The History Of Pop Part 30 aka In this new frame of mind a thousand flowers could bloom

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Now 30, like 1995, starts slow but then explodes into full-on dance mania as high street clubbing meets pop and a flood of great, blink-and-you-miss-them hits follow. Handbagmania! In amongst the dance tunes we have dadpop, Britpop, a bit of r'n'b and a sprinkling of trip-hop. It's a big poll with some big questions: have at it.

One of the big questions is - what's going to win Now 29? Kylie and Shampoo were tied on 34 votes each, just ahead of Whigfield and Corona, so there's a straight choice to be made here. Meanwhile Oasis highpoints clustered around Cigs and Boose, Live Forever and Supersonic: Wasis make the first of several reapparances on today's poll.

1995 - what were are we thinking?


[Poll #686986]

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

i'm actually really enjoying the bjork/massive attack/portishead consensus, and didn't expect it at all. primarily because this was the music i RILLY RILLY loved at the time, but which everyone at school thought was weird and didn't 'get' - except what they liked was 'indie', so i always saw this as non-indie - and it is gratifying to see that yes, lots of people love it! also the trip-hop dudes are only really canonical in the same tokenistic sense that eg public enemy is canonical - the two obligatory non-guitar records in any given top 100 list, but never seen as any sort of aesthetic ideal to aim for over four boys + guitars.

if 'set u free' wasn't present here, and it really is the biggest monster ever, i'd be totally repping for portishead to win!

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

the other thing is if there's a consensus thing along the lines of 'yes all the pop dance/handbag/ravey stuff is automatically GRATE' that risks undermining the individual qualities of each track in that vein. it would be equally (ok, MORE) annoying if people were doing this with all the Britpop! but my pickiness has always been based on purist/rockist criteria rather than honestly judging them as justified crowd pleasing anthems with ultra-catchy hooks or whatever.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

every time someone votes for a britpop song, somewhere a handbag house diva dies :(

i find that the collective attitude towards the bosh stuff is incredibly severe - there's either MASSIVE CONSENSUS (eg the last corona, the two 2 unlimited songs wot won) or the song gets, like, 5 votes because no one remembers it (eg this corona, the other 2 unlimited songs). there's very little genre consensus anywhere in the now polls actually - except possibly the pre-lilith women like lisa loeb, sophie b hawkins, scarlet, who always get almost exactly the same no of votes each time from prob the exact same people, and inevitably place bang in the middle with 50%.

[cis.livejournal.com]

See, I think of all that tokenistic canon stuff as being indie! Tokenistic it may be but it's central to the indie canon, more so than is a lot of actual 'indie' music - indie at this point, for me, boils down to 'what was in vox', and the first issue of vox I can remember owning had interviews with Radiohead, Bjork, REM-- conveniently I think it was a year rundown of 1995 or something? So it gave me a sense of the terrain that I never really lost, and portishead etc were definitely definitely treated as part of the in-group of bands one was supposed to recognise, not an external-but-known factor as was e.g. Goldie, or indeed... I think Ice Cube was interviewed in that issue or one soon after? And you knew he was from outside, there was a certain archness or distance or something to the tone, beyond the obvious things like his being a) a rap artist b) black.

You know, kind of unrelatedly, I never really had to deal with the set 'boys who liked oasis' beyond, like, my brother-- anyway I liked Oasis! My first ever gig was Paul Weller! Who am I trying to kid etc etc etc. I was aware of the concepts 'boys who liked ugly kid joe' and 'boys who liked rage against the machine', that was where I could sense that sort of testosterone-normative attitude (about which I was very very ambivalent); after a while my brother and I divided on blur-v-oasis lines, slightly girly-vs-laddish, but-- there were as many posters of Liam Gallagher as of Damon Albarn in Just 17, you know?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

ah i never read vox! (or indeed any music mag growing up, really.)

i will admit that i totally, totally privilege music which smacks of 'sonic innovation' (ugh what a phrase) - most of my enrapturement with portishead, bjork etc at the time was sonic, like wtf are these amazing sounds i have never heard them before. and this has consistently carried over into my taste! timbaland-r&b, trendy dahnce and so on. oasis et al were the total antithesis of this hence super-hatred.

i can't believe l gallacunt got in j17. i am appalled.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

He was quite the sexpot!

This subthread has been really interesting. I will reply in a new post!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

he looked like an ape!

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

but despite this you didn't get into drum&bass/techstep no? of course it was often quite far from Pop (more than Portishead etc.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

i didn't have as much access to it - i heard and liked the little which got into the charts, and really enjoyed goldie's album, but this was pre-internet and i was a teenager in rural somerset: no access to the scene itself (ie the clubs) and no real way to hear the music.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

ha ha. i liked both Ugly Kid Joe and Rage at one point. had a very weird US rock phase between 93-94 that wasn't particularly discerning because it all felt vaguely new. i absolutely hated House & Garage at that point but the whole thing shifted radically again a year later.

this in turn re-inforces the absurdity of the Blur v Oasis thing. i didn't know anybody who hated one but loved the other. it was just a matter of which one you preferred slightly. unless you hated both, and i knew a few who did.