#Parklife blur full#

Here's a wider view: Britpop was the willing soundtrack to – and yes, enabler of – the final destruction of everything Britpop ever claimed to love. And those who, for reasons of their own, cannot permit themselves to take a wider view. And the answer? Those who stand to profit in some way from this kind of negationism – Britpop's permanent lowering of the bar has been extremely good to them, so the myth must be perpetuated. 'Who would want a simpler history of of a dead cultural moment?' asks the protagonist of Phonogram: Rue Britannia, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's fantastical comic about Britpop survivors. Everyone else is excluded from the discourse, because God damn it, they complicate things. The simplistic, smugly flippant nature of what passes for media commentary on popular culture is testament to that. You'd hope so, wouldn't you? What I do find worrying, if not surprising, is this blithe miswriting – by people who should know better – of what was, for mostly unhappy reasons, a crucially important part of British cultural history.īut all those nodding dogs with fuck all to say, they're the 'experts' now. If you ask someone who spent the mid-1990s guzzling cocaine and alcopops, sleeping with teenage girls in tennis skirts and being told they were the fucking king, then yes, they're going to say that Britpop was 'really exciting. I can take this kind of ahistorical crap from the bands. They actually said that! In 2014! You have to stop and scratch your head: how could anyone possibly think that? How is it conceivable that anyone who was actually there, who saw this shit unfold, and saw what happened next, could still be splashing around so far from the truth – even from anything which sounds like the truth? Youth culture winning! What the fuck? A voice on the radio telling me that Britpop's commercial success, and its prominence in the media, was 'youth culture winning'. And this is how the glorious anniversary has been celebrated: all the usual bores, saying all the usual boring things. They pretty much control the media now, that Britpop generation – these are the new baby boomers, second-rate and shallow like the times.

#Parklife blur full#

The media's been full of it, but then it always was. This was their moment, this was their time, and no miserable motherfucker's going to take that away from them (I'd like to see them try). You'll have noticed this Britpop anniversary, I suppose? Everywhere you look, greybeards reminiscing all those bastards you thought you'd seen the last of, tunnelling out of the boneyard. Nothing's ever going to change, except to get worse.

The British: so proud, yet so eager to serve.