Britpop backlash (2 Viewers)

I think it's like everything; easier to dismiss than to grapple with it and it also takes work to find what you like.

Yeah, probably.
I don't care enough to engage with it. I haven't liked a record this much in ages, so I was actually looking for anything at all that had been written on it.
 
so that Quietus article on Parklife/Britpop. At one point he was getting dangerously close to what I've always felt about Britpop and how, in my little mind, I defined Britpop. And I kind of hate that word because its a nothing word. It doesn't really mean anything. Its not a genre of music per se, which I think contradicts the commonly-held opinion.

When he started going on about happenings in London in the early/mid 90s, about people not giving a shit (probably because of whatever drug they were on at the time), etc, he was getting very close to hitting the proverbial nail on the proverbial head.

Anyone that was old enough back then to have had a decent awareness of what was going on will remember how those times were. We (we = brits and us) were just off the back of Italia 90. Times were starting to get good. There was a kind of blurring of class division that, from my recollection, was always more clearly defined before then.

And there was Italia 90. And football. And the laddishness that went along with that. I remember a friend of mine in school turning up one day in an England soccer jersey. I asked him what he was at and he responded, "Happy Mondays", in some kind of british accent.

So my mate, who was big into his music but not football, became a football fan. Meanwhile, football fans everywhere were starting to get into music. And thats kind of how I remember Britpop.

I remember I was into my music back then. And I remember people who I knew well, and who weren't into music, suddenly becoming experts on certain bands and albums. And I hated them for it, and I hated the bands and albums they like too (I was about 16 in fairness). Stone Roses mostly. Happy Mondays secondly. And a scattering of other bands besides (Las, etc). The one band that people I knew never really 'got' is the one band I liked most back then, and still adore now, was the Charlatans. I never got why back then but I guess they had more subdued personalities.

Then came 'E' and Britpop morphed into something more resembling the dance/trance scene of today. And I never got that. There were plenty of those bands I liked, sure, but I never got the connection between them and the Stone Roses or Happy Mondays. If Britpop was a genre, it was a fucking wide-ranging, diverse one.

Just look at the tracklisting of those 2 'Unbelievable' compilations to get an idea of how things changed.

And I fucking hated Oasis because of the people who liked them. I was in college at the time and while I did have a lot of like for Definitely Maybe, christ how I fucking hated Whats the Story, Morning Glory. Even now it gives me flashbacks to drunken fuckers in the DCU bar of a thursday night attempting to howl out 'Soooo Sally Can Wait' and not even getting those few words right.

Blur or Oasis was a no-brainer. Blur every fucking time.

I often wondered how Radiohead were never pigeonholed as 'Britpop', or maybe they were (but it was less obvious to me). The same people liked them (and Green Day, and lots of other stuff that wouldn't be remotely Britpop), so I'm guessing its because Pablo Honey went mostly under the radar until The Bends became popular, and by that stage Britpop as a thing, was on its last legs.

If a band like Coldplay were around in the early-90s they'd have been latched onto by the Britpop crowd. And that kind of sums it up for me.

Oh, and if Pulp hadn't have had 'Common People' I think they'd mostly have been the preserve of a more discerning music fan.

In summary, music fans ruined music for me in the 90s. I hate Oasis. And most of what people consider Britpop, was fucking great. IMO.
 
I'd also like to point at that most/many Britpop fans also dug the likes of the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, acts that both dealt with more disparate influences. Oh yeah and that Underworld song was ENORMOOOOOOSE on the back of the Trainspotting OST.
 
I'd also like to point at that most/many Britpop fans also dug the likes of the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, acts that both dealt with more disparate influences.
so this is the thing. It was almost a case of , make music and see who likes it. Then we'll decide what genre it is. Incidentally, heres the tracklisting of Unbelievable Too

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you, BRITPOP

1. Loaded - Primal Scream
2. Kinky Afro - Happy Mondays
3. Step It Up - Stereo MC's
4. Dub Be Good To Me - Beats International
5. Hippy Chick - Soho
6. International Bright Young Thing - Jesus Jones
7. Saturn 5 - Inspiral Carpets
8. Supersonic - Oasis
9. Then - The Charlatans
10. Sally Cinnamon - The Stone Roses
11. Metal Mickey - Suede
12. Girls And Boys - Blur
13. Regret - New Order
14. Cubik - 808 State
15. Feeling So Real - Moby
16. Ebeneezer Goode - The Shamen
17. Papua New Guinea - The Future Sound Of London
18. Sweet Harmony - The Beloved
19. Little Fluffy Clouds - The Orb

Disc: 2

1. Charly - Prodigy
2. Dis - Bomb The Bass
3. Pump Up The Volume - M/A/R/R/S
4. Is There Anybody Out There? - Bassheads
5. Theme From S'Express - S'Express
6. Good Life - Inner City
7. The Only Way Is Up - Yazz And The Plastic Population
8. Pump Up The Jam - Technotronic feat. Felly
9. Naked In The Rain - Blue Pearl
10. You Got The Love - Candi Staton
11. Got To Have Your Love - Mantronix feat. Wondress
12. Voo Doo Ray - A Guy Called Gerald
13. Don't You Want Me - Felix
14. Rhythm Is A Mystery - K-Klass
15. Infinity - Guru Josh
16. Insanity - Oceanic
17. Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use) - Sub Sub feat. Melanie Williams
18. Don't Go - Awesome 3
19. On A Ragga Tip - SL2
20. Phorever People - The Shamen
 
His reading of its impact on culture/media is really challenging and thought provoking. His decisions on what is good and bad music less so:

Looking back, Britpop is almost unique among those musical trends which lasted half a decade or more, in that you couldn't fill a Nuggets-type compilation with genuinely good tracks. Trying to find twenty memorable singles from twenty different Britpop bands, you'd end up on the very fringes of what anybody ever meant by "Britpop":

anyone wanna have a go at this?

also an observation:

One thing I remember noticing in retrospect about Britpop was just how written the tracks were. My go-to example is Sale of a Century by Sleeper which contains:

  • An keyboard/guitar intro
  • A hooky guitar riff played throughout the verses of the song
  • verse section
  • a bridge section
  • chorus section
  • after first chorus guitar break
  • Middle eight
  • Short Guitar solo after final chorus
  • an outro acoustic and electric guitar piece

there's pretty much nothing else you can fit into a 4 minute pop song.

The next big NME thing that actually made any kind of impact were the Strokes and their songs tended to give up halfway through the second chorus.
 
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Pop is not a genre, it is an abbreviation of popular. If it is british, and popular, then portmanteau gods are happy.

About Popjustice - Popjustice

Popstars who say “pop just means popular” don’t really get it. And forget singing, writing, dancing or any of the other stuff: ‘getting it’ is one of the most important abilities of the modern popstar.

Snarkiness aside, the "pop" in Pop music is supposed to refer in some way to the "Pop" idea in Pop Art. So yes, it does come from popular but no that's not what it means.
 
THIS is britpop

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