100% Britpop

Britpop. To celebrate 20 years since Blur's Parklife came out we're now suffering a range of awful reminders about a fairly dodgy period in British pop history. Blur, Oasis and Pulp are the only bands I remember, in fact I don't think I ever knowingly bought a Britpop record. Even the splendidly stupid and meaningless genre's name is off putting and hard to divorce from the grinning face of Tony Blair in his full manic 90s splendour. Not a good modern history lesson. So all the splendid and once radical Britpop rock gods have either embraced full and well deserved obscurity and gone onto normal careers as inner city social workers or they're playing out their days building up ever more pretentious projects and churning out the same old sixties type shit as if they'd actually invented it. Others have gained some kind of Hipster and cultural respect and write self centred articles for the posh Sundays or curate art galleries and run organic farms while their Gibson 335s and their Rickenbackers gather dust under beds or on wall hangers in Cotswolds farmhouses. They infiltrated the great British consciousness like cheap burglars who steal your couch but leave your Tag Heuer whilst in the dusty background the shallow voices of Radio 1's near dead DJs sycophantically compliments their every cliched move through a tinny loudspeaker. Oasis sadly sang about being in a rock and roll band and being stars, if only, they didn't even come close. They were stuck in a British built loop of slowed down and turgid musical soup like a Morris Marina groaning in third gear trying to tow a caravan across the Thelwall Viaduct on the M6. Meanwhile, the people that did know how to do rock and roll stayed safe and creative on the other side of the Atlantic and the English Channel. Britpop? Shitpop.