Word: britpop
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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George Michael scores with it, the Pet Shop Boys mock it, and everyone cashes in: Britpop, an easeful sound that tops the charts...
That kind of shared attitude is ripe material for satire, and, indeed, the current Britpop scene has its shrewdest, severest critics right at the center of its matte black heart. The Pet Shop Boys mock the scene from the ideal perspective: deep inside. Their inventive synthesizer work makes music so stylized it becomes otherworldly. In the words of one admiring London critic, "They know how to use their computers." The Pet Shop Boys' tunes are inventive and danceable; It Couldn't Happen Here, on their new album Actually, was co-written with the formidable film composer Ennio Morricone. Their lyrics...
...Britpop is lighthearted and featherweight. The producers Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman run a kind of pop-star atelier in South London, where "we have pretty much a hard and fast rule that no one we work with is over 25. There are too many aging rockers hanging on to the charts." Actually, it was SA&W that had a stranglehold on the English charts for most of 1987. The production team sold 35 million singles and 12 million albums, and they like to say "We are the charts." "They're very contemporary in what they do," says...
...this reliance on technique and surface flash flirts with fashion (Cat Vocalist Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot turned his cap front to back and started a fad) and plays fast and loose with the built-in impermanence of pop. It also makes most Britpop inbred and narcissistic and ripe for a revisionism that may already be happening. Upstart groups like the Godfathers, the Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction, and Gay Bikers on Acid are harking back to the brash activism and overheated playing of the late-'70s Clash era. In Hull, 150 miles north of the London scene, the Housemartins are purveying...
Weaton calls himself a radical socialist, but the Pet Shop Boys, who shy away from direct political writing and look like fashion objets themselves, end up saying the most about the Britpop scene and about the years of Thatcher's England. Shopping, from their current album Actually, sounds like a recessional hymn for a fashion show until Tennant's lyrics catch hold: "Our gain is your loss/ That's the price you pay/ I heard it in the House of Commons/ Everything's for sale." Britpop may be so smooth and cool that it has brought...