Source: Page 118 of White Noise Keywords: "for," "surely," "seem," "raucousness"

From: "Switters" <maxyorkeNOSPAM@tiscali.co.uk> Subject: crisi della musica ? 2 Date: 17 Feb 2003 Newsgroups: it.arti.musica.rock

Cover story: And the beat goes off Britpop recalled the halcyon days of the Beatles and the Stones - but the party didn't last. Report by Philip Norman From this point in the early 21st century, looking back over the 20th produces a curious optical distortion. Early- and mid-century events like the great war or the Queen's coronation take on the vividness of yesterday, while the late 1990s have become an epoch so remote and unreal, one can sometimes hardly believe one lived through it. Take, as a random example, 1997. Consider the many features of British life in that year that so soon were to seem like historical curiosities, as long extinct as suffragettes or child chimney sweeps. In 1997 we had a new political order, led by a new young prime minister, that still seemed fresh and full of purpose. We had a half-built Millennium Dome that, we believed, would be a thrill and credit to the whole nation. To complete our reawakening sense of national pride, we had Cool Britannia and Britpop. What happened to the new political order, Cool Britannia, national pride and the Millennium Dome is all too depressingly well documented. What happened to Britpop, however, is harder to assess. Today's pop stars, the barely distinguishable groups and soloists bolted together on TV shows, seem to have been around for eternity. Is it possible that, less than a decade ago, British pop was said to be on its most creative upswing since the fabled Swinging Sixties; that political agendas looked to be shaped by the Brit Awards and even Top of the Pops; that bands such as Suede, Blur, Pulp - and, above all, Oasis - were hailed as multiple second comings of the Beatles? A cinema documentary, just released, conducts the first forensic study of Britpop (apart from irritating TV compilations such as I Love 1994). Entitled Live Forever, a quotation from Oasis's Definitely Maybe, the film comes with impressive credits and a still more impressive cast. Its producer, John Battsek, conceived One Day in September, a documentary about the terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics, which won an Oscar and an Emmy. Its 31-year-old writer-director, John Dower, made such cult Channel 4 classics as Sneaker Freaks and When Will I Be Famous? Its talking heads include all of Britpop's leading lights - Damon Albarn from Blur, Noel and Liam Gallagher from Oasis, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker - plus contributory figures such as the artist Damien Hirst, the designer Ozwald Boateng, and James Brown, the founder-editor of Loaded magazine. The thesis of Live Forever, in essence, is this. Throughout the 1980s, with the Conservatives in power and Margaret Thatcher seemingly unstickable from No 10 Downing Street, Britain's youth had felt progressively more repressed and alienated. Pop music, either American or American-accented, only underscored the desolation of their home environment and the stale hopelessness of their lives. With Thatcher's fall in 1990 came a surge of energy from a youth culture no longer under the Tory cosh. The smug pop bands who celebrated Americanness were kicked onto the scrapheap. The bright new ones who celebrated Britishness for a brief, dizzying period reigned supreme. Hang on a minute. We know pop music endlessly repeats itself, each young generation discovering the same finite vocabulary of chords, vocal inflections and attitudes, and adopting them as its own unique revelation. But, surely, this kids-storming-the-Bastille script has had one too many airings already. It was used when rock'n'roll blew apart the stuffy 1950s, again when the Beatles blew apart the milksop early 1960s, and when punk rock blew apart the decadent mid-1970s. Thatcherism did bear down heavily on much of Britain but not, so far as one recalls, on the pop charts. The era of the Pet Shop Boys, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Frankie Goes to Hollywood hardly seemed one of Stalinist repression. The truth is, if you begin counting instances of déj^ vu, never mind déj^ entendu, in Britpop you'll soon run out of fingers. Its bands, almost without exception, were like bands of the 1960s, featuring jaunty guitar riffs and exuberant vocal harmonies, sporting Beatles cuts and Technicolor mod clothes. Even Blur, the most original of them, unashamedly harked back to the chirpy suburban satires of the Kinks and the Small Faces. Oasis, the most globally successful, made clear their debt to and worship of the Beatles in each mega-selling song they released. The rivalry between Blur and Oasis was portrayed in exactly the same terms as that between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, 30 years earlier. At times, the replay of the Swinging Sixties scenario was almost eerie. In 1964 the old-Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, elected after 13 years of Tory rule, sought to win popularity by inviting pop musicians and pop-cultural luminaries for drinks at Downing Street. In 1997, new Labour's prime minister, Tony Blair, elected after 18 years of Tory rule, tried an identical shtick with Oasis's Noel Gallagher and Simply Red's Mick Hucknall. Exactly as Wilson's Britain had been, Blair's Britain was marketed as a happening place for pop, fashion, design and other sexy arts, while below the surface the country's real problems were as intractable and as ignored as ever. There is something horribly familiar, too, in the aftermath as shown by Live Forever. Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker - both undeniably talented songwriters and performers - speak as only-just survivors of a shock to the system for which, they imply, overindulgence in alcohol and drugs was only partly responsible. The Gallagher brothers seem equally stupefied to recall the era when billions unquestioningly bought their claim to be 'the best fing band in the world'. The general air of bitter bewilderment is summed up in a recurrent phrase reminding us of another 1990s casualty, the letter T. Indeed, Battsek and Dower could just as well have entitled their film Whah Was All Thah Abouh? A less formulaic explanation comes from John Harris, the former editor of Select magazine, Britpop's main handbook, and author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, to be published by Fourth Estate in May. However short-lived and easily corrupted, Harris says, Britpop brought back a unanimity to the British pop-buying audience that hadn't been seen in decades. During the 1980s a divide had opened between the angry, politicised heirs of the punks and the overdressed, hedonistic ones of the new romantics; the yuppies in Thatcher get-rich-quick heaven and the dole kids on their housing estates. 'It was all-out war. Either you liked Duran Duran or you liked the Smiths, there was no middle way. And to many people, if any band cared about the trappings of fame and success, it made them less authentic. People like Morrissey of the Smiths were cultural refuseniks. Morrissey, in fact, even refused to make videos.'What Britpop did, or seemed to do for a few years, was pull all these warring factions together. For Oasis's two-day gig at Knebworth in 1996 - Britpop's answer to Woodstock - 2.5m people, or about 5% of the population, applied for tickets. 'Bits of Britpop were always playing on TV ads, on trailers and over sports channels' goals of the week,' John Harris recalls. 'When Oasis's Don't Look Back in Anger came out, there wasn't anywhere in the country you could go and not hear it. Britpop truly was everybody's music.' In fact, when Thatcher stumbled tearfully from office in 1990, there were still seven more Tory years to run under John Major, and the shape and colour of the new decade's pop remained very much in flux. Acid house remained in full cry, with its ecstasy-fuelled simulations of hippie love-ins. Punk and heavy metal had come together to produce grunge, flaunting American-style hegemony yet again in the near-deification of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. The pre-eminent British band of the early 1990s promised to be Manchester's Stone Roses, the first to pull rock's two cultures back together by combining a sense of mission (mainly to wipe Phil Collins from the face of the Earth) with unabashed revelling in material success. Two things then happened to confound the wisest pundits' predictions and open the way for Britpop. The Stone Roses received a huge lump of money from the Geffen label and were almost never heard from again. And Kurt Cobain committed suicide, becoming a late-century synthesis of John Lennon and Jim Morrison. To fill this sudden vacuum came what were then called 'indie' bands, nurtured by the small independent record labels that had proliferated in the 1980s counterculture. Exactly which music paper coined the term 'Britpop' is now forgotten. None of the bands ever thought of themselves as such, and all quickly came to despise the term. But all undeniably bore Britishness like a banner, re-emancipating their homeland in the pop charts by taunting and satirising it. As early as 1992, the 'spindly, dark and artful' Suede (to quote the eloquent John Harris) were celebrating the 'love and poison of London' and appearing on Select magazine's cover with a Union Jack background. In 1994, Blur released their Parklife album, a hymn of love-hate to the English suburbs inspired by the band's unenjoyed second US tour. The title track came with a cockney commentary evoking the Small Faces' Lazy Sunday, and a video that showed Blur skipping over a zebra crossing exactly like the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album. Two widely different, seemingly uncompetitive figures quickly rose from the ranks to become national heart-throbs. Blur's Damon Albarn, born in London's East End, raised in Colchester, Essex, was a prickly-haired sprite with large, faux-naif eyes, a gift for writing irresistible hooks and a willingness to rhyme 'Prozac' with 'Balzac'. Pulp's Jarvis Cocker was a beanpole in Buddy Holly glasses, already in his thirties after 17 years of indie struggling and intermittent dole-queuing. Cocker's 1995 song Common People came closest to the Lennon league with its prescient mockery of social dumbing-down. Middle-class inverted snobs who really 'lived like the common people', he warned, would only 'watch their lives slide out of view... and drink and dance and screw... because there's nothing else to do'. It was of no small significance either that, with clone Beatle bands popping up everywhere, the real Beatles should have chosen the decade's exact midway point for their long-awaited reunion. In 1995 the band's three survivors released their first single for more than 30 years, with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr providing backup to some 'lost' John Lennon solo tapes. Britpop bands were not criticised for apeing the Beatles, but praised for the degree to which they resembled them. Never had the then and now of pop moved so perfectly in sync. The era was even to produce its own Brian Epstein in the Glaswegian Alan McGee, founder of the indie Creation label that had previously nurtured Primal Scream and the Jesus and Mary Chain (as well as turning down Blur). In 1993, at an obscure Glasgow club named King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, McGee discovered a band called Oasis, led by two rowdy Mancunian brothers with Irish surnames who had threatened to wreck the place if they weren't allowed to perform. It was, ironically, the time when John Major struggled to sell his 'back to basics' philosophy to the electorate. Noel and Liam Gallagher offered a parallel regression to rock's eternal verities, a driving lead guitar, a sneery-soulful voice, lyrics that seemed to mean everything even when meaning nothing, backed up by a relentless offstage descant of smoking, swearing and savage sibling rivalry. Their first album, Definitely Maybe, became the fastest-selling debut album ever seen in the UK. Oasis's rise meant a change of market niche for Blur, who now found themselves cast as effete middle-class southern boys versus tough working-class northern ones, even though Damon Albarn was 100% East Ender and the Gallaghers' Manchester district of Burnage was a world away from Moss Side. Whereas the media-stoked rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones had masked friendliness, generosity, even co-operation, their Britpop reincarnations developed no such mateyness. Blur taunted Oasis for sounding like Status Quo; Noel Gallagher once said of Blur: 'I hope they catch Aids and die because I f---ing hate them.' In August 1995, Blur's management deliberately scheduled their new single Country House to appear on the same day as Oasis's Roll with It, so ensuring that only one of the two bands could be No 1. Blur won in singles sales, but their subsequent album, The Great Escape, was wiped out by Oasis's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? By March 1996 it had sold 6.5m copies and topped singles charts in 16 countries. All Britain seemed to be singing Don't Look Back in Anger, every note of which, consciously or subconsciously, echoed 1960s golden oldies from Dusty Springfield's Some of Your Lovin' to Pink Floyd's See Emily Play. Wonderwall was an even bigger Oasis single, sung word-perfectly and in tune by all 250,000 at the band's record-setting Knebworth gigs while Liam simply stood there, swigging ale. None seemed to care that George Harrison had used the same title for an album in 1968. From the moment Blair became leader of new Labour, his publicity machine began selling him as Britain's first rock'n'roll prime minister. No opportunity was lost to remind the electorate that he'd once played in a college band named the Ugly Rumours or to show him at young-bloke-ish pursuits like heading footballs with Kevin Keegan. Blair attended the influential Q magazine music awards in 1994 and courted key industry figures, notably Oasis's label boss, Alan McGee. Like the Beatles in 1964, Oasis were appropriated as symbols of a vital young would-be-socialist nation, hungry for change. 'Britain is exporting pop music again,' wrote Blair's press secretary, the former tabloid journalist Alastair Campbell, in 1996. 'Now all we need is a new government.' Noel Gallagher appeared on the cover of new Labour's house magazine and, at that year's Brits, delivered a ringing endorsement of Blair 'for bringing some hope to young people in this country'. Like the dome, the concept of Cool Britannia technically predated new Labour's landslide victory in 1997. It had been three months earlier that Vanity Fair magazine (imitating Time magazine in 1966) ran an issue devoted to with-it Britain, its cover showing Liam Gallagher and his future wife, Patsy Kensit, together under a Union Jack bedspread. According to Toby Young, a VF executive at the time, Blair initially had doubts about being photographed for the issue, fearing it might be seen as celebrating an aspect of John Major Toryism. Oasis, meanwhile, continued to be a phenomenon all on their own - a 'nation state', according to Louise Wener from Sleeper, one of several female bands under the Britpop flag. Noel and Liam Gallagher's unrepentant oafishness more than any other influence shaped so-called laddism, whereby male blobs who sat on couches in vests, slurping beer and watching football, found themselves tagged as a culture, and young women everywhere adopted the former masculine prerogatives of sexual aggressiveness, drunkenness and raucousness. It was the first step to our modern world of Frank Skinner comedy, Tony Parsons novels, Big Brother and Sara Cox asking guests on her chat show: ''Oo's got the biggest willy in 'ollywood?' The release of Oasis's third album, Be Here Now, in late August 1997, was considered an event so momentous that it made BBC TV's main news bulletin. Huge expectation quickly gave way to huge anticlimax as the punters found what Noel Gallagher now says he knew they would: 'A bunch of guys in the studio on cocaine, not giving a f---.' Within a week, Oasis fever was wiped off the front pages by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Among Blair's former Britpop crusaders, disillusionment spread faster than a dose of scabies after a northern tour. The new government's decision to follow their Tory predecessors' spending plans for two years turned them overnight into persecutors of almost everyone they so recently vowed to succour: single mothers, pensioners, students, the disabled. Albarn was outraged by the first steps towards university tuition fees and Blair's decision not to educate his own children at a properly socialist bog-standard comprehensive. When Albarn expressed his views to the media, he now says, he got a letter from No 10 ordering him to desist. 'It was like, 'We run the country now. F--- off.'' In February 1998 the government's by now mass attendance at the Brits was marred when Danbert Nobacon from Chumbawamba emptied an ice bucket of water over the deputy prime minister, John Prescott. A month later, the NME published an anti-new-Labour issue headed 'Ever Had the Feeling You've Been Cheated?' Inside was a 12-page round-up of complaint and recrimination from leading musos, headlined 'The Stars Line up to Kick Blair's Arse'. By now, too, even Britpop's most resourceful talents had reached that bleak season in the life of every rock band when ''it was no fun any more'. Blur's last hit single, Beetlebum, was taken as a coded reference to heroin. By the time of Pulp's 1998 This Is Hardcore album, Jarvis Cocker had decided celebrity was 'shite' and won fame far beyond any musical achievement by publicly shaking his bottom at Michael Jackson. Alan McGee's closure of the Creation label in 1999 appeared a symbolic act to put Britpop's last stubborn remnants out of their misery. It was the end of riffs, fringes, harmony and satire; the start of Robbie Williams, Britney Spears and Steps. The truly gifted Britpoppers did not starve. Damon Albarn went on from Blur to devise the Gorillaz cartoon band and work with African music like a latter-day Paul Simon. Cocker, who soon hits 40, kept Pulp together while pursuing new careers as a DJ and TV arts presenter. The Gallagher brothers are still out there with Oasis, effing and brawling as much as ever. In December, Liam lost two teeth in a fight in Munich after allegedly kung-fu-kicking a policeman. A few days later in Brighton, Noel stormed off stage, telling his audience he hoped they die of hypothermia. But even they now have the air of elder statesmen. Noel, in particular, is mystified by child bands like the S-Club Juniors and the uniform little dance they do. 'Whah's all thah abouh?' he asks despairingly. 'Choreographers have taken over the world...' So what's different?.

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