The real sign of ageing isn't the
grey hair or balding, it's knowing the difference between your past and what is
presented as history.
I grew up with a pop culture that wilfully
misremembered the 1950s and 1960s - the mere act of putting fashion, music,
cinema and other things in boxes labelled by decades is clumsy to start with, but what they are filled with is clumsier still. My parents were the first to point out that
"the swinging sixties" barely existed - and they were the people
dispensing the contraceptives. My
father-in-law rarely saw Teddy Boys in full glory as seen in a thousand cheap television documentaries because few people in his
home town were paid enough to afford the complete outfit. I have had a love-hate relationship with some
of this stuff over the years; as much as driving away with Jane Merrow in an
E-type Jaguar may appeal as a fantasy, it's always a pain to have a recent
Golden Age mythologised when you are trying to make your own mark on the world.
Of course, I was never around when Patrick
McGoohan filmed The Prisoner and The Beatles recorded Paperback Writer and Rain,
too young to read J G Ballard's novels when they were first published. Rather like the television panelist who was
a self-declared expert on the 1960s but had never heard of The Seekers, I'm
only on holiday in someone else's past. Living there is
out of the question.
Sooner or later, it was going to be my own
past that would be distorted. My last
post mentions the first time that it was - reading Ronald Reagan's obituary and
barely recognising the man it described - but politics will always come up with
extreme examples. Now we have the
twentieth anniversary of Britpop, with all the magazine retrospectives and
broadcasts that brings. As a keen
record-buyer and concert-goer of the time, much of what is being commemorated
has me puzzled.
It was only ever a
loose musical movement in its day and many of the acts I was listening to - The
Lightning Seeds, Super
Furry Animals, Stereolab, Dubstar -
now seem to have been left out. It's not
as though they were obscure cult figures - they all had hit singles - but
mid-1990s British pop music has been reduced to its muddiest and least
adventurous by cultural policemen.
Now Britpop means
Oasis, particularly if you skip their first few singles and start at "Live
Forever", or Blur at their laziest and most arch.
Suede tried their best to avoid the Britpop label at the time; I
don't know if this was a lucky escape, or if it would restore some
balance if they were included.
There's an article on The Quietus that says
much of what went wrong; it was too London-based, too retro, too ironic to make
any serious points. This is true of its
worst acts, but I don't want a genuinely interesting few years of British pop
culture - cinema, television and comics also had a good patch at same time - flushed
down the toilet because of such tunnel vision, or the fact that the dullest runners
won the race.
