Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Oh Britain. It’s been a rough ride lately, hasn’t it? Brexit isn’t really working out, COVID-19 hit you hard, you’re stuck with a Prime Minister with a bad haircut half the country hates (we can relate), a feuding Royal family (we can’t relate), and let’s not even talk about Sunday’s Euro Championship. In fact, it’s not a stretch to imagine the United Kingdom might one day cease to exist, splintered into tiny nations with rivalries that go back millenia. It wasn’t always like this. They once said the sun never sets on the British Empire, and for the better part of the last century the UK was seen as an arbiter of music, style, and cool. Britpop was perhaps the final flowering of British pop and rock as a global force and is the subject of “Hail Britpop,” part of the new music documentary series This Is Pop, which premiered last month on Netflix.
This Is Pop was produced by Canada’s Banger Films, who have created some of the best music documentary films and series of the last 20 years. This Is Pop presents cultural events and trends as if explaining them to a space alien with no prior knowledge of Earth music. Other episodes this season include deep dives into the history of Auto-Tune software, summer festivals and historic hit factory the Brill Building. If at times the approach seems heavy handed, it’s also a testament to how seriously they take their subject matter.
While This Is Pop is scholarly in its scope and wealth of knowledge, it also keeps things light-hearted and fun. This is a particularly good idea when discussing Britpop, a genre which basked in its own hype and celebrated British culture at its most colorful. This being Britain, cheekiness abounds, such as introducing Blur bassist Alex James as “a cheese farmer,” his current occupation. For his part, James gives as good as he gets. “Everytime I hear the word Britpop a little part of me dies,” he says. “I’m sorry I know you’re making a program about how brilliant it was but…bollocks.”
Emerging from London’s Goldsmiths College at the dawn of the 1990s, Blur are the picture frame in which “Hail Britpop” paints its portrait of a musical genre and social movement. James explains how an unsuccessful U.S. tour and the prevailing popularity of grunge inspired Blur to create music that drew on specifically English sources and celebrated British life. A distinct mod influence prevailed, whether it was musical nods to The Kinks and Small Faces, or a sharp fashion sense that stood in contrast to grunge slovenliness.
As This Is Pop notes, Britain is a monoculture. In those pre-Internet days, the UK had four weekly music magazines that needed an endless supply of new bands to write about. Britpop benefited from the hype machine as grunge had before it. Music writer John Harris says the scene was thriving well before the term “Britpop” was bandied about, “but by the spring of ‘95, it’s kind of everywhere.” Some of the band’s labelled under the banner had toiled in obscurity for years while others were charlatans (no, not the band) who quickly re-fashioned themselves in “Fred Perry shirts and they were suddenly singing songs about cups of tea,” in Harris’ words.
For every Alpha there is an Omega. For every Blur there is an Oasis. Hailing from hardscrabble Manchester, the Gallagher brothers arrived on the scene with all the subtlety of a pint glass to the face and played up England’s regional and class divide. The British tabloids gleefully lapped up their rivalry with Blur, leading to “The Battle of Britpop,” when the two bands released singles on the same day. Blur carried the day, outselling Oasis by almost 60,000, but Liam Gallagher’s dismissal of the group as “Chas & Dave chimney sweeping music” is the kind of put down that could end a lesser band’s career.
By 1997, Britpop was so big, Labour Party leader Tony Blair courted Oasis’ Noel Gallagher when he ran for Prime Minister. “All the people that liked Britpop voted for Tony Blair,” publicist Jane Savidge says. However, the creative juices that had once fed Britpop were starting to dry up. That same year, Blur committed the ultimate blasphemy, aping the sounds of American alt rock on their single “Song 2,” which predictably became their biggest hit in the U.S. All parties must come to an end sooner or later and as Blur drummer Dave Rowntree says, “You can only write about, ‘Isn’t it great to be English at the moment,’ for so long.”
This Is Pop strikes a good balance between music series like Song Exploder, which reduce their subject matter to easily digestible single serving episodes, and more in-depth programming, such as Banger’s own Hip-Hop Evolution. The eight episodes in the season’s inaugural run display an impressive diversity in topics and genres, which seem perfectly in tune with the omnivorous nature of today’s music fan. Should the show follow in others series’ footsteps, it will be interesting to see what topics are covered in future episodes.
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
