71 - The Parapolitics of Britpop 1: 'But Doctor,' said the United Kingdom, 'I *am* the great clown Pagliacci!'
Added 2023-08-14 19:53:29 +0000 UTCThis is a story about a haunted house.
The Strange World of Moving Shadow:
https://thequietus.com/articles/33074-the-best-of-moving-shadow#:~:text=This%20gem%20has%20all%20the,in%20wild%20movement%20around%20you.
Comments
Dude as an American guy I have LOVED oasis since at least like 2005. I’m going into this with ears open….also love your work, Matt!!!
Jonathan Fischer
2025-01-22 17:09:20 +0000 UTCBro you need to check out bands like Fat White Family and the scene in south London. It’s a small scene but it’s an idea that offers an alternative for society, particularly artists.
Haider Ali
2024-10-22 10:38:09 +0000 UTCI've gone through so many episodes of end of the world since becoming a subscriber and the quality is fantastic. This one really hit me. My god it was such an underimagined time. Even as a 16 year old britpop seemed to miss the point of the pop it copied. I think you need to do an bonus episode just on vitriol for nme writers and how their terrible writing can stick in your imagination. Can't wait for more episodes about the UK.
Capital Knockers
2024-09-23 08:29:25 +0000 UTCAmerican philistine that I thought you’d be starting the British Pop Parapolitics with the Beatles.
Trazdat
2024-09-08 01:45:19 +0000 UTCLol no it's not ya dork.
Person
2024-04-04 17:23:33 +0000 UTCI think much of the early rave scene was as real as it gets, simply because there was nothing to fake in the first place. It was just overt escapism - a way to get away from everything, party, and listen to new, exciting music. The subversive aspects of the scene were just means to that end, not a deliberate ideology that could be faked or betrayed. And aside from the drugs there was no profit involved either, so capital couldn't easily wedge itself into the scene. I suspect this sort of anarchist quality - moreso than the drug-related issues that made headlines - is what freaked out the powers that be. Here you had this large segment of the younger generation sharing a communal experience and having the time of their lives, and aside from buying a bit of equipment, they were completely untethered from the established socioeconomic order without even trying to be a political movement. What if, one day, those behaviors would make it past people's ecstasy hangovers and into their daily lives? Edit: and I'm aware some of this is a bit idealistic compared to how things developed in reality, but as Matt has mentioned in plenty of earlier episodes, it's often the appearance of a threat rather than an actual threat that makes power put its foot down and stamp someone/something into the dirt.
Reine Berglund
2024-03-27 15:05:18 +0000 UTCWhat are the smiths two good songs?
Daniel Paul Taylor
2023-12-05 00:13:32 +0000 UTCI guess it's like the N word to black people or faggot to gays
tim lever
2023-11-03 10:46:14 +0000 UTCDoes the mere mention of those words always invoke such a visceral reaction?
Hank
2023-11-01 00:32:49 +0000 UTC“White and cis” fuxake you’re not one of the alphabet people are you?
tim lever
2023-09-28 15:36:52 +0000 UTCGreat episode! I love the way you approach every subject with a sharp intellectual leftist angle. Well written and well thought.
Mark
2023-08-29 19:16:46 +0000 UTCAngloid Derangement Syndrome; accelerated and amplified as Y2K approached, reality depatterned itself in preparation for the return of entropic nightmares that usually sit juuuust orthogonal to the mindseye. Quite possibly human perception had eviscerated, mulched, and bailed up these troubled and forlorn archetypes, somewhat sympathetically having some nice local kids bury them a bit past outer dark; few feet to the left, beyond the waning of the light of the collective campfire. Unfortunately for all of us though, Dr. Gull did complete at least most of his transcendent masonic femicide ritual, thus chaining Dionysus at the feet of the Apollonian Brotherhood, way back just a quarter past Hitler's birth until now; accordingly the few neurons and spindle fibers solidifying reality are back operating again for the immediate aeon. Ie. Noel Gallagher is what you get when Angloid Actuarial Genocidaires perform a precursor ritual to produce through alchemic recombination, a century of calamitous-degenerate fascist mysticism, delivered bathed in the blood and viscera of Eve, Cassandra, and Athena; yet the priests of the master race got autistically fixated on column errors on 19th century EIC opium spreadsheets, and didn't quite cross the ritual t's and i's... polemically speaking of course. So now we're stuck here in limbo between the return of the demon haunted world, but we can barely remember what came before all the Esoteric Hitlerist Fourth Reich shit none of us asked for (I hope). But at least we've got a Leto and a Gallagher, or two, to hunt as food should the climate go completely bugfuck.
Lukas Lion
2023-08-27 02:39:18 +0000 UTCWe've got you man. Little bit about Paul Staines and Leach in tomorrow's ep, just adding final production touches 🙏
pinballa
2023-08-20 14:08:25 +0000 UTCMan, I'm looking forward to this ....Remember when talking about Rave, the Right-wing nexus inc. Guido Fawkes/Paul Staines - Tony Colston-Hayter et al. Then still before Britpop, but into and during the 90s you've got Carlton Leach and various other firms muscling in on door control. Michael Howard's pardon for John Haase and Paul Bennett....then own relative busted for an amphetamine factory.....And So It goes on....
Andrew Driver
2023-08-20 13:55:40 +0000 UTCthis is really fuckin' good, and as a fellow hater of nightclubs, I will wonder for the rest of my life whether the whole rave thing would've struck me as real or fake or, third & most frequently, only real for other people
Michael S. Judge
2023-08-20 08:47:52 +0000 UTCAs an American this is super interesting... I'm wondering how much I need to question the number of times I listened to She's Electric off that Oasis album. Damned if I could tell anyone what I liked about that song even back then 😂🤔 Wondering where being a Radiohead fan will land in terms of earning credibility points back for or if I am in for soul crushing disappointment for things I truly liked. I did do the DC rave scene at the time but I'm not sure it was quite as inspired in the US
Wiley Michelle B
2023-08-18 20:44:52 +0000 UTCThe swipe at The Boos was perhaps a bit churlish. Literally had a pretty decent experimental record named after Coltrane's "Giant Steps." It was my youth though and we don't let go of it easily.
Adolphe Marlaud
2023-08-18 18:06:12 +0000 UTCLong-time listener here - this one finally got me to subscribe! Apologies for the delay. As an American Gen X britpop listener, I devoured this episode and loved feeling stupid for my young self. I think I always sort of saw Oasis as being super in-your-face cynical with their over-the-top derivative thing, but I’m definitely not claiming to have had any kind of clever perspective on it all at the time. Thanks for carving out space for Pulp. (Perhaps listen to some of the Boo Radleys’ pre-britpop shoegazey/noisey/spacey/poppy stuff and reconsider?) Also, are there any thoughts on actual ‘indie’ British music that overlapped with the same period, like Sarah Records? (which really stands the test of time for me) I could go on but I’ll spare you. Thank you!
Amy
2023-08-17 22:30:57 +0000 UTCThis episode is incredible. My favourite so far
Tom
2023-08-16 20:32:38 +0000 UTCThere’s some real Jared Leto shit going on with Noel Gallagher. How could such a spiritually and physically small man, with such a lack of talent, curiosity, and wit get so big?
Rory Tregaskis
2023-08-16 15:41:47 +0000 UTCTy for this one! I needed a break too after Palme 🥵 Although I grew up on blur and Oasis (American) and like some of the material I always had a sense that it wasn’t significant beyond the veneer of ‘style’ and attitude. Not to mention how cringe the Gallagher lads egos are - rarely funny chaps. st etienne closing track😍
S. Walker
2023-08-16 14:05:25 +0000 UTCOne of them has to be How Soon Is Now, but what's the other?
Gareth Watkins
2023-08-16 12:52:16 +0000 UTCAdelante! Looking forward to the rest. Re: thatcher‘s crackdown on the Left and maybe on countercultures broadly I was shocked to learn about the Battle of Beanfield recently. Not super familiar with new age Druid stuff but the fact that they got the Tories so worked up made me interested.
KS
2023-08-16 12:05:54 +0000 UTCWhich are the only two good Smiths songs?? 👀 also, thoughts on how the Cure fits into all this?
Caroline Gee
2023-08-16 03:01:17 +0000 UTCReally great analysis of Blur/Albarn. Despite still being synonymous with Britpop they were maybe the only group that actually did some self-reflection and went out of their way to overcorrect/atone for their earlier work. Self-titled (coincidentally released several months before the nadir of Be Here Now) closes with Essex Dogs which couldn’t be more of a fuck you to the scene and perfectly lays the groundwork for 13
bwen
2023-08-15 23:34:45 +0000 UTCThere was a short-lived scene that was mostly a music press creation in the early 1990s called the New Wave of New Wave that now seems like the prototype for the media hype that accompanied Britpop. I've always wondered to what degree that kind of thing was a conscious, planned effort by people in the music press as opposed to jumping onto a bandwagon in the early stages of something more organic.
Tom Breen
2023-08-15 21:23:16 +0000 UTCI came of age in the 90’s and was a raver. I absolutely fucking hated oasis. Not so much for their music and just for their stupid fucking haircuts and the way their fans were like drones. That said, i developed a love for the songs of OCS quite recently so i was a little bit triggered by the intro. Just started listening and its shaping up to b another classic.
John
2023-08-15 20:51:13 +0000 UTCAre they any books you recommend about Howard marks? Don't wanna get halfway through a book a realize it's a whitewash.
Aaron Snelling
2023-08-15 17:31:18 +0000 UTCMan, you're not lying about the Oasis cover of I Am The Walrus, which I listened to for the first time upon your prompt. Absolutely shit cover of a song you shouldn't even mess with unless you can (a) channel the original's unsettling, off-kilter vibe and (b) then do something interesting with it. Just doing a garage rock take on it is just pathetic. That just vindicated my having immediately written them off from the get-go. I don't know if you've seen this appreciation of the Beatles from some toff-y classical artist, but it is terrific. The all-too-brief discussion of I Am The Walrus, at about the 13 minute mark, is particularly on point. https://youtu.be/ZQS91wVdvYc
Phil Hostak
2023-08-15 17:30:14 +0000 UTCYou’ve made me go from enjoying Oasis as background music for something I’m doing to actually turning a critical eye towards their music and realizing there is really no substance to any of the lyrics and I’m shook 🤣
Willy D
2023-08-15 15:13:33 +0000 UTCI must have cut that by mistake because there should be a bit where I mention that he was a Tory voter
pinballa
2023-08-15 13:28:09 +0000 UTCAmazing ep ! what do you make of Ian Curtis allegedly being a thatcherite?
Acele
2023-08-15 13:06:35 +0000 UTCTasmanian now settled in the UK, sending greetings across the Tasman the long way round! How would you say the Lange government fits in to the NZ neo-liberal story? Remember watching with envy when he declared NZ a nuclear-free zone.
Catherine Hutchinson
2023-08-15 12:52:04 +0000 UTCPulp well get let off easy these days - neoliberal Human League that they are - MisShapes is the nastiest song of the era, the California Ideology distilled for resentful English nerdocrats and new labourites
Rob Keery
2023-08-15 11:54:43 +0000 UTCFirst time caller from Aoteoroa. As a 'former' colony we have a lot of love for music of the mother country. Love will tear us apart was number one on our charts for weeks and weeks. I think you were right that JD captured a mood of the time and it resonated here on the outskirts of the Anglosphere. Little did we know how much worse it would get for us here when we went through one of the first neo liberal experiments of the early 80s. Interested to see further parallels with our experience in wee New Zealand. The 80s sucked hard imho but shit we had some good bands here and I don't mean Split Enz.
John Kennedy
2023-08-15 06:35:40 +0000 UTCIt’s always worth the wait when you post a new episode.
Ian P
2023-08-15 06:23:12 +0000 UTCThe soulless decontextualized 60s revanchism, I mean.
Alex
2023-08-15 04:08:16 +0000 UTCAll of this also applies to the Brian Jonestown Massacre
Alex
2023-08-15 03:36:43 +0000 UTCWhat does this mean I'm pretty drunk
pinballa
2023-08-15 02:52:45 +0000 UTCTheeeeeme lol
greg
2023-08-15 02:23:43 +0000 UTCAgreed
pinballa
2023-08-15 00:44:16 +0000 UTCJoy Division/New Order were never Nazis. They just wanted to grind everyone's gears. Death In June, otoh...
Hodag
2023-08-15 00:43:49 +0000 UTCI think Tony was trying to protect his boys there tbh, as he was want to do. I'm 95% sure the name New Order was a deliberate reference to the Aryan supremacist state. They weren't Nazis at all but they definitely had an interest in the period and it'd be some coincidence if the surviving Joy Division members just happened to call themselves New Order as a reference to Gramsci. At the very least they will have known what New Order was as a concept in Nazi ideology. I buy the Durruti Column thing tho.
pinballa
2023-08-15 00:31:53 +0000 UTCIf I recall correctly, Tony Wilson says in his 24 Hour Party People book that New Order were named after Gramsci’s newspaper. Similarly he claimed he’d urged Vini Reilly to record as The Durruti Column as a tribute to the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War.
J D
2023-08-15 00:24:28 +0000 UTCIn the US, the politician who pushed the Anti+Rave Act was Joe Biden.
Hodag
2023-08-14 22:18:39 +0000 UTCLove this ep and am super excited about where this series will go. Hadn't heard the story of Shields calling britpop a government pushed scene. I remember at the time of Oasis being everywhere , I was listening to MBV and Sonic Youth a lot , thinking, what is this boring shit?
Cory
2023-08-14 22:18:18 +0000 UTCIf you are going to talk about the miners strikes and Leeds, gotta talk about the Mekons. I live in Chicago and John Langford lives here for 30ish years. Leads a great country and western band called the Waco Brothers. And be nice about Morrissey! He a prole Irishman, as I.
Hodag
2023-08-14 22:15:36 +0000 UTCYou mean for the pod or for making music
pinballa
2023-08-14 20:29:12 +0000 UTCWhat are you micing your cabinet with? What’s your gear setup?
NYCM&AHole
2023-08-14 20:20:03 +0000 UTC
