Early 90s fairly popular, fairly poltical British music

There was a strange little Interzone of Politicised Baggy/Crusty/Hip-Hop in the early 90s, quite mixed in race and gender terms. None of these bands was critically well received, all of them were fairly to very popular i.e. Chart action/TV spots! An admission; I didn't and don't like any of them. There may well be more obvious contenders I can't remember, obviously there's The Levellers (aha! that's where Folk went in the 90s, innit!) but they don't have a dance dimension. Britpop pretty comprehensively swept all this stuff away. I'm also going to skip RDF/Citizen Fish/Culture Shock for now as they were too "underground".

Chav-bashing ideogram

These townies they never speak to you
Just stick together so they never get lonely.

Blur - Chemical World (1993)

***

"London Fields inspired Parklife. That book changed my outlook on life".

Damon Albarn

***

The novel [State of England, 2012] tells the story of Lionel Asbo, a skinhead lout who wins the lottery while in prison. Amis has revealed that one of the characters, "Threnody", is loosely based on Katie Price, whom he has previously described as little more than "two bags of silicone". Other objects of Amis's satire include the British press and a society obsessed with sex and money.

***

***

Other Brothers Can't Deny

In the spirit of Phil's project of an alternative pop canon, IMHO the above could be the greatest hit single of the 90s. For starters, I defy anyone to name a better U.S. no. 1 from that decade. If you want to get all 'cultural theory' about it, there's myriad social conflicts, historical vibrations, defiant affirmations and contradictory anxieties at play in this ditty; but I can't be arsed elaborating all that much. Let's just say it forms part of a continuum stretching back to vaudeville and the 'jelly rolls' of Delta Blues, recklessly throws itself into the thick of the culture wars, perversely reclaims American capitalism's traumatic origins (whip-crack), and even has a blink-and-you-miss-it flashback to the Vietnam War. It manages to throw in all these allusions while (literally) grounding the listener with its celebratory theme. In four throwaway minutes, it manages what Oliver Stone couldn't pull off with a hundred million dollars, a six-month shoot and a crew of thousands.

But for now, I'll conclude with a Zen defence: What makes it so very wrong may be the very thing that makes it perfect. Surely the a posteriroi justification for all the best 'low-brow' art, no?

Olympian Spirit

Lovely bit of Spenglerian iconography in this advert for British Telecom's new broadband service, BT Infinity (!). Here we can see The Singularity raining its holy manna-jism over man-machine cyber-athletes, clad in the increasingly ubiquitous Union Jack. This is patriotism not in the blood, but worn as a second skin purely for abstract, ritualised competition, and easily shed to reveal the globalised, pan-national corporate leviathan beneath.

The accompanying soundtrack is by Coldplay, whose hesitant, tentative, optimist-pessimist, wave-that-never-crests sound ever suggests a goal that is in sight but that can never quite be reached. Philosophically, Coldplay have always seemed to suggest the impossibility of communication, and perhaps our culture's last idea will be to accommodate the impossibility of reaching infinity as a kind of achieving infinity by default - that the gap becomes the prime symbol of our civilisation rather than the goal itself.