Britpop
Britpop was a mid-1990s British-based music culture movement that emphasised Britishness. It produced brighter, catchier alternative rock, partly in reaction to the popularity of the darker lyrical themes and soundscapes of the US-led grunge music and to the UK's own shoegaze music scene. The movement brought British alternative rock into the mainstream and formed the larger British popular cultural movement, Cool Britannia, which evoked the Swinging Sixties and the British guitar pop of that decade.
Not to be confused with Bitpop or British pop music.Britpop
Early 1990s, United Kingdom
Britpop was a media-driven focus on bands which emerged from the independent music scene of the early 1990s. Although the term was viewed as a marketing tool, and more of a cultural moment than a musical style or genre, its associated bands typically drew from the British pop music of the 1960s, glam rock and punk rock of the 1970s and indie pop of the 1980s.
The most successful bands linked with Britpop were Oasis, Blur, Suede and Pulp, known as the movement's "big four", although Suede and Pulp distanced themselves from the term. The timespan of Britpop is generally considered to be 1993–1997, and its peak years to be 1995–1996. A chart battle between Blur and Oasis (dubbed "The Battle of Britpop") brought the movement to the forefront of the British press in 1995. While music was the main focus, fashion, art and politics also got involved, with Tony Blair and New Labour aligning themselves with the movement.
During the late 1990s, many Britpop acts began to falter commercially or break up, or otherwise moved towards new genres or styles. Commercially, Britpop lost out to teen pop, while artistically it segued into a post-Britpop indie movement, associated with bands such as Travis and Coldplay.
Terminology[edit]
Artists of the genre have dismissed the "Britpop" term. Oasis bandleader Noel Gallagher denied that the band were associated with the term: "We're not Britpop, we're universal rock. The media can take the Britpop and stick it as far up the back entry of the country houses as they can take it."[103] Blur guitarist Graham Coxon stated in the 2009 documentary Blur – No Distance Left to Run that he "didn't like being called Britpop, or pop, or PopBrit, or however you want to put it."[104] Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker also expressed his dislike for the term in an interview with Stephen Merchant on BBC Radio 4's Chain Reaction in 2010, describing it as a "horrible, bitty, sharp sound."[105]
In 2020, with attention turning to all "landfill indie" acts of the 2000s, Mark Beaumont of the NME argued that the term Britpop had been devalued, ignoring all the cultural aspects that had made the scene so important, with the term becoming a "catch-all" for "any band that played guitars in the 1990s."[106][107]