An open letter to Simon Reynold on his 'Brit Pop box' critique

[tate]

I have a general question that I've always wanted to ask folks here:

When Oasis first broke in the UK and US* a lot of my friends perceived the UK press' championing of Oasis as a pretty transparent attempt to reclaim some relevancy for UK rock in the wake of Nirvana, grunge, the Seattle bands, and all that, which had been thriving for a couple of years. Was this just my local, highly subjective and cynical response, or was it a more widespread opinion? Is there a story here regarding Oasis/Britpop as a response to grunge? Not sure about the UK chronologies and perceptions on this, which is why I ask.

At the time it was as if we (=me and friends) wanted a hot new UK band to be excited about (having adored MBV and plenty of other UK indie, pre-Oasis), but were very, very disappointed with the actual music of Oasis. After hearing/reading about Oasis for a while and then finally hearing them in '94, we totally scoffed at the idea that they were a fresh new band worth paying attention to -- they sounded like paint-by-numbers-modern-rock-plus-retro-Beatles business to us. I didn't like them at all at the time and certainly never bought a record, though I did come around and enjoy a few of their singles eventually.

*which in the US was late '94 if I remember correctly ... ?

 

[Gavin]

I'd disagree with this too - I have no chart data to base my impression on, but I'd guess that Wonderwall was far and away the most popular Oasis song in the US.

FWIW the RIAA site lists both singles gold.

 

[tate]

Man-Voice-Over-Power-Chords-Rock (aka post-grunge) is very much over.

Not where I live, it's not.

Nickelback's close to the state fair circuit.

Well, you've made my point exactly. Who do you think "the state fair circuit" actually is ? The state fair crowds are exactly what I am talking about in regard to non-urban working class, and I hope that you're not speaking disparagingly of that crowd because if so, it would leave you sounding pretty elitist there, which I wouldn't expect given your class-based concerns. I, uh, still attend state fairs - in Syracuse, NY, in fact, which is an absolutely massive sea of people - and have working class musician-friends who go to them in order to see rock music.

 

[mistersloane]

I have a general question that I've always wanted to ask folks here:

When Oasis first broke in the UK and US* a lot of my friends perceived the UK press' championing of Oasis as a pretty transparent attempt to reclaim some relevancy for UK rock in the wake of Nirvana, grunge, the Seattle bands, and all that, which had been thriving for a couple of years. Was this just my local, highly subjective and cynical response, or was it a more widespread opinion? Is there a story here regarding Oasis/Britpop as a response to grunge? Not sure about the UK chronologies and perceptions on this, which is why I ask.

At the time it was as if we (=me and friends) wanted a hot new UK band to be excited about (having adored MBV and plenty of other UK indie, pre-Oasis), but were very, very disappointed with the actual music of Oasis. After hearing/reading about Oasis for a while and then finally hearing them in '94, we totally scoffed at the idea that they were a fresh new band worth paying attention to -- they sounded like paint-by-numbers-modern-rock-plus-retro-Beatles business to us. I didn't like them at all at the time and certainly never bought a record, though I did come around and enjoy a few of their singles eventually.

*which in the US was late '94 if I remember correctly ... ?

I know Oasis certainly were symptomatic at the time of a particularly nasty strain of journalism which found its zenith in James Brown's Loaded magazine, and the price of coke dropping, I think it was as much to do with that as needing a post-Cobain face, it was zeitgeisty as well as a created need. The whole Britpop thing per se was created by a PR company run by John Best and Phill Savidge, it's them what was responsible.

 

[tate]

I know Oasis certainly were symptomatic at the time of a particularly nasty strain of journalism which found its zenith in James Brown's Loaded magazine, and the price of coke dropping, I think it was as much to do with that as needing a post-Cobain face, it was zeitgeisty as well as a created need. The whole Britpop thing per se was created by a PR company run by John Best and Phill Savidge, it's them what was responsible.

Thanks, mistersloane, that's very interesting.

 

[tate]

FWIW the RIAA site lists both singles gold.

Good to know, thanks.

 

[Gavin]

Not where I live, it's not.


Well, you've made my point exactly. Who do you think "the state fair circuit" actually is ? The state fair crowds are exactly what I am talking about in regard to non-urban working class, and I hope that you're not speaking disparagingly of that crowd because if so, it would leave you sounding pretty elitist there, which I wouldn't expect given your class-based concerns. I, uh, still attend state fairs - in Syracuse, NY, in fact, which is an absolutely massive sea of people - and have working class musician-friends who go to them in order to see rock music.

No, not to disparage the crowds, but if you're a band playing state fairs, you're not exactly a main attraction -- you need to be part of an entertainment package: ferris wheels, funnel cakes, cows made of butter, etc. So past the peak of popularity was my main point. Blue Oyster Cult plays the Ohio State Fair every year I think, which is sort of what I had in mind -- although the bills are getting more and more country-fied!

Actually, tangential thought just crossed my mind... rock era coincides with the height of manufacturing industry... Decline of manufacturing industry / rise of service sector working class leads to rebirth of rural simulacrum? And also a retreat into the family, as much country music espouses the virtues of domesticity?

 

[tate]

No, not to disparage the crowds, but if you're a band playing state fairs, you're not exactly a main attraction -- you need to be part of an entertainment package: ferris wheels, funnel cakes, cows made of butter, etc. So past the peak of popularity was my main point. Blue Oyster Cult plays the Ohio State Fair every year I think, which is sort of what I had in mind -- although the bills are getting more and more country-fied!

From the point of view of a phenomenological characterization of the event, I completely agree that music is not the only attraction at a state fair. I do think, however, that from the point of view of the realia of the people booking the acts and managing the budgets, there is an attempt to book both 'the most popular acts *now*', plus 'the most popular past-their prime acts that we can afford', which still indicates a certain mass popularity. At this point I'm not really disagreeing with you though.

The formula for the NY state fair seems to be 'Current popular country act + current popular pop act + current popular modern rock act + classic rock superstar, with side stages filled out with past-their-prime-but-still-crowd-pleasing acts' of the BOC, classic rock, hair metal, popular 70s radio varieties. So yeah, I agree that 'past their prime' rock is an integral part of the state fair entertainment plan, and of course I agree that modern country is ubiquitous there and elsewhere these days in the states.

 

[tate]

Actually, tangential thought just crossed my mind... rock era coincides with the height of manufacturing industry... Decline of manufacturing industry / rise of service sector working class leads to rebirth of rural simulacrum? And also a retreat into the family, as much country music espouses the virtues of domesticity?

It's defniitely an interesting suggestion that I'd like to think about for a while. In general, I tend to be initially skeptical about one-to-one structural equivalences where economic phenomenon (A) is mapped seamlessly onto aesthetic trend (B), only because I find that this kind of thing, while provocative for discussion and analysis, sometimes ends up running roughshod over local details (not because I am anti-marxist [I'm not] but because post-structuralism left me on the side of privileging singularities, localities, and hyper-attentive analyses to those localities rather than large structural generalizations) -- though I hasten to add that in some cases the structural analyses look correct and are therefore useful and acceptable to me. It's when both an analysis of structural trends and local micro-singularities are combined that I feel the most comfortable.

As for your specific suggestion about the emergence of a 'rural simulacrum', it's something I'd like to ponder [very provocative idea you've got there, as it cuts across both the socio-political history of the US midwest and other analyses regarding folklore and folklorism and the like], but one immediate comment is that the 'manufacturing replaced by service industry' account, which certainly applies in some ways to parts of upstate NY's cities (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse), is harder to map onto rural midwest agricultural areas, where manufacturing was never on par with agriculture as the primary economic activity. I'm thinking more of the rural Missouri-Iowa-Nebraska-Kansas midwest than the Ohio one, if that helps. Though perhaps this latter comment of mine is off point, i.e., you're not not talking about rural areas at all but other geo-locales where the 'rural simulacrum' (if such a thing can be agreed to exist) becomes manifest.

 

[mistersloane]

Thanks, mistersloane, that's very interesting.

actually thinking about it the biggest factor that led to the rise of britpop wasn't the end of grunge or the price of coke but the end of the conservative governments reign of power in the UK and Labour getting in for the first time since 79 or whatever, this led to an idea of a 'new britain' which britpop fed into.

 

[Buick6]

Some interesting discussions going on, I'd just like to throw in:

1. There was a a-croaky-voice-power-chord English band called BUSH who were massive, and um...they pretty much follow the lineage of massive English bands in America etc..if you wanna go down that path from Zep, Motorhead, the Cult, Bush etc...

2. TRAIN'S song 'drops of jupiter' or whatever despite having an annoying vocal, has better groove and playing than fucking Oasis.

3. An interesting thing about the BRIT-PLOP 1984-1999 era what that is was one of the first genres to be really pushed by intellectual, purple-prose rock journo, who could make the dullest, limpest most pretentious and quickly DATED music of all-time sound sound fantastic that your existential-crisis would not be complete without it! Alas you either ejaculated vigourously when hearing the stuff or were ripped off, but the next step was seeing these bands live, when ultimately they inherently suck, destroying the romantic 'head' notion of what they were. Reynolds 'blissed out' tomes is one of the perfect example of this, as were articles by Everett True, Johnny Walker and nearly every other NME/MM jouno of the time. I find it even more ironic in that most of the journos were (or seemed to be) bigger rockstars than the lame bands they championed!!

And thats the great thing about time and art, great art transcends time, space etc, the truly great critic needs to have the sensitivity, skill, and probably life experience to pick it.

 

[tate]

1. There was a a-croaky-voice-power-chord English band called BUSH who were massive, and um...they pretty much follow the lineage of massive English bands in America etc..if you wanna go down that path from Zep, Motorhead, the Cult, Bush etc...

You're right about Bush being huge in the states for a time but I don't see how they really fit into this story apart from the fact that they were absolutely irredeemably crap and very obviously crap from the first moment of their appearance until the last. I guess if the question has to do with Brit bands' failure to make it big on US radio then they fit only to the degree that they were nothing but shameless cliche-abiding ripoff cash-ins who didn't hide the fact that they harbored absolutely no ambition for anything but lowest common denominator nirvana-lite rock, and sure enough US rock radio swallowed it, hook line and sinker . . . but you're right, they were frat-rock huge in the mid-to-late 90s, much to the consternation of many listeners ... the fact that albini recorded them only shows how much he loved to go against the grain, annoy even his own admirers, and subvert expectations that he behave according to prescribed underground rules (at least that's how I took it) - i.e., it was a sort of 'fuck you' to the underground-police that made a certain kind of sense, actually.

 

[crackerjack]

1. There was a a-croaky-voice-power-chord English band called BUSH who were massive, and um...they pretty much follow the lineage of massive English bands in America etc..if you wanna go down that path from Zep, Motorhead, the Cult, Bush etc...

Bush were an anomaly. In the UK they were only famous for being massive in the States. Couldn't get arrested here.

actually thinking about it the biggest factor that led to the rise of britpop wasn't the end of grunge or the price of coke but the end of the conservative governments reign of power in the UK and Labour getting in for the first time since 79 or whatever, this led to an idea of a 'new britain' which britpop fed into.

There was some link between the music and the political atmosphere of the time, but Brit Pop's rise began about 93/4, then peaked in 95/6 with the Blur-Oasis scrap and success of Oasis's 2nd album. Labour didn't get in til May 97.

When Oasis first broke in the UK and US* a lot of my friends perceived the UK press' championing of Oasis as a pretty transparent attempt to reclaim some relevancy for UK rock in the wake of Nirvana, grunge, the Seattle bands, and all that, which had been thriving for a couple of years.

Some of the mags - Select especially - worked up an anti-American angle to the whole thing. But more than anything they were just massively relieved not be having to write about 'faceless' dance music. Nirvana excepted, grunge didn't really penetrate the mainstream over here, which left the media with a choice between knob-twiddling dance producers, the arse-end of shoegaze and comically crap student bands like Carter. There was a massive audible sigh of relief when Suede emerged. This also kickstarted the phenomenon of bands being greeted as saviours before they even had a single out (does that ever happen in the US press?).

 

[mistersloane]

There was some link between the music and the political atmosphere of the time, but Brit Pop's rise began about 93/4, then peaked in 95/6 with the Blur-Oasis scrap and success of Oasis's 2nd album. Labour didn't get in til May 97.
.

lol my bad!!!!

 

[Mr. Tea]

I never said that: I said that they resonate strongly with the majority. Whether you in particular are a part of that majority or not is irrelevant.

Oh sure, I wasn't referring to what you'd said, specifically.

 

[tate]

This also kickstarted the phenomenon of bands being greeted as saviours before they even had a single out (does that ever happen in the US press?).

I'm not really knowledgeable enough to answer, but it's funny that you ask the question because the first conspicuous example of this kind of pre-release savior-heralding is precisely what I associate with the Strokes, which indeed happened to them on the strength of their UK support. They were hailed as 'The Next Big Thing' by the US press solely on the basis of popularity in the UK even though they had yet to release anything in the US, which even they (the Strokes, i mean) themselves admitted at the time felt weird. It was the first instance that I ever remember in which I was reading about a band in a US magazine solely on the basis of having been celebrated by the UK media.

But that was all part of a very noticeable and desperate desire on the part of the US media to invent a new mythologization of New York City in the wake of 9/11: suddenly, out of nowhere, to read from afar anyway, there was supposedly some nyc 'scene' with the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and TV on the Radio in it, all of whom were heralded as important next big things and all of whom in 2001 were about as musically exciting as drying paint. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were fresh-faced college kids recently arrived from Oberlin *Ohio lol, TVOTR had a mediocre EP with Touch & Go in the can but not yet out, and the Strokes were ... well, there's no need even to characterize that version of retro-pastiche 2.0.

So yeah, I've always thought that the pre-release heralding of the next big thing was a UK specialty import. : ) I'm sure that folks will think of a thousand counterexamples, though, which will just go to show how distorted-by-annoyance my views on the matter actually are.

*Actually brian chase was originally from new york or brooklyn if i remember correctly

 

[Dunninger]

the fact that albini recorded them only shows how much he loved to go against the grain, annoy even his own admirers, and subvert expectations that he behave according to prescribed underground rules (at least that's how I took it) - i.e., it was a sort of 'fuck you' to the underground-police that made a certain kind of sense, actually.

I don't know what his original motivations were at the time, but I know that he has said on various occasions that his work as 'producer' (a word he normally doesn't use) on this record was a mistake.

Bush aren't really Britpop/rock, of course they were from the UK but everything about them was so american. At least here in Germany they weren't perceived as british, as far as I recall it.

 

[swears]

the fact that albini recorded them only shows how much he loved to go against the grain, annoy even his own admirers, and subvert expectations that he behave according to prescribed underground rules (at least that's how I took it) - i.e., it was a sort of 'fuck you' to the underground-police that made a certain kind of sense, actually.

Or just to make shitloads of money.

 

[STN]

Britpop often did seem to be explicitly presented as an 'antidote' (or at least in opposition) to grunge, both by journalists and the bands themselves, so tate's friends observations are by no means wrong or localised. In fact, it's still presented that way now (in much the same fashion as the notion that grunge 'saved' us from hair metal).

 

[petergunn]

i think the problem with this thread is the crossthinking of two ideas:

a) in the UK, britpop (oasis, elastica,, blur, ) was presented as a alternative to nirvana, mudhoney, soundgarden

b) by both oasis's and blur's second LP's the music had become the soundtrack to every lager lout up and down the isle...

both are true...

from a mainstream US perspective, Oasis is the only band i can think of that had more than 2 singles off one album played on mainstream rock radio stations... as this boxset shows, there were tons and tons of UK one hit wonders in the US ("unbelievable" will be played at sports game forever...), but very few bands had more than one hit (shit, the Prodigy had 3, albeit off different albums... firestarter, slap my bitch up, and that "come play my game" track...).. like will blur, "there's no other way" and "she's so high" got mainstream radio play in boston the way their big hits in the UK did not... rock radio was too busy playing Bush...

oasis: wonderwall, champagne supernova, don't look back in anger ...all very big radio tracks in the US...