A friend of mine has started listening to mid-90s NOW! albums in the car. The NOW! series was the epitome of Capital Radio, chart pop. I was surprised then, looking through the track lists, about how much Britpop is on those CDs. I shouldn't have been as Oasis et al scored plenty of Top 40 hits. More than that, you realise (or remember) how these songs fitted very happily alongside boy and girl bands, one hit wonders, and those 'grown up' pop groups that don't really exist anymore, like the Beautiful South.
'Don't Look Back in Anger' isn't a world away from 'Back for Good'; it's a thin dividing line between Supergrass and Hanson. Sure, the boy bands were pushed for a specific female market, but its two sides of the same coin really.
So maybe the angst about Britpop stems from a misunderstanding that it was for the 18 to 24 crowd. Surely, the core record buying public for it were 10-14 year olds and their mums, united by a need of breezy pop you can sing along to in the car.
If it was part of a 'push back' it wasn't against American alt rock or Penman n' Morley era NME, but against dance music (and to a lesser extent hip hop). A handful of sixth formers at my school were into 'serious' dance music or rap. Those were adult music scenes, which a 13 year old couldn't participate in.We all need a gateway drug in, and for most early teens it was never going to be 'Terminator' (although I reckon most of the audience for 'Scatman' or 'I Like to Move It' were kids.)
It IS strange that men in their mid - 20s with art school educations started making singles for children, or magazine editors in their 30s were pushing this stuff. But that is, unfortunately, something of the dark thread running through the British entertainment industry.
‘I’ve never written about Welsh
identity before: these days, I’ve got to search for things to write
about, whereas in the past everything would be driven by anger and all
the rest of it. Now I’ve got to delve more… Ready For Drowning is the
most complete song I’ve ever written, I think…’
After Everything Must Go, This is my Truth Tell me Yours
is the best album of a mediocre bunch – even with its overblown and
airless moments, even with Wire’s retreat behind domestic lines and
po-faced earnestness replacing their early half-articulate,
all-encompassing ire. Ready for Drowning is perhaps not the best
but the most interesting song on the album: its rippling chapel-service
introduction; Bradfield’s precisely rendered Valleys diction on the
line ‘Said ‘e’d y’eard it in a tacsi’; the second verse’s
disappointing touch of that chronic Nineties disease whereby ‘proving
you care’ feels like more of an imperative than actually caring; and the
climactic sample, amidst the song’s drunk-sounding central lurch, of
Richard Burton’s misanthropic telekinesis master in The Medusa Touch. As the early Manics were and remain a band only a teenager could
properly love, so this, their first album produced entirely post-Richey,
is inescapably the product of a band forced to grow up, but unsure what
to grow into – a state reflective of, among other things, the
post-industrial stasis and stagnation still affecting much of their
homeland.
Released in 1998, This is my Truth is a deeply Welsh
production. Its cover photo was taken on Black Rock Sands in Gwynedd, a
tourist-friendly beach which in the cover shot manages nevertheless to
look as desolate and featureless as an abandoned slate quarry or the
surface of the moon. The album quotes, references or eulogises Aneurin Bevan; the impressively irascible North Wales poet and
Anglican priest R. S. Thomas; and the Welsh who left to fight fascism in
1930s Spain. In 1998, of course, at the end of a decade marked by the pushing of
confected ideas of ‘Britishness’, ‘Welshness’ was also getting big
(everything’s relative). As explored in Wales Off Message, Patrick Hannan’s
occasionally amusing compendium of devolutionary culture and its
cock-ups, the taking root of specifically Welsh political institutions
gave rise to broader debates on how national identity was to be
characterised and defined. The Welsh Assembly’s establishment took place
alongside a very Nineties shift of focus from economic issues to the
nation’s performance on various cultural stages; for Wales, this meant a
cathartic concentration on the national team’s improvement on the rugby
pitch and the consolidation of a dubious ‘New Welsh Cool’, based around
the sudden commercial success of the Manics and the emergence in their
slipstream of other Welsh bands of varying quality and longevity.
Around the time of this album the Manics, never having previously
appeared to endorse flags as anything other than combustible material,
began draping their amplifiers and themselves in the red dragon. But,
just as 1994’s The Holy Bible had been a refusenik splinter in the side of Britpop, so in Wales, when everything surrounding This Is My Truth
seemed to indicate a post-Thatcher, post-imperial, post-devolution sigh
of forward-looking relief, the Welsh album of the year was steeped in
backwards-looking pessimism, quietly if resentfully resigned to despair,
and old before its time. Well, of course it was. It’s Welsh.
In late-90s South Wales at least, the experience of having had work
first defined as one’s purpose for living, then abruptly removed but not
replaced with anything meaningful, was cemented by the shallowness of
Blairite triumphalism, which, despite Kinnock’s unenviable place as New
Labour’s handmaiden, had little time for Wales. The dispiriting and
bathetic micro-machinations surrounding the attempt in 1998 to impose
Alun Michael as London’s man in Cardiff, against Rhodri Morgan’s
positioning as the people’s choice, exemplified this distance. In
addition, New Labour’s post-socialist direction and the Welsh Assembly’s
lack of tax-raising powers both militated against any commitment to
concrete economic improvement. No longer condemned to an industrial
past, vast swathes of the country remained condemned to a
post-industrial future, against which the New Welsh Cool rang as hollow
as a lot of other Nineties rhetoric. Against this backdrop, Ready for Drowning has no solutions and little
hope to offer, in accordance with the quietly bleak defeatism,
resignation and pathos that riddles the album.
On This is my Truth, lacking roots in older, more established
ideas of Welshness tied to custom, place and language, Wire’s casting
around for a secure identity finds him latching on to specific
traditions of Welsh political history. From the Bevan quote in the
album’s title to Welsh participation in the Spanish Civil War, these
aspects of Welsh identity are more modern than ancient, more southern
than northern, and more industrial than agrarian. They are also,
crucially, based in class rather than national consciousness, and they
are, equally significantly, things of a heroic and romanticised recent
past – stuff of history rather than myth, but just as irrecoverable. The
album derives its few comforts and securities from the past,
reinforcing the present lack of either. Ready for Drowning, like If You Tolerate This…, is almost unbearable in its yearning for what’s lost –
for principles, potential and power that, by the end of the twentieth
century, were all over bar the shouting.
*
[A much longer version of this, if you're so inclined, is here, here, here, here and here.]
This is how the 90s sometimes look in retrospect: the narrowing of access and erasure of working-class lived experience across culture, media and politics; the parallel fetishization of working-class culture via an unholy alliance of Blair, late Britpop and London-centric art, fashion and football; and the degeneration of UK indie from something moderately interesting and markedly 'other' compared to the rest of the chart fare, into something increasingly homogenous, nostalgic and insular. A distinguishing mark of the decade was the gradual stifling of nuanced articulation of identities and their subsequent appearance in an ersatz, appropriated, or puppeteered form. This post attempts a further excavation of what was.
*
The fast-obsolescing Kaiser Chiefs' 'I Predict a Riot' tended to figure in responses to last August's unrest, most recently in a deservedly dismissive way in the lyrics of Plan B's 'Ill Manors'. Perhaps this referencing only proves the cultural poverty of the intervening years, but it does demonstrate the song’s longevity – far greater than that of its creators – and its impact as a checkpoint for class-inflected fear and loathing. The song sounds like a forerunner of James Delingpole's 2006 invocation of the 'great scourges of contemporary Britain'; his 'aggressive female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye...' are a stone’s throw away from the song’s censorious yet prurient reportage ('girls scrabble round with no clothes on / to borrow some change for a condom / if it wasn’t for chip-fat they’d be frozen'). Both visions are part of a cultural shift which has combined the vanishing of working class female identity in public discourse with its accelerated use as an all-purpose whipping-post onto whose alleged precocity, promiscuity, agency and independence, various social ills and moral panics are projected.
Sneering by grammar-school boys at slatternly scrabbling for small change was perhaps the logical culmination of late Britpop's fellow-travelling New Laddism, a tendency waxing unapologetically blatant and boorish in the post-Libertines London scene in particular. 'I Predict a Riot' almost deserves acclaim for its unabashed depiction of something a step beyond class tourism – attitudes which, in a less triumphalist decade, might have been unpalatable without the distancing minstrelsy of 'Vindaloo' or the nudge-and-wink of 'Stereotypes', could by 2004 be sincerely held and expressed. Scattering presumptions, from the inherent irrational violence of men in leisurewear to the lack of sense and sensibility of underdressed women, the song seems to lack any hint of irony. And by 2012 the song could be received in the same way, as though, after 'Stereotypes' and 'Vindaloo' and 'we are all middle-class now', after Waynetta Slob and Vicky Pollard, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
*
In 2011, 'I Predict a Riot' soundtracked a trip into the tortured psyche of Delingpole, Starkey and Dalrymple - the streets of darkest Britain delineated as a volatile, flammable under-kingdom haunted by spectres to whom junk-food is both fuel and insulation, tracksuited thugs and girl-golems clad in chip-fat. It's jarring to recall the female potential of early 90s indie, whose space for oddity allowed through voices which occasionally managed to be those of the chip-fat girls – voices capable of narrating the Night Out from the perspective of celebrant rather than alarmed observer, presenting it non-hysterically as an unremarkable ritual of growing up. Even Shampoo, major-label novelty act though they quickly became, seemed, like Kenickie, more fully their own created cartoon, more at home in their delinquent drag, than, say, Jessie J or Lily Allen. Both Shampoo and Kenickie were, significantly, grounded in appreciation of the Manic Street Preachers' proletarian glam aesthetic, both were able to articulate the experiences of suburban/provincial girls in fearless, loving awe of what the present and future had to offer, and both managed to embody one music writer's identification of 'that terrifying stage where teenage girls are half-human, half-rat':
Kenickie in particular, a pop-aspirational indie band with wit, swagger and style to spare, were on one level unabashed 'pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers' too. I find Kenickie worthwhile because, regardless of the slavering hype they received, part of what their music offered was a presentation of working-class female life crafted with sympathy and solidarity, and an insistence upon their social and sexual agency. Throughout the 90s this voice was heard alongside those by whom it appears to have been retrospectively eclipsed – girl-power usurpers like the swiftly all-conquering Spice Girls, or unhelpful dullards like Sleeper - a curiously dry and prudish band for all Louise Wener’s hiccupy attempts at lyrical titillation, try-hard where Kenickie were effortless.
That 'indie' gained the ascendant in 90s Britain much as 'Labour' did, while becoming a travesty of itself, grew increasingly clear as the next decade wore on. Something notable but seemingly unremarked upon in the sudden acknowledgement of this, the emotional spasm over indie's having been found out as meaningless, mainstream, and posh, was how uniformly male the railed-against 'landfill' guitar bands were. What happened to the women, in particular the 90s phalanx of pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers? While Shampoo are probably the last band in the world to be concerned about artistic integrity or cultural appropriation, the appearance of a posh-girl cover of 'Trouble' on the soundtrack to the 2007 St Trinians remake still exasperated. Lauren Laverne, the only member of Kenickie still occasionally in the spotlight, is now safely ensconced at 6 Music and 10 o’ Clock Live, still fighting the good fight, I guess, but in compromised conditions.
Mainstream pop and indie have been subject to ongoing cultural appropriation and narrowing of access outside the hothouses of stage-school or talent-shows, with a resultant disparity between that which is represented and who represents it. The working-class female experience is offered as a kind of stage-school burlesque - even Allen, for all her occasionally intriguing interior monologues, can articulate the Night Out only as chav-pop pantomime. Outside the pop bubble, the past few years' chav-hysteria, the pathologising of the Night Out, has enabled incessant media and political policing of the social, economic and sexual lives of young women via the avatars of chavettes and single mothers. This, along with the remoteness of mainstream feminist discourse, has shaped a scenario where young working-class women appear mostly as externally-designated objects of exaggerated panic, ridicule, pity or contempt, with little ability to speak for themselves. Any cultural counterweight to this stereotype, any genuine alternative expression of lived experience, must struggle to breathe.
*
All of which means that I'm never sure, you know, how to take Girls Aloud's turbocharged 2006 cover of 'I Predict a Riot'. Bubblegum and pantomime, for sure (as compared to 'Ill Manors'?), but, in making a stab at reclaiming Wilson's narrative for its objects of fear and loathing, awkwardly impressive for all that:
Seeing asmydefenseofDelAmitriwas souniversallywell received,I've decidedto presson withanother newinstallmentinaseriesunofficiallytitled: "Trying to Find SomethingGood Aboutthe ShitMusic IQuite Likedas a Child".
This time aroundit's the turn ofmainstreamBritpop. Specifically, I'd like tosuggestthat onequite goodthing aboutBritpop, to putbesidethemany, manyflaws,wasits (relatively) positivegender politics.
Imean, okay, you couldargue thatalotof thefemale leadsingersinthe videosbelowwereobjectifiedin thefamiliarmanner, andtherewasobviouslysomethingperniciousabout therise of the"Ladette" archetype.
All of Pulp's contradictions are brought to the fore in the 1995 single, 'Mis-Shapes', where the relentless momentum of 'Common People' takes on a newly insurgent tone. If Pulp's mid-90s records are best understood as a South Yorkshire retooling of disco, then 'Mis-Shapes' is their 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now' – a statement of triumphant collectivity against the odds. It bottles the giddy feeling that 'we' were on the move that accompanied both Britpop and early Blairism, and the knowledge of what false dawns both were is bound to colour any listening today. Not incidentally, it's a song the group themselves quickly grew to hate, and they didn't play it again from 1996 onwards, although they made a couple of curious attempts to rewrite it. The motorik pulse is replaced by a peculiarly prancing, piano-driven glam-stomp, and like those sleevenote communiques, it's addressed at the Pulp People, at the constituency of outcasts they acquired after 1992. We're defined by being poor, weird misshapen waste products, 'raised on a diet of broken biscuits', so when facing the enemy, we have to use 'the one thing we've got more of – that's our minds'; but we're also defined by certain choices – 'we don't look the same as you, we don't do the things you do', 'we weren't supposed to be, we learnt too much at school'. If it ended there, then that would be one thing – but other, grander associations are courted.
What makes 'Mis-Shapes' so exciting, other than the feeling – lesser than in 'Common People', but still electric – of someone finally finding the right words to convey an age-old grievance – is the way it speaks unashamedly in the language of class war, with the threat aimed directly at property: 'we want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won't allow us'; you hear someone who has unexpectedly chanced their way into the unexpected position of spokesman, and seizing the role with alacrity – or rather, using it as the way of avenging the defeats of the past, that hissed 'you think that you've got us beat, but revenge is going to be so sweet' – and there's nothing else produced by Britpop which takes on so fully the role of punk-style upending of received values. Yet though it might present itself as being about class conflict, 'Mis-Shapes' encapsulates rather more a conflict which anyone who went to a comprehensive school or lived in a provincial town in the 1990s will be all too familiar with. That is, the one-sided fights between conformist, violent, sportswear-clad 'townies' and 'hippies'/'moshers'/'goths'/'indies' (otherwise competing tribes pushed into uneasy alliance by a shared and deeply relative nonconformism), fought out in corridors and precincts across the UK.
The phrase 'townie' itself – which Pulp used in interviews to describe 'Mis-Shapes'' adversaries - comes from the town vs gown conflicts of University cities. It's the students' derisive term for the inhabitants of the city that they're exploiting (or, more recently, that is exploiting them). It's also used by the teenagers that most probably will soon be students as a counter-insult to the usual 'poof', 'dyke' and suchlike directed at anyone who doesn't quite fit. So it's deeply double-edged. In the context of school, or at a weekend in the centre of town, it's an expression of weakness, a word you direct at those who directly act to make your life a misery; but by the time you're at university, it expresses a far loftier contempt. In that, for anyone who, like the present author, got given a black eye in the centre of town for wearing a 'Mis-Shapes' T-shirt, the song still elicits an intense feeling of belonging. Here is a record that appeared to dramatise our daily predicament in the plainest of terms.
In class terms, though, it hardly mapped onto 'haves against haven'ts'. In the mid-90s, judging at least on personal experience, most (if not all) 'townies' were more-or-less working class, raised in an environment which is much more apt to violently enforce conformity, the duress of everyday life causing an all-too-often suspicious attitude to 'difference', towards getting funny ideas. Meanwhile, most (if not all) of 'us' were either middle class or raised at the intersection where the self-educated working class meets the bohemian lower-middle, where reading books were not something to be ashamed of (i.e, with backgrounds like Pulp themselves), and oh, how all of us loved 'Mis-Shapes'! - even the Green Day fans, so perfectly did it describe our literally embattled position. But why are those who torture the 'Mis-Shapes' every weekend so inclined to play the lottery when they're in so much more privileged a position than their prey? You can hear why Pulp were later so embarrassed by 'Mis-Shapes' when it reaches quasi-Albarn sneers like 'what's the point in being rich, when you can't think what to do with it – 'cause you're so bleeding thick'.
What 'Mis-Shapes' does beautifully – and, irrespective of the group's own disdain, this is a thrilling, totally convincing pop single, one of their best - is lay claim to working-class intelligence against the notion of class as mere identity and ethnicity, sportswear and accents, thuggery and racism. Instead it says we, 'coming out of the sidelines', are the true misfits, those who won't fit either into the tastefully arranged world of the middle-classes or the enforced stupidity of a defeated proletariat. It's enormously exciting as an idea, a call to arms where we will rise up and take over from M People on one side and Oasis on the other, and it's hard not be carried away with its insurgent pride in awkwardness. But it's a fantasy, however wonderful that fantasy might be. We're wrenched out of class-as-essentialism, but where to? A solidarity of clothes and records, of freely-chosen identities as indie kids in charity shop threads?
Pedro Romhanyi's video dramatises it in terms as horribly dated and Britpop-ridden as his video to 'Common People', although this one is significantly funnier. We're in a nightclub again, where a townies vs 'us' fight is brewing; 'we' again look like the members of Menswear and Cast, while 'they' are casuals. Yet of a weirdly dated sort – rather than the Ben Sherman shirts and Puffa jackets of the genuine mid-90s thug, they're dressed as the likely late-70s tormentors of Pulp themselves, dressed in Fred Perrys, skinny ties, short skirts, sequins and wedges. 15 years later, it's all completely reversed, as the vintage tracksuit jackets and overgrown Liam Gallagher shagcuts worn by 'us' in the video are much more likely to be the uniform of someone kicking your head in outside Wetherspoons, while the circa-1980 thug-wear worn by 'them' fits perfectly with the never-ending 1980s revival favoured by vaguely bohemian or indie youth. What saves the video is the fact that Jarvis Cocker plays the leader of both gangs, once as 'himself' in brown velvet jacket, once as the evil angry prole alterego in skinny tie and pencil moustache. It's a welcome pointer that the divide is not nearly as clear as the song – and us – wanted it to be. The them and us in 'Mis-Shapes' is wishful thinking, an urge to take the moral force of class warfare and apply it to a rather less righteous fight between the wearers of different jackets. Any real battle between haves and haven'ts would involve some common cause between bullied, intellectual dole youth such as Pulp once were, and the lads and ladies who chased them around town every Saturday. The song still carries, though, the urge to reimagine the divides of class, to produce some sort of alternative collectivity. As a single, it was double-A-side with a song which remembered another moment of failed communalism, a genuine and brief attempt to live in common – rave.
This is an extract from Uncommon - An Essay on Pulp, published tomorrow.
I've wondered what happened to this guy. Nice to see he's still writing. Looking back on when I was following this stuff and reading about it, I think he had a quiet influence on how I listened and talked about these things. His actual style wasn't quiet, mind. If I recall correctly, he got his break after a writing a long ranty letter to Melody Maker about racial bias in music journalism (the things that stick in the mind... I dunno). I quite liked the way he was willfully subjective about these things. There can be uncomfortable connotations to classifying pop music too much (HMV shelves can have a sense of apartheid to them). Being so based on emotion and personal meaning, its impossible to boil music down to simple aesthetics, never mind 'science'. Surely pop's 'x-factor' is the space opened (not conquered) between consumer and producer?
The most interesting, fruitful aspect of British pop in the 90s was when it was, well, mixed race; if not physically at least sonically. Any innovations (however minor), and the sense that you were hearing something said differently, related to this (Two Tone had a more important social impact than punk: discuss). Considering this, Britpop was even more hideously reactionary than many assume, which may be why Gorrilaz are more listenable and inoffensive (in a good sense) than Blur. The chronic social/racial stratification of British pop since the end of the 90s sealed the lid on its coffin as anything relevant. If experience is anything to go by, 'the kids' are now more starkly divided into 'indie' (white) or 'urban' (black), with all the class division that implies. Once those terms weren't as racialised as they are now. Even the Great White Hopes of trad soul just re-sell costumes* without context, to the relief of those oblivious to the 'other side' (I bet Adele et al have a fair few EDL/BNP fans. They'd see no contradiction). The wares of Simon Cowell are even more ominous - a kind of state schlagermusik, a degrading caricature and consolidation of neoliberal pieties.
The effect is that music fans over 40 tend to have more omnivorous tastes than teens now, which I find very sad. It may have something to do with the distortions of the 00s housing market, with its knock-on effect on education (but time prevents elaborating). However, Blairism's deliberate murder of subcultures (long story) has a lot to answer for. It may be no coincidence that the Vicar was so closely associated with the white identity movement** known as Oasis (the last time I was at a festival, we had to pack the car and do a runner as soon as their identikit fans conquered the territory - a terrifying mob). It wasn't the end of history, but the end of a history. The relationship of pop culture to reality has become an irresolvable divorce. It lost its ability to speak to life.
*Pop has also seen a restoration in gender and sexuality.The empty tableaux of a Lady Gaga are just repackaging pre-sold approaches used by glam, disco or even Madonna - herself an agent of desexualisation and decontextualisation. **Oasis rewrote the meaning of the Beatles and Stones into something far more narrow and ignorant than those bands ever intended. It's somewhat creepy that many regard Britpop's non-event as an affirmative cultural epoch.
"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.
The story of Western art in the 20th century was that of its desperate, hopeless struggle against ossification and irrelevance. In comparison with the previous 500 years that had seen the gradual evolution of technique and tincture in painting; in instrumentation and acoustic space in music, it saw a profusion of disparate styles, ever emerging and fusing and fissioning before tailing away into cul-de-sacs of obscurity or rarefication. Burdened with an art that had crystalised its final form, and would no longer yield mana, artists could only respond in an ad hoc and provisional manner, seeking any means they could to breathe life back into the dying disciplines.
These efforts usually entailed either one of two strategies: firstly, to incorporate and adapt styles from cultures that had previously been despised and therefore neglected. In music this meant incorporating innovations from Black America and later the Caribbean. In the plastic arts of painting and sculpture it meant adopting "primitive" styles from anywhere from Africa to Polynesia. Secondly, whatever forms already existed were abstracted, so that any remaining mana could be iteratively sieved out. When miscegenation and abstraction had been exhausted, then two other now-familiar artistic gestures would result - nihilism and shock tactics. Although nihilistic art movements such as Dada and Punk are often written of as responses to the extreme socio-political currents of the 20th century, they were even more a response to its artistic-cultural exhaustion - a howl in the face of expressive extinction. Classical music, jazz and rock all ended their productive phases with abstract-nihilist gestures that, though decades apart, sounded hauntingly similar in their brittle, atonal desolation.
It is this alternating pattern of miscegenation and abstraction that gave 20th Century culture its strange, giddy, quality, as the adoption of a new form could suddenly generate a new optimism and vigour in the arts and popular culture, before its premature exhaustion within the rationalising cultural superstructure would lead to the bitter deflation of hope. New eras and new ages were perpetually declared and quickly found to be false dawns. The sense of desolation was amplified in the wake of the constant hyperbole and "buzz" that necessarily saturated the culture, amplifying the mana-affect of exciting new styles while simultaneously attempting to ward off the underlying sense of doubt and anomie. The abstract-nihilist phase was invariably policed by particularly virulent progressivist rhethoric, partly to ward off the layman who might impolitely mistake the work for a cacophonous din, like the apocryphal cleaners who disposed of priceless conceptual works from modernist galleries, but mainly as an act of bad faith: the maintenance of the collective illusion that any 20th century art movement was capable of going anywhere.
Britain in the 1990’s was to witness two parallel movements that affected to reinvigorate the nation’s artistic culture. One of them, Britpop, was a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well. The other, the Young British Artists, was a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge.
British rock musicians in the early Nineties had been roused from a decade of torpor by the thundering arrival of Grunge from the US northwest. Although in themselves neither musically radical or innovative, the Grunge bands managed to sound fresh to British ears largely due to their adoption of early-70’s hard rock influences that had been proscribed in the UK by Punk. However, in attempting to fashion both a response to Grunge, and a new style of music to suit the times, the British musicians faced a predicament in that they could no longer stylistically feed off their traditional source of inspiration - the great engines of musical innovation and spiritual mana that were Black America and Jamaica. Black American music had, in the form of Hip-Hop, largely shed its mana-lode for the kind of nihilist aggression of which white music already possessed a surfeit. Also, as with the more mainstream R&B of the "swingbeat" producers, it was structurally complex, and not amenable to being broken down and organically re-fashioned. The intricate recording techniques of R&B producers such as Teddy Riley and Jam & Lewis functioned like the filigree designs on a banknote - as a protection against counterfeiting. If you wanted to adopt these guys’ sounds, you had to work with them directly, and pay them well.
Two of the early notable British bands of the Nineties, the Manic Street Preachers and Suede, attempted to overcome this impasse by re-invoking those elements of radicalism that were deemed to be indigenous - in the former’s case via the use of the kind of Situationist sloganeering not seen since Punk, and in the latter’s via recalling the shock-androgyny of the likes of Bowie and Bryan Ferry. What neither band could provide, however, was the necessary aural shock-of-the-new counterpart. The Preachers’ adoption of a not-especially-bold combination of New Wave and the lighter end of Glam Metal sounded conservative even in comparison to Suede’s blend of Ronson and Marr riffing. That said, both bands represented genuine efforts to squeeze out whatever vitality remained in the dying form, as indeed did the band that was to supplant them in being the signature group of the 1990’s.
Oasis are generally condemned for a putative conservatism in their harking back to the classic melodicism of the likes of The Beatles and The Jam, but initially, with songs like "Wonderwall" and "Live Forever" it really seemed that they might pull it off, that sheer talent might by itself be able to beat back the shadow of nightfall. Unfortunately they succumbed to that characteristic affliction of the era - a lack of staying power. When rock was young and vital, bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who could undertake coast-to-coast American tours while releasing one or two albums a year and a slew of hit singles. Oasis’s American tours were notoriously reluctant and tardy, and by the constipated gestation of their third album it was clear that they had prematurely given their best. Moreover, diligent sleuthing on the part of their critics began to expose the jackdaw nature of the band’s music. Noel Gallagher wasn’t so much a great tunesmith as a connoisseur of other great tunesmiths.
After Oasis came Radiohead and Coldplay, the first of the zombie bands, and British rock, starved of sources of miscegenation, devolved into "landfill indie", a classic example of Spenglerian pattern work, in which bands sounded identical for decade after decade, generation after generation, with only the most enthusiastic admirers being able to identify the detail-differences. Hip-hop itself also drifted into pattern work - perhaps the absence of white musicians purloining its structural and textural innovations was ironically a reason for its stasis, the confounding of thieves having been a good reason to keep the music changing. The popular music landscape of the early 21st century is of course one of disparate genres, or multi-genres in the case of Metal, each one labouring away in its silo to the breathless appreciation of its own adherents. Tellingly, any collaborations across genres tend to go under the monicker of "versus", signalling in advance that after the brief fission, both participants will return to their respective corners.
If Britpop had been a futile attempt to ward off death, Britart, as the work of the Young British Artists was sometimes called, was a kind of grinning post-modern celebration of death - a dancing on art’s grave. "Conceptual" art had long been in the business of the industrial-scale production of the baffling, the shocking and the merely titilating, but with Britart any lingering embarrassment regarding the business-commercial relationship between the artist, the patron, and the paying customer was definitively put to rest. It boasted a raft of almost Dickensian characters with its hungry working-class artist-entrepreneurs, its wide-boy dealers, its shady advertising-executive patrons, its dunderhead curators buying cans of "artist’s shit" and its mysterious Russian customers purchasing works as part of complex tax-evasion schemes.
Perhaps the most important figure in Britart was the advertising mogul and gallery owner Charles Saatchi, who first witnessed the work of Damien Hirst at a property developer-sponsored exhibition entitled Freeze in the late 1980’s. Saatchi reputedly stood open-mouthed at a Hirst work that featured a cow’s head being consumed by maggots. It was to be the start of a beautiful friendship in which Hirst and his cronies would supply the tabloid-baiting works and Saatchi the marketing power and art trade connections to bring them to the widest possible audience. The worthless art of the YBA’s dovetailed neatly into a London that was increasingly making vast amounts of money from worthless activity - from property speculation, insurance scams, reckless credit expansion and opaque financial transactions. The decadence of Hirst’s work, his openness about his non-artistic background and use of assistants, no doubt resonated strongly with those who knew that their own wealth was equally the result of fraud and circumstance. It’s difficult not to suspect that the riches blown at auction on Hirst and his cohorts’ tat were some kind of subconscious potlatch, the plutocrats attempting to cleanse themselves by exchanging their filthy lucre for the most putrid and inconvenient exhibit possible. It is perhaps telling that when Hirst created an object deliberately intended to appeal to the wealthy, a diamond-encrusted skull entitled "For The Love Of God", it failed to find a buyer.
Nevertheless, the media furore surrounding the Young British Artists gathered its own momentum, and exhibitions such as Sensation proved to be popular draws, the public not so much going to see the works, as to see why everyone else was going to see them. Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin became household names, celebrities even. It would probably amaze future generations that such obvious charlatans could be taken seriously even for a few minutes, but then future generations will have far more important work to do than pore over the scrag-ends of our own dying civilisation.
Are you all aware of DBC Pierre's concept of the fate song?
About 15 years ago, I attended, along with three other candidates, a "recruitment event" for the Mars Corporation (you know, the choccy bar manufacturers), who are in fact a deeply strange and sinister organisation.
The event consisted of us spending 3 days confined in a hotel (I mean really, we were forbidden to leave) in a small Norfolk market town while their human resources managers subjected us to various types of psychological stress/torture, including psychometric tests, mock legal disputes, and their UK vice-president insulting us to our faces in order to see how we would react.
About midway through Day 2, I thought "ah, fuck this", strode out of the hotel, across the busy market square (poignantly thronged with pensioners milling around the stalls, a world away from what I had emerged from) and into the nearest pub.
Sitting there, pint in hand, breathing in deeply the comforting atmosphere of normality, this suddenly came on the jukebox:
And, you know, I thought it was really quite deep.
The Major years witnessed the final demise of a particular kind of drug-based radical hedonism. Of course, the so-called radical aspects of drug taking have always been compromised by the fact that drugs tend to get in the way of social protest and other related important stuff like, well, critical thinking. Nevertheless, it's inarguable that the counterculture (however loosely defined) was at certain crucial moments and in certain important ways galvanized by a subversive, imaginative use of illegal substances. What's equally certain is that this particular approach to drug use is no longer with us, and that the nineties was the occasion for its repudiation.
The telltale sign that something is about to become extinct is always a hyperbolic, last-gasp flourishing of it. Reliably then, we might note the carmodism that the very same day Major was announced PM (27 November, 1990), this was released:
Within months there was this:
And about another year later, of course, this:
At this point, pre-Leah Betts (another last-gasp - this time of anti-drugs tabloid sanctimony), even the retro-conservative aspects of these records cannot cover over the fact that there is still something faintly meaningful, if not quite subversive, about invoking illegal substances. Drug culture was still vaguely an alternative one, and the nineties was going to give it one final fling.
There was an element of eighties hangover here. The unemployment pogroms of the eighties had not quite broken the spirit of the working classes and their ability to create collective identities. And one cogent response to being continually out of work and without money to even go to the pub is of course to resort to a kind of unbridled hedonism: cheap pills, powders, weed, petty larceny, playing loose shaggy music, listening to the classic records that happen to be to lying around, scrapping, going out raving. This hedonism might end up killing you, and its long-term social effects can only be utterly pernicious. But for a while you might be able to derive a large amount of radical creative energy from it. Hence acid house, and the above indie-pop reductions of it.
As with so many things the period 1995-'97 was the turning point. In September '95 Pulp release this, which sums up the opiate of the people motif pretty eloquently:
In December, Leah Betts dies. A few weeks later in February '96, the filmic behemoth that is Trainspotting descends (Carl has said almost everything that needs to be said about this, so I'll limit myself to observing that it was timely and apposite partly for being a perfect pastiche/retro-annullment of post-war drug culture, with its reifications of Iggy, heroin, etc). In 1997 Blair comes to power, and the remainder of his time in office sees a rapid removal of the taboo on public figures and drug taking, to the point that an almost Dickensianly old-fashioned Tory can be elected Prime Minister in 2010, without his fondness for cocaine being anything of an issue. That's before we've even gotten onto that early-nineties escapade involving our chancellor, the call-girl, and the white stuff:
In 1995 Oasis said "where were you while we were getting high?" and for me, putting aside the band's copious culture crimes, there's a good deal of pathos in that line. It seems to compound a past tense of collectivity ("we") with a present in which some sort of extraneous betrayal ("you") has travestied solidarity and replaced it with pleasure-seeking egotism. Oasis's ramifications were entirely negative, but it's also true that their roots lay in a much more positive context of affirmation, brotherhood, and most relevantly for our purposes, in the hedonistic culture of the early nineties. This is most evident of course in the better tunes on Definitely Maybe (Supersonic, Cigarettes and Alcohol), which were, ineluctably, actually written on the dole, whatever lucrative poisons would subsequently come to turn the Brothers G into nouveau-Thatcherite monsters. Here's the elder Gallagher on the contexts underlying the composition of Live Forever:
"it was written in the middle of grunge and all that, and I remember Nirvana had a tune called I Hate Myself and I Want To Die, and I was like . . . seems to me that here was a guy who had everything, and was miserable about it. And we had fuck-all, and I still thought that getting up in the morning was the greatest fucking thing ever, because you didn't know where you'd end up at night. And we didn't have a pot to piss in, but it was fucking great, man."
This was radical hedonism. At its best Oasis's music is ultimately redeemed, I would argue, by its ability to encapsulate this tendency at the very moment it's about to be transformed into its opposite, morphing from a means of retaining some kind of empowerment and collective enjoyment in the middle of the dark night of neolibralism, into an egocentric, acquisitive hedonism that is utterly, tragically complicit with the neoliberal status quo. The lyrical climax to Live Forever is perhaps the most compelling instance of this double-pull, as it moves in the space of a few syllables from a remarkable declaration of solidarity (maybe you're the same as me) to hubristic - but still oppositional - drug-speak (we see things they'll never see), before finally collapsing into a final, hardcore Thatcherite statement of Faustian self-regard (you and I are gonna live forever). Oasis's songs can be heartbreaking for the way they embody this shift from "you and I" to just "I". It's surely no coincidence that the promo video for Live Forever features a symbolic burial in what looks like the ruins of a council estate, as it was more than just drummer Tony McCarroll (soon to be screwed over by his band mates) that was being buried here.
I've never been more than a very sporadic drug taker. But I've come to think recently that this is more than just a matter of inherent temperament, also a consequence of the Times. Put simply, drug taking and drug culture just isn't that interesting any more. Intoxication is still a central part of our culture, and probably always will be, but the subversive potential of opening the doors of perception seems to have been somehow nullified. Alcoholism, the eternal state-sanctioned, commercially profitable form of inebriation is rapidly approaching pandemic proportions. Meanwhile, in January, an NHS survey found that illegal drug use (cannabis, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine) had fallen significantly over the past few years. A charity spokesperson said:
"There could well be a generational shift away from drugs going on ... Overall drug use has been declining significantly over the last six or seven years, which is encouraging, and we are seeing fewer young people reporting that they are using drugs. It could be to do with young people's culture and fashion..."
From Pete Doherty to Russell Brand to Skins to Ke$ha to David Cameron: it seems that the superficial, commodified aesthetics of drug taking and pseudo-radical lifestyle hedonism are more popular than ever. A casual admission of an appetite for drugs has become acceptable, just as an admission of one's actual wealth has become the most unacceptable taboo. The reality is that we're all impoverished, and no one's actually getting high any more, or daring to think outside the box.
[NB: credit for this post's title goes to Phil Knight.]
This is a tough one. The guitar solo was one of many ingenious lovely things that died in the nineties. Conspicuous musicianship sounded archly reactionary after the electronic incursions of the previous decade. Cue the Britpop nadir. (But see below for some articles for the defence!)
For me though, one possibly underrated figure is Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo:
[from 2:10, and again at about 3:10]
"If I was Johnny Carson I'd say that was a wacky wacky guitar solo", says the voice of authority that is John McEnroe (?!). No wonder his show got canceled.
Clearly, we're into avant noise territory here, so it's often more a case of extended scene-stealing jammage than of solos per se. As in this:
[starts to get particularly good just before 6:00]
Nice shredding action here [from 3:12]:
Wonderfully wayward stuff in this [from 1:43]:
This was released in Feb 2000 but has great stuff all the way through so I'm gonna slap it down anyway:
Exultant lilting orientalism at the end of this [from 2:45]
.............
Okay so here's where it gets parlous.
I'm fairly sure you can get down with this moment of visionary lo-fi clarity, particularly as it's buried on an album by an otherwise deeply noxious band:
[from 1:11]
I like how early in the song this is. Clearly a guitarist's first "proper" choon. As in: I've just written a verse and a sort-of chorus; what now? SOLO!
I also love this [from 2:08]
Some very winning (pre-Darkness-therefore-justifiable) ironic metallica. And I like that it's Lauren Laverne's brother who plays it, a nice example of sibling harmony to set beside more ambivalent contemporary cases.
And .... I might never live this down, but finally I'd like to put in a heartfelt plea for the following, partly because it was one of the first things I ever learned to play in 1996 as a 12 yr old nipper, but also because it's FUCKING SWEET!
