It's going to get a bit tired isn't it? If I just keep posting stuff about Salon? Yeah. It's testament to the fact that: 1) my time is limited 2) I find something, I stick to it.
Anyway - today's offering is about my favourite dirty secret: Britpop.
Was having a conversation about this just the other day - Well, in fact to kind of elide the embaressing "I was a teenage Britpopper" disclosure I was trying to talk around the issue and obliquely make comments about being an "Anglophile," mirthfullly describing the lost youth of affected behavior and the painstakingly coiffed black mod bob.
So, Simon Reynolds asks - what ever happened to Britpop? And, forgive me here young naifs, but is that a question really worth asking? The one I tend to ask myself more often is: what was I thinking? For that matter, what was everyone else thinking? How did the whole movement last so long? Can we blame Tony Blair for this? (He who invited Noel and Liam Gallagher to Downing St.) What Reynolds' article makes clear is that - social/cultural issues aside - much of the music was crap. Or at least, far from enduring. This is something I've come to realise myself as I've aged. Things that seemed so full of "something" actually turned out to be pretty empty. Or else, the derivative elements became so overwhelming that instead of sounding like a real song it starts to sound like a thin parody. Indeed, some of the parody music that is around today is ten times stronger than some of the hopeless thin Britpop stuff. Many is the time I've been confronted with my CD collection and been tempted, seriously tempted, to excise some of this embarressing excess to the second hand store - I never do of course...
Britpop was, in almost all respects, one big exercise in embarressment. Reynolds points out how *white* it was. How staunchly safe and unexperimental. All that time I thought myself on the cutting edge for idolising some waifish creature who did a passable impression of what Ziggy Stardust might have been had he touched down in the mid 90s in London behind the local Tescos...
It's terrible to think that for some the very definition of Britpop is Oasis. And I'd hate (and would've hated) to have been tarred with that particular brush. But even then, it's not much of a defense is it? To place yourself squarely on the side of a slightly better class of parody music lout is not really to raise oneself out of the pit. Now days I might be more inclined to align myself to some of the more "enduring" artists - Moz in particular - but it still throws my character into a questionable light...
The Reynolds article is about a CD box set incidentally. Four discs. At first I scoffed at the thought of buying it, but perhaps I could prune that CD collection of mine and just reduce it to the four discs. Hmm, nah.
