Sunday 1 September 2013

The REAL hardcore continuum

For all the kids in the playground and the backseat of the car.















6 comments:

Paul Hebron said...

What's notable on looking back is that it was basically a 10 year-ish period in the pop charts with no rock bands as such. My own memories are of this sort of pop-dance stuff, other dance stuff, hip hop, rnb, dancehall. Also not a great deal of it was British, American and European. A weird time to be growing up that also coincided with the terminal decline of the music press (I've never in my whole life bought a music mag and I can't think of anyone I know who has).

Growing up with all these genres jostling the charts, I guess this why so many things that aren't overtly retromanic sound soupy and ill-defined.

William said...


Interesting, was rock/metal not big round your way? Metallic/Nirvana/Radiohead were all huge, but no one bothered buying the singles.

Paul Hebron said...

They did, though much more niche (yet to meet a human face-to-face who likes Radiohead), but there's an odd sort of retroactive thing where people proclaim there ever-dying faith to a Cobain who died when they about two, or a friend who says he took sides in the Blur vs Oasis chart battle when he was three. Foo Fighters (an almost universal liking for these) and White Stripes were popular, although not really any of the new guitar bands like the Strokes.

I think things started quickly dividing in the 2000s between "what chavs liked" (grime, rap, pop) and "what emos liked" (numetal, My Chemical Romance) with a more general thing where people liked mainly pop and canonical stuff (ACDC, Queen, Led Zeppelin). As far as subcultures went there were a handful of mod types, guitar types into blues and Eric Clapton, a one sole guy really into minimal techno.

Alex Niven said...

Yep this was it.

Interestingly, I think there's been a turn in the past year or so back to exaggerated beats in the major chart hits. Guitars have definitely been sidelined somewhat, partly because their use was so thoroughly exhausted that there was literally nothing left to squeeze out of em.

Culla said...

so many in this continuum of tacky, knowingly cheesy dance pop, but interesting that firestarter makes this line-up as whereas all the other producers would be upfront about the ephemeral and tongue-in-cheek nature of their product, the prodge were quite seri-arse about their stuff, and firestarter in particular (after their earlier toytown techno)

pop has always had this streak, but it's possibly the very infantilist hardcore from the likes of the Prodigy, Altern-8 (then urban hype, smart-es, etc) that drove this strain on

William said...


Thanks Culla that is what I wanted to write but couldn't find the words!

I included the Prodigy deliberately, for the reasons you say. I find it curious that 'ardcore and, later, the gatecrasher 'kids' managed to maintain a dividing line between themselves and actual kids pop which was going down the same path.

I remember there was one guy in the sixth form who would bring all his candy raver gear into school, so that at 3:30 on a Friday he could head off to Sheffield. As 14yos we just thought he was bizarre "You're old enough to drink and drive, but you want to dress like a toddler in Yorkshire."