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Britpop was a movement of singles, like any pop movement, so this thread didn't talk much about the albums. Listening to Suede's Dog Man Star recently, though, which I'd call a classic of overblown pretentiousness with few equals ("You were outside making permanent love to the nuclear age,") I wondered what, if any, the classic Britpop albums were.
The obvious choices are the twinned duo from the summer of Britpop, Oasis' (What's The Story) Morning Glory and Blur's The Great Escape. Except that the latter is, I believe, not held in high esteem by Blur fans and comprehensively lost the battle for sales and public acclaim that the Manc lads won. Parklife is probably more of a blueprint for Britpop, with its Kinks influence and Phil Daniels and its crude attempts to anatomise the working classes. But I spent those years fervently hating Damon Albarn so I'm not the best person to comment. Pulp's Different Class also came out in 1995 and was a sales success. It's got iconic songs on it - Common People, Es And Whizz - but doesn't, to my mind, hold up that well today. Too many fillers indistinguishable from each other.
My nominations for classic Britpop albums? I'm glad you asked.
Suede - Dog Man Star
The apothesis of everything Suede promised and strove to do, a moody, dramatic extravaganza of an album. It's got those Bowie guitar lines zipping up and down, every song is epic, and as the album progresses each song attempts to top the last in length and power. It's exhaustingly full of itself. But it's also full of tunes, of style, it's unified in sounding like the product of one place and time and of extraordinary excess, and it's about modern Britain. Through all kinds of filters, but what makes this unarguably Britpop is the focus on modern life in Britain and how it's lived.
Pulp - This Is Hardcore
Suede wrote about the dark side of excess as it was happening, in a doomy glam-goth way. This album is about what happens after the wave breaks, after your generation emerges into the sunlight and takes over the airwaves and the nightclubs. It's the comedown album, dealing with getting older and getting things wrong and the ultra-short-term nostalgia the 1990s specialised in. "The revolution's happened, haven't you heard?" Jarvis sang, with the crumpled cynicism of a man who's achieved the fame he's spent a decade or more working toward and found it not much more than a novelty. It's post-drugs, post-youth, post-orgasmic. And again it's all about Britain and how we live in it, obsessively digging through our entrails like a soothsayer.
There may be more, I'll have to think. Any other suggestions? |
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