Passantino on Britpop

Still reading but wonder how Jarvis fits into the alleged paradigm of Britpop as either resolutely straight or asexual - just as in that wasn't Jarvis considered a freak by your stereotypical Oasis fan, yet ever so dreamy by the same girls cooing over Damon, Alex, Graham but not Dave? Then again, many abhor Pulp being thrown in the Britpop brig so much - though they were the third most popular band in Britain in 1996.

One problem may be that it doesn't seem like a particularly good time to look back on a media-fuelled FAUXnomenon JUST because it's TEN years since. I mean, there's nothing new being said here really? The thing about 'indie or the indie press never learning' rings true though I think.

Hua Hsu:

"But in the U.K., Britpop and the idea of Cool Britannia it inspired brought forth a fascinating shift in what it meant to be young, British, and more often than not, white. [...] Wittingly or not, pop stars were doing the work of the ruling class: They were making it all right to care. Even if you didn't like the music, the synergistic coupling of pop and patriotism offered a reason to keep your head high. [...] In the mushy discourse of charisma, the Tony Blair of the mid 1990s had given many young Britons the greatest reason for hope."

i have problems here. i was young and white ('more often than not' british people are white -- by a margin of about 6:1, so this was a strange turn of phrase) in the mid-nineties. but in liking blur i did not therefore identify with the government; the relationship with US pop, the 'patriotism', was a lot more complex than that. what i do know is that not one britpop fan put their hopes on tony blair, if they thought about politics at all.

'time heals all wounds, and I feel a very faint, sneaking fondness for Britpop in hindsight (specially after seeing what pitiful sadsacks they've all become in that recent documentary).' -- blissblog

well, Johnny Rotten loved the Creation, to be fair, Television loved the 13th Floor Elevators etc. etc.

I liked this article until it mentioned Catatonia and Placebo. I mean.. gasp.. catatonia played with the execrable, long forgotten Space! Maybe the indie baton got passed to people like Broadcast and all those Wolverhampton bands more than the aforementioned.

but as for the next step, i really hate placebo and catatonia, and never liked belle and sebastian at the time. sfa i quite liked, but really i preferred radiohead, even ver verve. for me what happened (er, hi LRD fans, here is where nrq talks 1998 again) is, i thought the beta band would do something amazing after the '3 eps', and then they didn't, and then i stopped listening to indie.

but if i was going to pick an indie band who countered britpop norms, it would have been early beta band.

britpop, of course, was a reductive movement, yet, at the same time the presence of pulp makes it more complicated (internal dissent within the scene not really restricted to oasis/blur rivalry, by any means). also, most pieces about britpop reference its masculinity, its laddishness, but it is worth noting that the fanbase was much more female than is ever given credit for (feminine pressure;) )

b&s seemed to take over the pulp baton, to some extent?

i STRONGLY disagree with this statement.

otherwise, interesting article

sfa and beta band (except the 3eps) i've always thought were on the brink of amazingness, and i think they wd have provided stronger examples for the domster (i think of beta band as scottish -- are they?).

*during* britpop i wasn't into pulp, but charlton is otm -- far more girls than boys of my acquaintance liked britpop. there was laddism, yes, but i didn't find actually-existing placebo fans to be unladdish, just gothick and "OMG he looks *slightly feminine!*", ie kinda lame.

Fair enough, but before that you had Cornershop. It was a shame it took that awful Norman Cook remix to get them a hit, but I recently rediscovered When I Was Born For The Seventh Time and it sounds as great as it did back in 97, an Asian-British Odelay or Check Your Head in many ways.

The mid-nineties was the period when I was really getting into "indie" music but I would consider myself the polar opposite of the "britpop fan" of the article (apart from being white and middle-class).

Radiohead in particular are notable by their absense. They continued to receive praise from NME whilst being pretty forward-looking and have been far more successful than Catatonia, Placebo and B&S put together.

What about Tricky? I remember him getting NME-love in 95. SFA? Portishead? Pulp? Massive Attack? Aphex Twin? All hyped by NME, none sounded like The Jam. Or The Smiths. Or the Who.

Also non-British acts (Beck's Odelay was NME's album of the year) and inventive post-Britpop bands (Broadcast, Radiohead, SFA, Beta Band were all lauded).

The article seems to be talking about "Britpop" as it was reported in The Sun rather than as the "indie" music of the mid-nineties and its music press.

I'm no lover of the NME but I feel strongly that this article mis-represents the people (fans and industry) who were actually involved in the "movement" it claims to be describing.

Oh, and Weller loved Stax and Motown as much as 'dead white bands'.

that said -- didn't belle and seb self-impose a blanket press ban until about 1998? that's not the nme's fault. and they did cover catatonia, until they went shit and started saying the 2000 fuel protest was the best thing since punk etc.

i wasn't so much referring to the john peel aspect above as much as i was referring to that "Indie barely existed outside of Britpop in those few years" nonsense

too pure's existence and activity during that time period bears that out. mowax and warp too. unless somehow "indie" exempts anything not guitar based?

not to mention sarah records, elefant and the whole "twee" side of indie that was thriving by this point

too pure,

too pure, which released a large portion of my non-dance, non-idm listening during this period - put out some truly phenomenal stuff

Of course this is absolute bollocks, even if it is undeniable that more people had an opinion about Blurasis than they did about rave culture or whatever.

Massive Attack (certainly more trip-hop than Britpop) were featured prominently in Live Forever.

no, loads of clubs and stuff totally rotated around britpop and not the other stuff. other stuff was excluded by britpop, whether it featured in the nme or not. britpop was strictly patrolled at the borders

-- charltonlido

OTM.

Saying "Britpop" = all the indie music of the nineties is to utterly misunderstand what the term meant at the time, and the myopic, backwards and conservative cultural agenda it represented.

The article was deliberately loose in content, partly because I wanted to throw a few... if not innaccuracies then deliberately arguable points in (as its the first of the articles this month, I wanted to make sure it fostered enough debate). However, I never thought it'd come up to it's own ILM thread!

stevem is right to a certain extent about how Placebo were effectively a halfway ground between Pulp and Marilyn Manson, and maybe their place in the charts (97/98) coming as it did between Britpop and nu-metal is more significant than I thought at the time. Actually, where do 3 Colours Red fit into all this, people forget that they were the Biggest Band In Britain for about two days.

The Peel comment may be something of a reaction to a reaction over Peel: I do recall a lot more people after his death (me included) being kind of disgusted that people were saying he played Oasis on his show than there were people who actually played Oasis on his show. Gruff SFA actually went on radio shortly after his death to say how Peel's great contribution to music was choosing DnB over Britpop, but how far that's true is up for you to decide.

The article seems to be talking about "Britpop" as it was reported in The Sun rather than as the "indie" music of the mid-nineties and its music press.

I'd argue that the Britpop of The Sun frontpages was more "real" than the Britpop of the music press. Surely more people bought Oasis/Blur/anyone down to The Longpigs albums than read the NME and Melody Maker combined each week?

Anyway, do continue.

(Sorry, is that laddish?)

I don't think I had encountered it before that. (But yes, this is quite a well-trodden path.)

this is remarkably thin.

Classic material.

Wrong about most things, but at least partly right about Blur Vs. Oasis.

Seen from the other side, as someone who was sick of hip-hop, house and metal (grunge was a kind of metal!), I never understood why Blur and Oasis had to have this rivalry going, as, for me, they were both great and both a breath of fresh air after pop music having been very horrible since the late 80s. The differences were merely sociological, because, musically, they were very much the same thing. And, in fact, the thing I had been longing for for years and only occasionally (Crowded House) found in then current popular pop music.

For me 1987-1993 was a horrible time because pop music was nothing like I wanted it to sound. Those two bands represented, well, not something entirely new because I had already discovered Dodgy and Lightning Seeds and found that some modern bands were indeed still writing good old-fashioned songs. But they hadn't dominated the hitlists (thanks to Britpop, both would to a larger extent later) like Blur and Oasis managed to do. Finally, pop music was getting good again, as in song oriented rather than groove oriented (and, well, no, forget it. Grunge wasn't pop, it was rock).

I can understand Britpop felt frustrating seem from the other side of the fence (House/techno fans, in particular, probably thought, around 91-92, that melodic, song-oriented music would never ever become fashionable again), but for me, it was something I had been waiting for for years. Not something that suddenly appeared out of the blue, but something which had to happen before or since.
Then, it got washed away by Spice Girls and boy/girl bands for a while, and then reappeared in a new and more mellow version through the likes of Coldplay, Travis and Keane. By then, it was all pop and not very "indie" (so the indie kids hated it), but it was roughly the same thing: A proof that people will always return to songs no matter how house and hip-hop fans tend to believe otherwise in 1991-92.

For me 1987-1993 was a horrible time because pop music was nothing like I wanted it to sound.

this articulates for me one of the most "I do not get it" things about your whole outlook. I don't have a way that I want music to sound; I don't conceive of an ideal. The music I like best usually sounds like nothing I would have conceived - nothing I would have been able to want, because it didn't exist yet. This is true across genre - my favorite classical composers are the ones who forged their own paths, my favorite bands make records that take me ages to get my head around. I don't hear the music I love most once and go "ahh, yes, that's the stuff." It usually sounds strange, and that's what's appealing about it. Having a way that you want something to sound is a sort of blindness - in this case, a voluntary one, which is frustrating.

also I just feel obligated to point out that Travis and Keane make the most horrible music ever known to man

http://base58.com/ilx/revival.jpg

I know what I like and I tend to want more of that. I am also the kind of guy who always orders the same thing at a restaurant if I know I have tasted it before and I loved it. There are lots like me, and Britpop and Coldplay/Travis exist for us.

jellied eels for while listening to the blur albums you like?

for years there was a friend of the family who my sister & I knew ate Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner every time we visited him. my sister and I thought it was kinda funny - no matter what, dinner at this guy's house (we'd stay with him while driving from California to Oregon) was KFC. He didn't mind if we'd eat elsewhere, but for him, it was KFC or nothing. Years later my mother told me that when he'd visited us in California once, my grandmother had prepared an elaborate five-course meal which he had turned down, explaining - to her, directly; she would have been about 70 at the time - that he only ate Kentucky Fried Chicken.

AND THAT MAN'S NAME WAS GEIR HONGRO

Well, you know, I have a bunch of different kinds of restaurants I go to, not the same place everytime. Just like I don't only like Beatles/Bowie influenced "indie", but also symphonic rock and 80s synthpop ;)

lol at the Spice Girls "washing away" "melodic, song-oriented music."

Note to self: do not drink water while reading a J0hn D post

No, no. They didn't. They washed way Britpop and replaced it with manufactured teenybopper pop (a bit like Stock/Aitken/Waterman 10 years earlier). But obviously, Spice Girls and the likes were a lot more song oriented than what they kids were into in 1991 had been. Maybe, incidentally, because of Britpop?

http://i36.tinypic.com/20ze2xl.jpg