This is a very strange article. It posits that grunge has won against Britpop. Sometimes I wonder about the very perverse relationship which took place in 90s music. You weren’t supposed to be in love with success. You were supposed to be in love with music, but you weren’t supposed to promote yourself or love success. You were on the fringe, and outside of the mainstream. Going out on a limb, being yourself, and aiming to please nobody would be values that you wear as a badge of pride.
Britpop I think was a wonderful thing. It was a wonderful thing for a similar reason why 60s pop was wonderful. It was a celebration of a community. It was extroverted. People didn’t like the decaying facade of what was the working class, but they were defiant and determined to have a good time: at least they were still capable of having a good time. Maybe this was the last golden era before they got screwed over completely. It was something that never shied away from giving you a peek at the uglier side of things, but people accepted who you are – as long as you were British of course. And there were so many ways to be cool – britpop was white, of course. But it had a peaceful co-existence with other musical trends of that decade. There was jungle / drum n bass. There was rave / techno. There was trip hop. There was urban soul. British music of the 90s was just so brimming with life and energy. You should have seen the guests on Bjork albums, who she collaborated with. There was Goldie, Tricky and the guy from 808 state. Everybody was cool, groovy, giving each other plenty of hi-fives.
The one exception, the one major band whose outlook on life was darker than everybody else’s was Radiohead. Maybe that’s why they didn’t seem like part of the scene.
Grunge on the other hand was a darker, more somber affair. I don’t really understand how anybody could say that grunge people had a more mature outlook on life than the brit poppers. They took heroin and didn’t keep it a secret from others. They were naval gazing, content to keep on spewing out tales of their own disenchantment with life. The lead singers of Soundgarden, Linkin Park, Stone Temple Pilots and Nirvana are already dead, through drug overdose or suicide or both. How on earth can you say that the grunge artists are more well adjusted?
But there is one respect in which grunge is doing better than Britpop. It does seem as though the indie scene in the US was more vibrant than in the UK. Perhaps people in the US did the internet better? They had better organisation for indie labels? They had more fans? When you were doing britpop, whatever you were doing had to be wildly popular in order for you to do it. There’s just no economies of scale in the UK.
Whatever it is, the music scene in the UK fell off precipitiously. Britpop began eating itself. It was all about laddishness and la la la melodies, so it was pretty hard to sustain creatively. There were bands like Coldplay, and it was dreadful and bland, other than a pretty good first album or two. It became creatively bankrupt, and pretty quickly too – so quickly it was astonishing.
And it’s pretty hard to knock a guy like Damon Albarn. When he was with Blur, he pushed it in so many different directions – people sometimes forget their first album was madchester style psychedelic dance pop. Then they turned to Brit pop. Then they embraced the slacker indie pop aesthetic. Then they went for Moroccan world music on their last album. And after that Damon Albarn formed Gorillaz and did side project after side project. It was a pretty much astonishing career. I liked the eternal optimism of his eclectism. But I could also understand that when he thought about what music had become since the turn of the century, he was disparaging. If Taylor Swift had become the best songwriter of her generation….
It’s a little difficult to judge Taylor Swift because I’m older than she is. She would have had some of her best work around the time when my interest in music would have been waning. Is “Blank Space” really a great song? With that cliche chord sequence? Taylor Swift’s era of popularity coincided with the influencer aesthetic: you had to make yourself the star of the show: you had to hawk your brand obsessively. Perhaps she wrote pretty good lyrics, and it’s all wasted on me. And I’m not really impressed with her music. Damon Albarn’s mastered a huge swath of musical styles. He absorbed the entire breadth and width of the British pop tradition and on “Parklife”, on song after song he showed that he picked something up along the way: here, I’m doing the Kinks. Here, I’m doing Bowie. Here, I’m doing 60s baroque orchestral pop. Here, I’m doing the Jam. Here, I’m doing Syd Barrett.
He was being a jerk and he deserved a slap on the wrist for that remark. And yet… something offhand like “she doesn’t write her music really” could be bitchy. Then again, if she doesn’t write her music, then why is she crediting it to everybody? Is it the industry practice this day to do this to financially reward everybody who worked on that song? Was it better back in the day when the song had one author, and it just got put out, warts and all? But did he deserve to be witch hunted?
You could say that Damon Albarn was a sexist. I’ve come to that conclusion myself. He had a rock chick girlfriend – Justine Frischmann from Elastica. But rumour has it they broke off because he couldn’t accept the level of success she was having in America. And there was this time when he just didn’t like Skunk Anasie. (And to be fair, quite a few people have worked with Adele on that same album and complained about how she treated them.)
But still, he didn’t really like being witch hunted like that. Sure, he’s had to deal with a lot of tabloid attention when he was with Blur, but maybe he’s older and unable to deal with it? Or maybe a lot of former rock stars from the 80s and 90s are just not used to the loss of status they’ve had over the last 20-30 years). Damon Albarn started off as an indie rock artist, and never had that level of popularity that Taylor Swift had. He didn’t have to deal with the pressures that she did, no matter that I also think he was the better musician. And he existed in a sphere where he was critically acclaimed by the press and hailed as one of the vanguards of Britpop. So he probably wasn’t that used to the hate mob.
What Taylor Swift, Adele and Beyonce have in common these days is that they understand that the pop landscape has changed so much over the last few years that their job is basically they are an influencer who happens to write music. In a way Madonna was changing the nature of the pop star so that it was more like that. But whereas the pop stars of old had to deal with the press, today the press is basically the stans that follow them, and they know how to marshall their stans to start a witchhunt. Taylor Swift already did that on Jake Gyllenhaal and Kanye West, and now she’s going to do that to Damon Albarn. But somehow I’m not sure that she’ll be remembered as well when it’s time for her to step down. In any case, the scene is different. Taylor Swift will always be seen as a feminist, or at least, she’ll be somebody that a lot of young women think about when they feel aggrieved and they need somebody to kick.
Pop music used to be fun. We now know that Blur vs Oasis was a bit of fun, and both bands actually did hang out together a few times. But that was a more innocent time. Today, pop fandom is more about a channel for the rage of your masses, and that’s something that Kanye West and Taylor Swift have in common that makes them ugly. So much of their music is about being thin skinned and slighted. Britpop was about having a thick skin and getting with it. Yes, some of it was punky and punk is about anger, but it is also about turning that anger into some kind of joy. It was about the joy of discovery, and of creativity. (There’s not much creativity these days because so much of the big ideas of pop music have already been articulated somewhere else before).
So while there’s not much doubt that Taylor Swift is one of the greatest musicians of her generation, I think that the fact that this is the case is an indictment of an entire generation.
Music Composition 