Britpop

Ah....Britpop.....those short lived days in 95....MTV Pub in Zouk.....
those days were so fun, the music was just as good as ''drugs''...haha
I remembered hanging out at Tower Records in Pacific Plaza, buying and waiting for the latest British music mags like Q ...... bands like Blur, Suede, Pulp were just oh sooooo cool!

you could just listen to their songs and feel high and happy (when actually some of the lyrics are bitter and sad...haha) Alternative music rules! it was so surreal and nice and dreamy.

AND NOW.....what?!!! these bands are like having nostalgic tours? has it really be 15 years passed? i really hope not cuz the music back then was a mix of their youth energy, vibe, image......i was also young. for them now to jump around singing Girls and Boys.....just not quite the same.

Thats the thing, alternative music cant really last thru the decades can they? Lots of 80s pop songs can but sadly for pop music now, no many hardly stay around for 3 mths.
Tower Records have also closed, and HMV down sized. oh whats next? death of the CD? Death Album art? everything JUST download! how are humans going to look forward to anything anymore?




http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/5561905/Why-there-will-never-be-another-Britpop.html

Why there will never be another Britpop
With its witty, parochial lyrics, Britpop was a stimulating commentary on British life .

By Neil McCormickPublished: 6:54PM BST 17 Jun 2009


IS IT TOO EARLY for Britpop nostalgia? It is nearly 15 years since its peak moment – the Blur-vs-Oasis chart battle in 1995. This week, Blur have been playing secret reunion gigs in the run-up to their official comeback at Glastonbury, while Oasis (who never broke up, but went through more hirings and firings than a series of The Apprentice) are in the middle of a UK tour.
While they may have been its headline acts, Britpop did not just belong to Oasis and Blur, and in some ways their North/South, working class/middle class, art school/plebeian rivalry has created an unfair stereotype of what was the last truly cohesive and all-encompassing scene in British music.

Presumably because they are more expensive to license than their shorter-lived contemporaries, along with Radiohead and the Verve they are pretty much the only major Britpop artists missing from Common People, the first real attempt at a definitive compilation. Released by Universal next week, it gathers together tracks from an impressive 54 acts, in an attempt to frame the scene in as wide a context as possible. Nostalgia is often viewed suspiciously by critics, but it can allow for a kind of re-evaluation, when the listening experience is liberated from the contemporary influence of trends, rivalries, tribal camps and other pop-cultural contextualisation, and you can just celebrate the spirit of some good tunes.
Listening again to blasts from the still quite recent past by such short-lived pop sensations as Gene, Kenickie, Catatonia, Sleeper and Longpigs, you do get a sense of the common factors that bound this music together.
As much as Britpop turned back to the primary musical elements of Sixties beat music, there was also a kind of gleeful appropriation of modern pop, which resulted in music of instant attraction and DayGlo colourfulness.
There is nothing glum, overly self-regarding or pretentious about this music. With a preference for witty, parochial lyrics, it actually seemed to provide a fresh and stimulating commentary on the lives that people lived in modern Britain.
Brett Anderson of Suede, one of the groups who first opened the Britpop floodgate, told Melody Maker in 1992: “All great British pop artists from the Beatles to the Fall have celebrated Britain in some way. I’m not remotely attracted by New York. I mean, all the streets are laid out in a grid. Doesn’t that say everything?”
It is always hard to be sure of these things when you are in the thick of it, but listening back it becomes clear that Britpop coalesced around 1993, peaked in ’95, before a final and rather reductive third wave (defined by the dadrock of Ocean Colour Scene and Stereophonics) ran it into the ground by 1977.
Oasis soldiered on, but there is a dourness to their post-Nineties output only compensated for by charisma, residual affection and Noel Gallagher’s way with a melody. Blur essentially turned inward with a more arty direction, and were losing mass popular support before they effectively disintegrated in 2003.
The fate of so many of the more eccentric and flavoursome Britpop bands suggests the instant appeal and parochial perspective of the genre had inbuilt limitations. Ironically, Britpop probably foundered on its failure to crack the all-important international market of America, leaving that to a new generation of bands (Coldplay, Snow Patrol) more influenced by the art-rock of Radiohead and stadium dynamics of U2.
Of the 54 bands featured on the CD, only a handful still exist (the Bluetones, Gomez, a re-formed James and Shed Seven) and only a couple of those have commercially and artistically functioning careers (arguably Stereophonics, Placebo and Paul Weller, the punk Modfather who was reinvigorated by Britpop).
THE INTEREST in Blur and the current vogue for reunions surely means we will see many Britpop also-rans getting back together. In another 10 years, there will be Britpop-themed tours, featuring Space, Embrace and Gay Dad.
But can revived attention on the last cohesive movement in British pop culture pave the way for a new British band scene? I certainly hear the shadow of Britpop’s witty, hook-laden mix-and-match of pure pop with Beat-group craft and socially connected lyrics in forthcoming albums from Reverend and the Makers and the Twang.
But, like the return of Blur and the everlasting appeal of Oasis, they seem more like throwbacks than the green shoots of pop recovery. This, I suppose, is the ultimate fate of all pop scenes: from urgent contemporary relevance to the fuzzy warmth of nostalgia in under two decades.