Britpop’s 90s dominance suppressed a pluralist future that never materialised

Evidence

The conflict that really mattered was between a music which acknowledged and accelerated what was new in the 90s – technology, cultural pluralism, genre innovations – and a music which took refuge in a monocultural version of Britishness: a swaggering white boy rock built almost entirely out of forms that were established in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a music designed to reassure anxious white males at a moment when all of the certainties they had previously counted on – in work, sexual relations, ethnic identity – were coming under pressure. As we now know, Britpop would win the struggle. Tricky would slink away to become the herald of a future for British music that never materialised. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Strong parallel with the ‘Cultural conservatism and destranged music’ theses already mined from earlier chapters of this same book. — connects to: Lost futures haunt a city more keenly than its past does — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 212; Mainstream pop culture lost its countercultural edge by the late 1990s. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 53; Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 381

Broader Connections

• Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future #expands (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381
• Mainstream pop culture lost its countercultural edge by the late 1990s. #complicates (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 53