nuanced, multifocal piece about Britpop, but an express remit to talk about how it “ruined everything” (?)*

*and of course with 20+-year-old pictures of Good Guy Jarvis, because we all love him, don’t we, isn’t he a national treasure, might not have done anything of note or value for a good decade and a half, but oh he’s so INTELLIGENT and has so many IDEAS and has so much EMPATHY, and it’s depressing to see how many grown adults still just MELT at the mention of his name, of his being, without ever worrying, well, what’s behind all this? What if it’s NOTHING – or the precise ANTITHESIS of what we had once thought? (Actually if you listen to something like “Mis-Shapes” now it sounds like Cameron and Gove fulminating against the shirking, uncultured plebs, as opposed to upper middle class, grammar school educated Jarv being benched off because some drunken plumber wearing a white shirt laughed at him one time? And what about “Common People”? What about it? Yes, these pallid working class types, they dance and drink and screw because there’s NOTHING ELSE TO DO. Dammit, JC, how would YOU know?)

An “opinion piece” does NOT mean “expressing yourself in the most forceful terms” unless you’re setting out to be Dave Spart or something. What you term “umming and ahhing” is trying to come to honest terms with what you are writing about, attempting a calm, balanced viewpoint – gently persuading people to at least CONSIDER changing their minds - and such writing carries an entirely different tone and resonance from OTT Rants 4U stuff full of arch hype, clever-cleverness and punk rock sweaty shouting which actually, in terms of helping people to understand each other and their art, eventually signifies precisely nothing** – and even five years ago, you’d have been hard pressed to find anything like that in the Guardian or anywhere else comparable.

**Why? Because that kind of writing requires patience, long-term thinking and, yes, that most Cameronite of sins, HARD WORK if you’re going to write something that isn’t clickbait, that won’t provide easy emotional release for people who’ve been led, by whatever means of convenience, to lose their curiosity.

Good writing should be – what word would best describe it? “Awe-inspiring” is far from perfect but yes, writing and reportage at their best should inspire awe. “Intimidating” might be another good adjective, in the sense that the writing in the 1976-82 NME was intimidating, because it made you want to BETTER yourself, to prove yourself worthy of reading it. The “trollumnists” (as somebody else on ILx, I can’t remember who, called them) on the Guardian, New Statesman etc. are intimidating in a smug sense, in terms of getting one up on somebody else, with no greater ambition than stamping their feet, shouting “ith not fair,” aiming their spray can at the wall and running away.

The consequence of clickbait “culture,” however, is that you end up servicing people who really only want their basic story about the world – the world as they, and ONLY they, know it – confirmed and agreed with, because perversely that makes them feel better about themselves. I’ve had people come up to me and say that Church of Me or Then Play Long helped them get through some difficult times. I’m not aware of that ever having been said about any piece of 'tis/'tisn't/black and white with no grey whatsoever clickbait.

the parkes piece didn't accuse britpop of apoliticism -- that's a strawman. the one time apolitical is used its in this context:

In the confusion of austerity a brand new Britishness is afoot, like the old one but fractionally closer to fascism. More than apolitical – actively hostile to radical thought. More than dismissive of class-consciousness – angry at the slightest suggestion that anyone's problem might not be a problem with them, but a problem with Britain. It's everywhere. And every single chance it gets, it guts that "other" Britishness, the kind pop music once personified, the kind that's all about irreverence, vitality and wit.

its very particular about a certain sort of particular attitude about class and culture that blur was heralding and how that foreshadowed where britain was going, etc. and it does feel like in retrospect i can look at blur videos and feel that context in a way i couldn't have seen at the time. the idea that they were on the wrong (but triumphant) side of history is pretty powerful as a central thesis

Also, Blur seemed to coat itself in vague political signifiers on their Britpop albums. Whether or not they were actually political, or just tourists, is a more significant question to raise than if it been about, I don't know, M People.

Pulp also, people always claim they were on the 'right' side of this divide, as opposed to Blur, somehow more compassionate and less snarky, but does Common People really make sense? I mean, it's an amazing composition, but isn't there something condescending and problematic about the narrator basically telling a young woman that he will always be more real than her, because she can always 'call her daddy'?

Dodgy were from Hounslow IIRC

Bromsgrove, actually

Common People: A lyrical discussion/dissection