What was Britpop?

What was Britpop? In musical terms, Britpop was guitar pop music, with its roots in the independent music scene established during the eighties. The relative amounts of rock and pop varied with each band. At the pop end of the spectrum were Pulp, an eighties pop band who added a few more guitars for their Different Class album; and Blur, a shoegazing band who adopted a smarter, Mod-influenced sound for their Modern Life Is Rubbish album. At the rock end of the spectrum were Oasis, whose influences included early seventies glam and late seventies punk; and Manic Street Preachers, who transformed their American rock sound into something more melodic and British sounding for Everything Must Go.

In cultural terms, Britpop was something more interesting- a danse macabre between class and national identity. Along with race/ethnicity, these are the factors which help define us as individuals and shape the way we respond to the rest of the world. Most of the political and ideological battles of the twentieth century can be understood as conflicts over the relative importance of these factors. Socialists emphasise class, fascists emphasise race; between these extremes, mainstream politicians often implicitly or explicitly use national identity to rally support. It’s a much more inclusive identity than the other two and therefore much more effective. A voter in a British election may be black or white, rich or poor, but they will almost certainly have been born in Britain and therefore be British, even though they may not always feel particularly conscious or proud of that fact.

Class and Nationality

Class fault lines run through British society in the same way that race divisions are fundamental to American society. In Britain, the class divide also manifests itself as a geographical divide between the richer, media-centred South and the poorer, industrial and post-industrial North. Actually, the divide isn’t strictly north-south; economic deprivation corresponds roughly to the distance you are away from London, and so the divide is really a diagonal line running from Gloucester to just south of Grimsby. This, incidentally, puts Wales as well as Scotland in the ‘North’ of the country.

British indie was forged in class division. British punk had much more class rage than American punk, being the preserve of the London underclass rather than Greenwich Village bohemians; consequently, the post-punk and indie scenes which emerged in Britain during the eighties were also predominantly working class. As British indie broke into the mainstream during the early nineties Manchester, the ‘capital of the North’, became the cultural centre of the UK, and the bands which emerged were proud of their working class roots and often emphasised them through their music.

All this was welcome. What was not so welcome was indie’s increasing tendency to wave the flag, a tendency which would lead to the genre being re-labelled ‘Britpop’. Much of this change was driven by the music press, who were at the height of their influence; it was kick-started by a Select magazine cover featuring Suede’s Brett Anderson superimposed over the Union flag and the headline ‘Yanks Go Home!’ in April 1993. Suede, Pulp, Blur and the other emerging indie bands were given the dubious honour of being ambassadors for the nation, valiantly repelling the hordes of American grunge bands which lapped at our shores. In retrospect it all seems very silly, and some of the principle actors recognise it as such. Brett Anderson himself insists “I never wanted to be photographed in front of a flag.”

So how did the class consciousness of British indie feed into the flag waving nationalism of Britpop? The answer lies is the increasingly globalised nature of modern life. As transport and communication becomes easier as a result of increasingly affordable technology the cultural barriers between nations start to crumble, but only for those who can afford it. The average British working class person has in common with the average American working class person the fact that neither of them has every made a transatlantic flight; as a consequence of this, they are cultural strangers. By contrast the middle classes from both countries will be far more imbibed in the culture of the other; they will be more likely to dress the same way, speak the same way, and listen to the same music. And, as McCarthy once sang, We Are All Bourgeoisie Now. Or rather, we all think we’re bourgeoisie, as we start to achieve lifestyles which were recently only the preserve of the well off.

As globalisation increases, national identity decreases, and the British working class are left behind as the standard bearers for all things British. The other social group which retains its national identity is the ‘old rich’, the traditional ruling class who can afford to embrace other cultures but choose not to- barons, lords, minor royalty, owners of estates and country clubs. In that wonderful barometer of American society which is the Simpsons, British people are always depicted either as working class stereotypes (‘shine yer shoes, guv’nor!’) or upper class twits living in castles and drinking tea. A middle class British person would just be too similar to a middle class American to make for entertaining TV.

Blur and the Manics

The Britpop band which most clearly embraced the ideal of pro-Britishness, anti-globalisation and anti-Americanism was Blur. Nowhere is the concept more clearly represented than in the video for For Tommorow, the lead single from Modern Life Is Rubbish.

The video could almost be an advert for the city by the London Tourist Board. Damon Albarn floats in the Thames and swings from the back of a Routemaster bus. The band plays in the fountains and chase pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Jovial Londoners of all ages sing along to the chorus. Blur’s philosophy, and arguably Britpop’s philosophy, is summed up in the outro chorus, which conveys a Londoner’s feeling of bewilderment with modern life and a yearning for past certainties and a sense of British identity. You can argue, as Roobin does, that Blur were primarily about class consciousness rather than nationalism, but as I have argued above I think their fascination with working class life occurs as a secondary consequence of their fascination with British national identity.

Compare that to the Manics’ A Design For Life, the lead single from Everything Must Go, which deals directly with class conflict and working class pride.

There are plenty of distinctly British images in the video; polo playing aristocrats are shown along side horse-mounted policemen clubbing anti-poll tax demonstrators; one of the aforementioned demonstrators clutches his bleeding head and is juxtaposed with a woman in a ridiculous hat at Ascot. But there are also American images in the video; an all-American family gaze at a Cadilac in a showroom, and kids play American football. This makes sense; if class as a concept is to mean anything then it must surely be something which is not confined by national boundaries.

Although many of the images used are associated with national identity, the song is clearly about class; in an inversion of For Tommorow, the British identity portrayed in the video is a secondary consequence of the class conflict which is at the heart of the video. Furthermore, the British identity portrayed is not a nostalgic or idealised but instead paints a picture of a society brutally divided by class conflict. Which, at the time song was released in the dying years of a long and divisive period of Conservative rule, Britain was.

If Britpop was culturally about the interplay between class and nationalism then the Manics represented the former and Blur the latter. This is why the bands are fundamentally different; this is why Nicky Wire described himself as the anti-Damon Albarn. The subject matter of A Design For Life and the nature of the music, which sounded more British than anything the Manics had previously done, meant that the band was suddenly considered a Britpop band and part of the mainstream British indie scene which they had previously despised. Radiohead’s The Bends, released a year previously with a similar sound, did not generate such interest from the music industry as the subject matter did not deal with either class or nationalism, but instead dealt with paranoia, introversion, depression and other topics usually associated with American grunge music.

The Demise

The demise of Britpop was ugly and messy. The obsession with class and nationalism perpetrated by the media led inevitably to the Spice Girls and Geri Halliwell’s Union flag dress, and an obsession with the fortunes of the English football team during the 1996 European Cup. The combination of class and nationalism is again represented by a national team playing a working class sport; also note the annoying tendency for the media to equate Britain with England. Some have gone as far to say that Britpop died when England lost to Germany on penalties in the semi-final; perhaps it started to die then, but it staggered on through to the election of Tony Blair on the back of a campaign combining nationalism (‘New Labour, New Britain’) with the false promise of a government which would be less hostile towards the working class. Noel Gallagher went to Downing Street for celebratory drinks.

In my view, Britpop finally died with several events which happened in quick succession towards the end of 1997. After their election in May it gradually became clear that New Labour would be just as lying and incompetent as the previous government. Oasis released their awful third album Be Here Now on 21 August. Ten days later, the Princess of Wales was killed in a car accident. The unprecedented outpouring of public grief and hostility towards the Queen and the rest of the Windsor family was the defining culmination of the class and nationalism hysteria. Nationalism, because the royal family are the symbols of the British sovereignty; class, because she was ‘The People’s Princess”, someone who had married into the Windsor family from outside. In actual fact she was just as much of a toff as the rest of them, but that did not matter to most people. She was ‘one of us’, a commoner whose life had been destroyed by the cruelty of the Royal family. London came to a standstill for her funeral. Blair milked the public’s grief with an emotional TV appearance. Elton John stayed at number one for 14 weeks with a remake of song originally written about Marilyn Monroe’s fatal drug overdose. To say it all got a bit silly would be something of an understatement.

Then, Robbie Williams released Angels, and guitar music all but disappeared from the mainstream in Britain. And that was that.

I’d like to end this rather negative and cynical post on something of a positive, so here’s another great Britpop single, from before the whole thing collapsed into shit and ashes. The music is pop and the subject matter is class. Sing along now…