Yes definitely. There was a progression from Football Casual->Baggy->Lad Culture->Britpop.
Britpop wasn’t a reaction, just a progression of something that was already there.
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Touching on the local music post bit in the initial post- I think that’s definitely happening again now, due to the costs of touring. At least here in Birmingham - it’s mostly off the UK tour map, leaving the spaces open for local acts to play and generate their own thing.
Yesh this, “BRITPOP” was just an escalation/progression of the Baggy/Madchester/Shoegaze sound of the late 80s/early 90s the same way “Grunge” (an equally ridiculous term) was just the DIY Indie/Punk/Hardcore/Alt-Rock of the late 70s and through the 80s exploding.
All either thing was really reacting to was how pop and rock music had gotten pretty stale by the early 90s and a new generation (X) injected some life blood into it having grown up listening to stuff from the past and doing something new with it, coupled with having lived through Thatcher and Raegan respectively.
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Given how much New Labour and Britpop have been conjoined retrospectively it’s interesting though that by the time Blair actually came to power it’s on its last legs, Blur’s self-titled came out three and a bit months earlier and Be Here Now is three and a half months away.
I think to believe Britpop was a reaction against dance music would be to pretend baggy didn’t exist when of its two most famous bands one were originally derided as baggy bandwagon jumping chancers and the other’s songwriter was a Hacienda regular who regularly roadied for a major Madchester band, to say nothing of the disco influence on Pulp or dance/soul kids Saint Etienne’s role in its early development.
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maybe that’s the point though. it’s less about what the actual scene thought of itself or why it existed, and more about what the creation of the brand tells us about the people who created that brand. maybe in that light the tweet has hit on something.
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I think it’s very easy to forget just how much people hated dance music. It was derided as not “real” music for a very long time. Baggy was played on guitars where as anything on computers was a joke.
This wasn’t helped by chart dance being terrible. I can’t find it on-line but Melody Maker’s edtiorial where they said that dance music was “real music acually” came later than you’d think.
And even then the dance / indie fusion of the greebo bands was no cool. Bands had to stay in their lane unless they were doing a Chemical Brother’s colabration or something.
Its worth remembering too that, outside the specialist music magazines, the broader media were (still are) much more big and little c conservative, so a bunch of white boys, playing music with melodies like the kinks, or that was rock in the way the small faces were, was much more appealing to get behind than the dance music they’d been demonising as responsible for drugs culture for a decade, and all those dirty, noisy americans who are saying nasty things about being miserable because of what capitalism has been doing to peoples lives.
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Probably my fave thing he’s ever done
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Always seemed to me like the 90s in the U.K., culturally, felt like a very straight, white, lager swilling male backlash to the culturally progressive, androgynous, more queer friendly 80s scene. Musically, we went from championing weird cutting-edge electro pop to binning it all off for 60s rock tunes (even while obviously a lot of cool stuff was happening at the same time).
Have a feeling there’s this sort of a natural pendulum effect, where you have cultural progress, backlash to that progress as society adjusts, progress, backlash etc. And wonder if we might be on the brink of a more culturally conservative backlash now with the waves of anti-feminism among young people, transphobia etc.
I’m sure someone more informed than me has written about this, and I might be completely wrong, but it’s always felt that way to me.
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Trip hop and drum and bass definately existed. I’m almost sure of it.
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Not the sort of people that NME wanted to be putting on their cover though if you know what I mean nudge nudge wink wink
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Luke Haines would tell you that New Wave by The Auteurs was both the first Britpop album and that it wasn’t a Britpop album in the very same sentence
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Whoops
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Now I’m not going to claim that the NME were models of diversity, and this was very much the exception for their cover stars in 1995, but…
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Is Luke Haines even capable of answering if he’d like milk and sugar in his tea or not without putting on some sort of intellectual affect though?
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Hmm two issues with a black person on the cover and one of them has put devil’s horns on him and the other is about smoking weed
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I’m sure we could find a couple of covers with Roni Size on them too tbh, but as you say these were very much
and mostly because they were being nominated for awards, not because the magazines were actually championing them as far as I recall. Dunno, maybe I’m being harsh.
Yeah, it’s a poor showing, no mistake. Those examples were mostly meant to tie into the point about trip-hop: if we look at all cover stars for the year, you can add an extra whole cover for a black solo artist (Prince), plus a handful for bands with some black members.
I’m pretty sure Maxinquaye got glowing write-ups and a fair amount of hype before the awards season. But probably no more on the whole than any number of guitar-based also-rans.
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You can find a full list of covers here
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Thanks. Looks like Roni & Reprazent weren’t ever on the cover (which I’m quite surprised about tbh considering they won the Mercury in 1997 iirc) unless browser search is failing me.
Goldie was (once) though, so I guess that covers the entirety of D&B.