The other 90's

[...]

The pre-Britpop context is interesting. Late-92 to late-93 was the key period (which also coincides with the darkcore era in the alternative Dissensus canon): there was the Morrisey Finsbury Park incident in August 92 and the BNP council by-election victory in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 which sparked an Anti-Nazi League revival. This all culminated in a big anti-racism concert in Brockwell Park in May 1994.

This is the same time that Blur were creating their British Image. The best contemporary review of Modern Life is Rubbish was in Lime Lizard and it was an extended essay, basically, on this phenomenon, which opened with the very serious and outraged and anxious question of Blur: “Why ‘Britishness’? Why now?” This was never properly answered, no one even really engaged with it, until suddenly Parklife was the greatest British album since the Beatles or the Jam depending on your perspective, and then it was too late to go back to it.

Everything happened so fast in those days, one thing reacting to the previous thing, that it’s difficult to go back and unpick what happened between then and Parklife but some significant (and negative) shift occurred and British culture ended.

Unless you were listening to jungle.

 

[luka]

Very intriguing, thanks Craner.

 

[Corpsey]

As a kid I was really into Britpop it seemed like a lot of fun

I was too young to understand what it was really about though

Oasis were my first non-pop music craze.

 

[DannyL]

I was wondering earlier if I could somehow blame Brexit on Britpop. Craner, you may have provided the missing link.

 

[Corpsey]

That song 'Alright' by Supergrass

Chirpy cheeky ring a ring a roses

Didn't even know cocaine existed. Cigarettes and alcoholllll was the height of rebellion.

 

[comelately]

I was wondering earlier if I could somehow blame Brexit on Britpop. Craner, you may have provided the missing link.

Some random thoughts:

MTV Europe giving way on Sky to MTV UK in 1997 was a pivotal moment. And I think this was heavily attributable to the second album success of Oasis really more than anything else. I think there's a qualitative difference between 'Noelrock' and 'Britpop', the latter of which was barely a thing really (St. Etienne is Britpop?) outside a media narrative.

Blur were deliberately parochial for a period, but Parklife also had 'To The End' which is partly in French and I don't think it was ever really about identifying as British so much as exploring Britishness - which isn't quite the same thing. Yeah Parklife is more than a little sophomoric and it hasn't aged well (I like 'Trouble In The Message Centre'). But Coxon's a helluva guitarist and 'Girls & Boys' was a tune - and to a 17 year old whose access to music was via the radio, HMV, their friends, maybe the library and maybe their Dad's CDs......well they were different times is all I'm saying. And much of the same can be said for some of the bands; I think it's a stretch to insert some kind of problematic intention to a bunch of indie rock musicians playing largely within their technological and imaginative limitations.

I was actually a Suede fan, and DogManStar is still one of my favourite Bowie albums. But the universe of Brett Anderson's lyrical lexicon, ludicrous as it might have been, was not some entity separate from the world of dance music and drugs - far from it. It wasn't some choice that you needed to make - and it's not like NME and MM didn't cover electronic music in the mid-90s; I was at the Prodigy All-Nighter in December 1995, good times!

I remember seeing the infamous Melody Maker 'Born To Do It Better' cover in 2000 and shuddering. Living with indie kids in third year of uni drove me to reading 'Energy Flash' in 1999 and wanting nothing to so with any of that fucking shit. BUT

1) Britpop and Noelrock were both way past it at that point. Most of the bands on that tape were American or at least American-sounding.

2) The disdain for UK Garage was hardly exclusive to indie kids. Plenty of my friends who loved them some jungle, not all of them white in case you ponder, couldn't make their peace with it at all. I kind of knew better and would make noises to that effect, I had read muh blissblogger - but my heart wasn't really in it tbh.

 

[pattycakes_]

There was never an aspiration to be psychedelic - though you can find that done well and badly in lots of other bands of the time - Spiritualised, The Shamen, Loop etc.

The Charlatans and The Verve, especially on their earlier albums had plenty of psychedelic moments. But they were much less loaded mag britpop than most of what's being talked about here.


Was at a blues jam session last night and after all the amped instruments had to stop a girl broke out an acoustic and a bunch of drunk berliners of all different nationalities sang 4 non blondes - what's up and oasis - champagne supernova along with a bunch of other 'other 90s' classics. Everyone had a good time including me.

 

[other_life]

Mr. Blobby

he inspires terror in me.

 

[comelately]

My reading of it is that there's no element of rave culture left in it. The 60s revivalism was simply an aping mod bands. The idea of 4th generation Small Faces impersonations, handed down via The Jam, with more dilution each time. There was never an aspiration to be psychedelic - though you can find that done well and badly in lots of other bands of the time - Spiritualised, The Shamen, Loop etc.

Not disagreeing, but worth noting that the Boo Radleys did follow up their 'Wake up!' album with 'C'mon Kids', which is vaguely seminal and considered to be decent psychadelic rock by some.

And K**a S***er certainly aspired to be psychadelic. I'm just saying!

(Edit: Ah yes, The Verve. Good shout).

 

[other_life]

i sense there's Disdain on this board for shoegaze by people who were geographically and temporally there but i'm not sure if it applies to the valentines, if they're considered before it/above it/beyond it somehow. shoegaze was absolutely my Way Out of 'the canon' + the Other 90's Has-beens and into everything else, even though the better bands including them are in that 'canon' somewhere. fwiw the valentines are the only thing from either shoegaze or 'the canon' for that matter i really give a fuck about now

 

[blissblogger]

At the height of Madchester, Noel Gallagher actually attempted to make some acid house tracks. But it didn't work out and then he realised what he was really about was Tunes.

That would be a good counterfactual alternative-historical pivot - how the Nineties would have gone if Noel had become 808 State

But seems likelysomething Oasis-like and Oasis-level would have emerged - there was a structural demand for something simple and rousing based in the traditional verities and virtues

I do think the mass-ness of Oasis gigs was like a rock surrogate for rave-type feelings of unity-in-uplift. The Verve also in a smaller way.

Liam Gallagher derived his whole thing from Ian Brown, adding just a little bit of a classic rock rasp to the vocal. He said something once along the lines of, "I went to see the Stone Roses and the moment Ian opened his mouth, this strange feeling went right through me". Like it was a visitation, a bolt of enlightenment - the Path Ahead suddenly clear. "I Wanna Be Adored" is the blueprint for the attitude and the stance, but musically it's far more unusual and new than anything else the Roses did, let alone Oasis.

Just recently watched that Shane Meadows doc about the Stone Roses reformation and comeback tour, chastening to see both the band and the fans all paunchy and jowly (somehow more so than looking in the mirror).

 

[pattycakes_]

he inspires terror in me.

You knowing who he is inspires weird feelings in me. Please tell me he didn't make it over the pond

 

[other_life]

XENOGOTHIC

 

[blissblogger]

I still have never listened to Modern Life Is Rubbish - have a CD still in its shrinkwrap, kept as a cultural document that might need to be returned to.

But I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with an investigation of nationality.

All that stuff exists and is real - what Luke captures in this line about how "you can hear cups of tea, low grey cloud covering the sun, mildness, kindness, small gestures, comfort, heart fm"

People always talk about how postcolonial influx changed the UK - white youth especially in London speaking black, etc. curry as the national dish. Reggae as the jam in the swiss roll of Britpop from "Ob La Di" through 2-Tone to Lily Allen etc etc etc.

But equally interesting is the other side of it: how the second-generation immigrants become British and/ or English (or Welsh or Scottish) . Not just in their voices - black and Asian kids with Yorkshire accents - but in their manner and their way of carrying themselves, and innumerable shared references.

"Big up the Cadbury's Creme Egg massive" - my favorite ever pirate shout-out.

Nationality is this invisible cultural atmosphere that seeps through the pores.

Paul Gilroy has written (in Postcolonial Melancholia) about this kind of thing poignantly - about his love of hedgerows and cricket and suburban front gardens etc etc, despite his own political beliefs and awareness of British imperial crimes, etc etc

It's very interesting stuff, not to be ceded wholesale to the Brexit contingent.

I'm always struck by how fucking French the French are, how Italian the Italians remain, etc etc

It's very stubborn, persistent stuff.

I feel it as soon as I step off the plane at Heathrow, or at least as soon I get onto the tube into Central London.

 

[luka]

All these things work in both directions at once, absolutely.

 

[sadmanbarty]

grime presented a far more english blackness than the rest of nuum stuff or road rap/drill.

the demographics of east london at a very particular point in history.

 

[sadmanbarty]

the car itself looks outdated for the late 90’s, like one of those mr toad cars. it speaks to the antiquated notion of the aristocracy we have in this country (something that rees-mogg exploits; it’s quaint and disarming).

 

[poetix]

Discuss, over spritzers, the shape of the estate,
the shade of things to come. Esprit de corps
has gothic overtones: the undertaking
proposed could involve one hell of a jolt.
Put your hands together for the body
politic; its multiple piercings, brandings,
lesions; tattoo-removal scars the marks
of erased liaisons. This is your cowed
Leviathan, cool Britannia newly risen
from her various slumbers. The jaded ring
inseparable, in spite of much soaping
and scouring, from the purloined digit,
or finger of accusation. The rigid neck.
The brow in stitches. The stiff upper lip.

(The Spirit Zone, 1999)

---

Bloody hell, Parklife was 1994? I associate the whole Britpop thing to Blairism, "Cool Britannia", the Millennium dome and so on, but this is a false memory - the whole thing was more or less over by then, or at least past its first flowering.

Perhaps it had two phases. A resuscitation of "Britishness" in response to a period of general decline (the wretchedness of the second Major government); then "cool Britannia" as a state project, with the Millennium dome as its projected totemic realisation, intended to capitalise on those cultural energies. The Spice Girls notably bridged the two phases, although they, too, were over by the end of the century.

 

[Slothrop]

Not disagreeing, but worth noting that the Boo Radleys did follow up their 'Wake up!' album with 'C'mon Kids', which is vaguely seminal and considered to be decent psychadelic rock by some.

And K**a S***er certainly aspired to be psychadelic. I'm just saying!

(Edit: Ah yes, The Verve. Good shout).

Didn't Mansun go from being fairly basic Britpop to full-psych? And the Super Furry Animals, I guess?

But this sort of thing tends to turn into a bit of a no-true-scotsman argument. Like, anyone who was a bit more expansive was, by definition, not Britpop but just another band that happened to get big at the same time and play the same festivals. Particularly given that Britpop seems to have followed the standard template for a pop-rock "scene" by starting with an initial cluster of bands who generally hung around together listening to the same stuff but rapidly became much less well defined after the first couple of hits when record labels started chucking money at anyone who they thought they hitch on the back of the same bandwagon...

 

[pattycakes_]

Bloody hell, Parklife was 1994? I associate the whole Britpop thing to Blairism, "Cool Britannia", the Millennium dome and so on, but this is a false memory - the whole thing was more or less over by then, or at least past its first flowering.

Perhaps it had two phases. A resuscitation of "Britishness" in response to a period of general decline (the wretchedness of the second Major government); then "cool Britannia" as a state project, with the Millennium dome as its projected totemic realisation, intended to capitalise on those cultural energies. The Spice Girls notably bridged the two phases, although they, too, were over by the end of the century.

Blair's Labour used Oasis' Live Forever as their campaign anthem. That was late mid 90s. Oasis/britpop were still in full force at this time. In 98 Lock Stock and Two Ssmoking Barrellls came out and all of a sudden I found myself reading about young wealthy Greenwich village-ites adopting faux English accents in coffee shops. Not long after Madonna marries Guy Ritchie and thus begins the now omnipresent anglophilia trend found in certain quarters of educated America.

By the millenium the charts were dominated by acts like Britney Spears, Darude, the Bomfunk MCs and Craig David. Oasis brought out Standing on the Shoulders of Giants in 2k and it bombed. Be Here Now from 97 did much better.

Have to admit I was a massive fan. Had the haircut. Played in a school band that covered some of their tunes along with the verve, the charlatans and a few other similar bands of the time. We got a write up in the local paper once.