The Nineties: When Surface was Depth - Michael Bracewell

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all its opacity and pouting, the movement produced some glorious pop moments, from Pulp’s ‘I Want to Live Like Common People’ to the thunderous title track of Oasis’s second CD, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, which confounded its detractors with their impassioned articulations of defiance in the face of modern life’s rubbish. At their best, these were serious and sincere pop songs, which used archaic formats and styling to pass comment on society as they found it. The message, in BritPop, was subordinate to the medium – a neat reversal of the up-front conscience raising of traditional protest songs.

      This mixing of intentions was much in evidence on Pulp’s controversial Sorted for Es and Whizz, which was seized upon by anti-drugs lobbyists to represent a massive misjudgement on the part of the group with regards to its ambiguous handling of a sensitive subject. It might have been one small step for Jarvis Cocker on to Michael Jackson’s heavily defended stage at ‘that’ awards ceremony, but it was a mighty leap for BritPop as the scourge and cartoon folk devils of the transatlantic pop establishment. Rooted in the past but sniping at the present, BritPop made its political points by never referring to politics. Noel or Damon might offer a cursory nod to New Labour, but there was none of the community knees-up and flag-waving which had typified the politicized pop events laid on by Red Wedge or Rock Against Racism during the early years of the 1980s. Rather, the politics of BritPop were summed up in the lyrics of Oasis’s ground-breaking single ‘Whatever’ (1994), with its demand for personal freedom – ‘I’m free, to do whatever I, whatever I choose,’ – being snarled by Liam over Noel’s evocative homage to the reversed orchestration on the Beatles’ psychedelic nursery rhyme of 1967, ‘I am the Walrus’. And, ironically, this plea for individualism would breed a new breed of conformism within BritPop’s massive fan base. In the end, the democracy between the performers and fans that punk had attempted to instigate, and that dance music simply took for granted, was wholly dismantled by BritPop’s reawakening of an earlier rock and roll orthodoxy. Jarvis and Co. might have been the Citizen Smiths of modern Britain, but their triumph lay in a powerful coalition between media and marketing.

      As BritPop spilt over into the ‘BritCulture’ of BritArt and the heavily over-mediated ‘neo-Swinging London’, as championed by British glossy magazines from GQ to the Telegraph Magazine and Elle, so a new aristocracy of wholly metropolitan socialites, art dealers, PR gurus and restaurateurs would benefit from the mini-boom. For Noel and Liam Gallagher, from the depressed suburb of Burnage, south Manchester, there must have been a delicious sense of victory in realizing that the old escape route from working-class drudgery through football or pop was still open – and it could still make the toffs dance to their tune. As is traditional in English popular culture, from Mick Jagger’s charming of the British aristocracy, the yobs were calling the shots to the snobs. Hence Noel Gallagher, on the television programme ‘TFI Friday’, displaying his neatly shoed foot to a fawning Chris Evans and barking the one word, ‘Gucci’. BritPop had not merely come home, it was thinking of buying the house. Which was rather why Liam Gallagher cancelled an American tour.

      What did become evident, however, was that by invoking both the sound and sensibility of English popular culture of earlier eras – be that the High Psychedelia of Sixties opulence or the cheerful cheesiness of Seventies kitsch – the ultimate destination of BritPop’s targeted revivalism was a kind of ‘virtual’ pop, in which the stars and the fans appeared like holograms of their distant and mutated originals. And, ironically, the Beatles themselves would release what amounted to a ‘virtual’ single, ‘Free as a Bird’, with Lennon’s vocals collaged into new material, just as Oasismania was nearing its peak. With a sigh of relief and a power surge on the National Grid, the country was once more united in its traditional twin obsession with northern working-class pop and the Royal Family – Princess Diana having screened her ‘Panorama’ special just minutes after the world première of the Beatles’ virtual video. This, if ever there was one, was a triumph for Sixties revivalism, and the Beatles had descended as though from Pop Heaven to anoint Noel and Liam – within air-space of Royalty – as the successors to the original BritPop throne.

      BritPop, as a media phenomenon attendant on the supposed rivalry between Blur and Oasis, had arrived at a time when years of Conservative government had all but conditioned several generations of young people into believing that politics were irrelevant – save as a distant force of despotism, reflexively acknowledged in a half-hearted way to challenge the legality of raves or keep homeless people in the streets. Now, it would seem as though the maturing establishment of BritPop can either follow the formulaic patterns of rock orthodoxy – the ‘difficult’ new album, solo projects, rumours of overdose, and, to quote Blur, ‘a big house in the country’ – or batten down the hatches in the face of the Spice Girls and the pre-teen pop parade.

      Like Boyzone and Take That before them, the Spice Girls are an arch-conservative construct whose media-friendly sex appeal is shot through with the commonsensical philosophies traditionally ascribed to well-behaved but fun-loving teenagers. The Spice Girls are naughty but nice, with a vote-winning dash of cosmetic militancy. Need we look any further than the coy chorus of, ‘If you wanna be my luvah, first you gotta be my friend’ to realize that they follow in a long line of safe pop phenomena that stretches all the way back to Cliff Richard and his pals in Summer Holiday? If BritPop plundered from pop’s past, in the name of Prog Mod revivalism, then the Spice Girls look back to the Mop Top era of Beatlemania, before the music turned weird, and the youthful Fab Four were cheeky professionals on the stage of the Royal Variety Show.

      And so this latest phenomenon in British pop is retreating yet again, in terms of its ethos, from the psychedelic garden of 1968 to the positive Eden of 1964. After all, the Spice Girls approached Richard Lester, who directed the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, to create their first full-length feature film. Who knows, if BritPop gives way to girl power then Britain might need the Spice Girls like Russia needed a communist Elvis. They could yet become the official state pop of advanced democratic consumerism – the sound of a bright new Britain.

      ‘… on an ever tightening coil …’

      In the big grey apartment, the submarine light seemed to turn moss-green. The grey-painted frame of one of the tall sash windows rattled suddenly, buffeted by the wind. There were going to be some changes around here. During the next ten years, certain … ideas would emerge from the culture, pretty much organically, the sheer brute force of which would take some getting used to. The list would run something like this:

      

      1. Throughout the 1990s, many of the very qualities being demonized as evil Thatcherite 1980s acquisitive competitive cultural bullishness – the whole yuppie arrogance of ‘greed is good’, for instance, or ‘second is nowhere’ – would be simultaneously rehabilitated by popular culture, media and advertising as ‘Attitude’.

      2. Pop, for the most part, would cease to be a venue for new ideas and become a site for recycling old ideas.

      3. Anxiety and doubt, as an energizing force within cultural practice, would be domesticated and disarmed by a) the comedy of recognition and b) market-formatted cultural production. The effect of these factors produced a culture that appeared to have been designed, by media, retail and advertising. Contemporary art would become fixated on issues of pre-mediation and mediation itself.

      4. Brute Authenticity would replace Brute Irony as the temper of the zeitgeist.

      5. A consequence of the above would be a pan-media return to gender stereotyping.

      6. As the 1990s became fixated on brands and retail culture, so the Trojan Horse of cultural materialism would be Infantilism – seducing the consumer with cosy treats: the caffe latte and the loft conversion. By the year 2000, frothy coffee would appear to be the multi-purpose signifier of urban, credit-based consumer society – the Death by Cappuccino effect.

      7. In the 1990s, the cross-cultural pursuit of Authenticity would also provide the ‘bread and circuses’ (most importantly, Popular Factual Programming – ‘reality’ and ‘conflict’ TV – an obsession with ‘celebrity’ and confessional journalism) with which to distract the consumer from the sheer fragility (as demonstrated by the near civic panic

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