RFI: Blur's "Parklife" (the song) -- What the fuck?

glastonbury, nme stage, sunset, sunday late june '94.

so Phil is saying he likes to feel smug/superior when observing the folly of modern life and the riff-raff ratrace?

and morning soup can be avoided by taking a route straight through what is known as...

i'm not sure what he meant by morning soup...but i suppose he means 'avoid the rat race, live longer' or similar

john's got brewer's droop, he gets intimidated by the dirty pidgeons, they love a bit of...

impotency?

then there's that bit where he says 'pork life' - that's a really feeble pun, what's the point of it?

but anyway
i always thought it was 'morning suit' meaning er, wearing a suit in the morning i.e. going to work or 'mourning suit' meaning er, dying

and 'Vorsprung Durtch Technique' is a quote from an audi advert which inexplicably became a catch phrase in the late eighties

rover tried something similar with a smug german bloke saying 'britisher architect' at the end of an advert.

i didn't have quite the same resonance but did inspire the i ludicrous song 'this is the year of the britisher architect'

but yeah, parklife is mainly about being smug because you are a pop star and can go and sit in the park while other people are at work.

I've nothing against nonsense pop songs but I think that Blur have always been a triumph of marketing hype over content, in much the same way as we've witnessed Radioheads' desperate attempts to find Someything To Say. Both groups became popular with fairly anodyne and very generic 'indie' music, and since their initial success Blur have done just enough to keep themselves commercially viable, while Radiohead have devolped musically into quite an interesting group.
Both Thom Yorke and Damon Albarn both talk endlessly in interviews about their their fear of being exposed as frauds, annd at least in the case of Blur with very good reason.

Yay!!

not true, blur = an interesting response to english identity in the 90s. obviously their version of it is at least as influenced by *previous* responses (kinks jam smiths blah blah blah) as it is by any external notion of 'englishness' per se - is this the 'fakeness' you detect? anyway, could probably be argued that this assimilation of a mess of cultural reference points into a vague, disengaged whole is actually a valid representation of the english and their relationship to their own cultural heritage at the end of the century?

would imagine albarn's fear of 'being found out' is more about his suppressed middle-classness and his unconvincing stabs at avant-gardism.

nb i don't think the people described in/listening to parklife and OPM are at all the same!

probably because Blur are perceived as intrinsically middle-class whereas Mike Skinner, with the whole 'Barrett Home' thing, is seen as at least 'lower middle class' and also in touch more with the notion of 'black music', rave culture etc.

Song's existence now fully justified:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/confidence-is-a-preference

chuffin' brilliant, that is.

Weird, I just listened to this song for the first time yesterday for non-Russell Brand related reasons.

Think of the line in 'End of the century' when he says for no discernible reason 'two thirty'.

seriously? he says "as you get closer to thirty." dude thought he said "as you get closer. two thirty" lol

I honestly thought that for a time as well. But then again, I was 13 and didn't really speak english.

There is no conceivable way he says 'two thirty' and it's even written on the inside lyric sheet of the album

Although not speaking English is excusable :-)

Well, I had the Best Of (I was seven in 94, did not know about Blur) but the lyrics are in there as well. Now I feel dumb.

what's the best time to go to the dentist? two thirty.

"Your mouth gets hurty, as you get close, er, two thirty.."

get on down, 254.

Listened to this album the other day, and couldn't help but feel that it's aged badly in places... especially in comparison to Modern Life Is Rubbish and Blur.

The ballads definitely still hold up, though.

He always wrote great ballads. The sarcastic post-modernism, the chas n dave stuff and all the British pop pastiches, never seemed to touch them. Blue Jeans, Badhead, Till the End, This is a Low, Out of Time, are why I still love Blur

didn't Harry Hill do that Parklife joke to much better effect?

yeah this album has aged atrociously. this is just how i feel

blur stank up the place back then, I dread to think what 20 years in the attic has done to this shit

didn't Harry Hill do that Parklife joke to much better effect?

this seems likely!

Well, the effect this time was to make fun of Russel Brand. Did he beat that?

Imago, I remember you repping hard for one Blur album or another a few years back. Which one was it?

He likes 13 best. I should dig that one out again as it feels like the one I most often forget about. And yeah, their ballads hold up brilliantly. I pretty much cried when they performed 'To the End' at Glastonbury about 5 years ago.

- In its rational form, dialectic is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

- PARKLIFE!

- The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

- PARKLIFE!

- You're a cunt ma -

- PARKLIFE!

clover over dover ftw

The bassline on Girls & Boys FTW.

But then again, that's p much my answer to any Blur album, no matter how bad. The Great Escape? But the bassline on Entertain Me! Parklife? Fucken suspended devil's interview, mate! Amazing!

Ha-hem.

that bassline does indeed rip, i was just talking about that a couple days ago!

Brits sure hate people with estuary (i.e. 'Mockney') accents, don't they?

to think that in their Seymour days, Parlophone expressed concern over Alex James' technical abilities.

Estuary... won't you take me... far away!

(Sorry, different Essex boy.)

he is an underrated bassist, and only cos Graham's showboating.

That said, I'd love to get a guitar lesson off Graham Coxon - one of the few indie guitarists with a completely distinctive style

in their seymour days he didnt do much iirc

alex i mean

didn't Harry Hill do that Parklife joke to much better effect?

― kinder, Wednesday, November 5, 2014 5:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Misread this as Henry Hill.

"Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as-"

FUCK YOU, PAY ME

"And morning soup can be avoided if you take a route straight through what is known as-"

FUCK YOU, PAY ME

I love the stories about Alex playing along to New Order records, shouting "1 - 2 - 3 - 4 take it away!" and then popping on a Peter Hook solo. <3 Alex (well, his bass playing at least)

The bassline on Girls & Boys FTW.

Now you mention it,... yes.

clover over dover ftw

― jello my future biafriend (roxymuzak), Thursday, November 6, 2014 4:30 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh god, absolutely. This song has lost absolutely none of its magic for me!

http://news.sky.com/story/1368987/brand-to-record-oasis-song-in-parklife-response

*sigh*

He's clearly not.

Indeed! I don't know what irritates me more, the headline or the Ye Olde Blur vs. Oasis rivalry of '95 being brought up a-fucking-gain...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/29989124

He's clearly not.

― Mark G, Friday, 7 November 2014 20:14 (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He clearly is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dAFbpk9_GM

pretty sloppy in its execution, but fair play.

I've not played it, but if it's sloppy, that's better than doing a "really good" version, like it really mattered or something. Like he was after Christmas number one or something else.

it's really sloppy.