Terrible Music of the Late 1990s

A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I went to Cornwall for a late summer holiday in a caravan park, the kind where there is a round of bingo every night and an Adele tribute act as a "special treat" on a Friday.

It being September, the weather was ambivalent, to put it mildly. One day we found ourselves in Newquay in the middle of a rainstorm. Sheltering in the local Poundland, I came across a rack of CDs priced at a quid each, nearly all of which seemed to be from around 1996-'98. Aha! I thought. Here's my chance to turn this veritable cliche of a miserable British holiday into something truly lugubrious.

When the rain cleared (briefly, as it turned out) we walked back to the campsite with a fiver's-worth of terrible late-nineties music in a thin red-and-white stripey bag, and the way was prepared for an afternoon of painfully frustrated in-caravan boom-box listening that went some way towards curing my nineties nostalgia itch once and for all.

A couple of years back, we surveyed the years 1999-2002 on this blog and judged it to have been some kind of peak for something or other. Whether or not this is the case, my Cornwall koshmar made me think that the preceding period was unquestonably a great cultural nadir of incomparable shitness. Indeed, in comparison with '96-'98, the later "noughties nightmare" we have discussed elsewhere seems like a time of heady artistic flowering redolent of the high years of the Florentine Renaissance.

Yes friends, these may have been the years of Mogwai, Beta Band, Timbaland, Underworld, Stereolab, and all manner of diverse EDM artistry, but this was also the heyday of bands like Ultrasound and Dawn of the Replicants.

NEVER FORGET.

Those Poundland purchases were as follows ...


Arnold, Hillside (1998)

Creation Records folded the year after this came out.


Marion, This World and Body (1996)

Somehow, this manages to combine the worst features of Suede, Oasis, and, err, Mansun, which is no mean feat.


The Unbelievable Truth, Almost Here (1998)

Wow. To think I was once envious of my bezzie pal Graeme for owning this.


Delakota, One Love (1998)

Wait, this is actually really good.


Tricky, Pre-Millenium Tension (1996)

And this is clearly awesome. What was I trying to argue again?

Brand A

The oldest kind of branding the nation knows, to paraphrase.

Britannia reaching towards reclaiming a genre that was ditched a hundred years ago, only that Military Wives tune despite marking a sea-change (when else could it have reached Christmas No 1?) is a bit of an outlier. In the British experience at least after the First World War, war songs came pre-packaged with melancholy and a different sort of sentimentality: that British society of boundless optimism and great-game playing was to a degree 'destroyed' as Paul Fussell has it here.

Of course since the Second World War there hasn't been a war of enough magnitude to require uplifting songs, and this seems to have stuck for a time: unlike in the US everyone from country singers to rappers didn't immediately make their contributions. Post-2008 this gradual re-branding of the nation with it's base components has accelerated faster than it would have done otherwise: it is two of the oldest British (English) institutions that have found themselves doing the most well, Army and Church. One has found itself become a beloved public institution able to dodge most of the criticism in-coming by appropriating emotion and anti-war critique along with the usual dogma; the other has found itself in it's 19th century role as most-often heard critic of the ills of the poor, a role that Robert Tressell and Joe Hill skewered around the same time.

The audio of the patriotic hymn comes accompanied with a pre-packaged "sort of controlled despair" that is as much a selling point as John Bull-ism. A youtube subgenre however exists consisting of jocular squaddies larking to pop tunes in the desert, gritty in-action footage, and video montages set to either ethereal melancholia or blood-thirsty dirge depending on temperament.

What happened this week is unremarkable in the history of the British army. The audio recording however is, something feeling very odd about both the awareness and performativity of what's being done, and the indifference to which it was treated by those who years before would have had at least something to say.

Dangerous Ideas, Dangerous Men

Something which seems to rapidly becoming lost in the recurring arguments for and against Dawkins and rational/scientific rationalism is that this is probably an evolutionary adaptation of what has come before (indeed check our William Shockley, who went from crucial scientific innovation, to popular speaking, to racism: some fairly strong parallels there). The living legacy of scientific racism has never truly been discarded or buried, either in practice or in thinking:

Here Charles Murray, one of the most influential standard-bearers of the Right's campaigns against the post-1960s developments in regards to race and the family, echoes more or less everything the Left has said about 'The White Working Class Community.' Our current elites are too distant and too disconnected to understand 'our decline', and the rest of the populace is too lost without guidance, solved in Murray's view by having the wealthy elite re-instruct us in the grand old ways of the pre-60s. What Murray and the left believe in unison is that the decline of the white working class is a problem of genetics and the passage of time. In 1984 Murray's Losing Ground would advocate reconstruction of welfare in the US; in 1996 the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act

attacked those groups Murray and his ilk felt were the cause of the country's decline: mothers and African Americans. Murray has experience in managing what he might call unruly populations: for a time Murray worked in Thailand on behalf of the US government carrying out counterinsurgency studies.

One of Murray's coups and a once ubiquitous for a time in US discussions was the publishing with Richard Herrnstein of The Bell Curve in 1994. Bravely the authors declared they could not ignore the wealth of IQ data which they had accumulated suggesting that America must face the facts: compared to whites, black people were possibly genetically less intelligent. Never-mind the distorted route by which intelligence testing came to find itself perfectly situated at he heart of American scientific racism, how it at the very best should be considered pseudo-scientific, or how it has been one of the most valuable footsoldiers in maintaining hierarchies. The genetic inheritance of intelligence is an area well-worth sniffing around because you never know who'll turn up. Putting their names to 1994's Wall Street Journal article “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” endorsing the views of the Bell Curve were respected intelligence researchers such as Raymond B. Cattell, Thomas J. Bouchard, Hans B. Eysenck, and Robert Plomin: these are not obscure backroom people but (Cattell and Eysenck especially) you will have encountered their ideas in some works training or seminar. Steven Pinker, to whom the world has already been pacified by liberal capitalism with the exception of some unruly outposts, approved this missive.

A figure who hasn't enjoyed a resurgence in popularity along with science pron nerd favourite Carl Sagan but is from the same era is the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould wasn't a prolific skeptic-buster, eager to throw himself into the industry that developed in the wake of Sagan and now has its avatars in Dawkins and co. In some of his last work Gould seemed to find a much better course in the friction between science and religion than his contemporaries preach. What Gould did in books such as The Mismeasure of Man was apply skepticism to ruling doctrines within science and psychology, and came away with what added up to the collusion and deception on a mass scale by eugenicists to forge the data to support their theories. Gould faced criticism for being ideologically driven in the face of the blistering destruction he delivered to the academic racists; usually, when the ideological biases of something are brought up (as Gould himself honestly does in the work) it is to distract from the fact that the entire body surrounding it is being driven by an opposing ideology.

Do You Recall

Nearly two decades of research on memory distortion leaves no doubt that memory can be altered via suggestion. People can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they can even be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them. When these sorts of distortions occur people are sometimes confident in their distorted or false memories and often go on to describe the pseudomemories in substantial detail. These findings shed light on cases in which false memories are fervently held – as in when people remember things that are biological or geographically impossible. The findings do not, however, give us the ability or reliably distinguish between real and false memories, for without independent corroboration such distinctions are generally not possible.

Loftus and Pickrell, 1995, Psychiatric Annals.

 

When I was 9 years old I was convinced for the space of an August afternoon that my dad had died in an explosion. Memory became tangled up in a strange way with ongoing events producing a dramatic but incorrect version of reality. What had happened was a major electrical fault at a local power station had caused an explosion, killing two workers, and leaving another to die of his injuries. Some time before, my dad had told me dramatic stories about working in the town's steel foundry: the deafening noise; the light and heat given off from the forging process; the indifference of the workers to being so near, and coming into contact with, molten metal. My dad hadn't worked at the foundry for many years, and I knew this, but somehow this information was scrambled into a narrative where my dad was one of the workers killed that day at the power station. Reality asserted itself when my dad came home from work that night alive. I can't really remember how I reacted to this, and its such a trivial incident my dad probably won't remember it at all. I don't even remember if I said anything; but I do remember that build-up of dread on the afternoon after I came home from school.

((Interlude – One of my first concrete cultural/political memories is the death of Princess Diana. I can remember it well for the simple, selfish reason that her death meant her funeral took up an entire day's worth of the television schedule and had to get my parents to program several videotapes worth of stuff (I can't concretely remember what, but variously, an early learning programme, a lot of clunkily produced daytime children's factual programming that seems to have been wiped from present scheduling, a deep sea nature documentary (I had/have an obsession), cartoons, something about dinosaurs, and curiously an American-imported Biblical cartoon series – eclectic stuff for daytime children's television). We sat down and watched the funeral. Partly I remember I spent some time playing with Legos and recreating the funeral procession out of hapzard brightly-coloured bricks; as was my way I likely proceeded to then smash it all up. Recounting this memory a few nights ago I stumbled on the adjacent on of visiting the town's war memorial with a friend and his family and laying a wreath or flowers with the many others commemorating Diana. Going further into the memory, I suddenly realised it was false: I hadn't placed a flowers/wreath at all but had instead waited while my friend and his family placed on annoyed that I didn't have one of my own. The Diana images completely obliterate what are now only traces of what must have then been a stronger memory: my parents elation at the election of Blair and New Labour.))

More than one month later. The television has been turned off since I came in, but there's been a strange sort of general disquiet. A lot of the teachers at school were rushing around but I’m not sure about what: this being just another day I can't pick out many specifics from the general blur of school-days. My dad comes home from work, into the room, and says:

“Turn it on, something’s happened in America.”

Days after this, the company that owned the power station where I imagined my dad to have died, and where three workers really were killed in an industrial accident, implodes in one of the most costly scandals in history. Enron, United Airlines, Bin Laden, Bush, Blair, Osama, Tora Bora, Afghanistan, CEO, KSM, Taliban, Saddam. Nursery rhymes. Night-vision footage. The Millennium and walking to the front gate to "see in the new year" and tear-arsing back into the house when everything suddenly exploded.

In the playground, we played a game. We would pretend to be planes and run around making plane noises. I think, although I'm sure everyone's memory is as faulty as mine and can't be sure what did and didn't happen, that we would pretend we were planes hurtling into the World Trade Center, and every 'crash' would be accompanied by a dramatic "whoosh" and a flinging out of arms.

We all fall down.

The REAL hardcore continuum

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