Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Champagne Supernova Edition Part 1

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2023

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the ’90s, U.K. rock was by Britons, for Britons. The music of the U.K. indie, Madchester and shoegaze scenes fused together into a new wave of guitar bands with punk energy, laddish lyrics and danceable grooves. They called it Britpop.

In the motherland, Britpop set the charts alight: Blur faced off against Oasis. Pulp poked fun at the class system. Suede sold androgyny, and Elastica repackaged ’70s art-punk as ’90s pop. But with rare exception, these hits didn’t translate in America. There was no Third British Invasion in the ’90s—with the exception of that one inscrutable Oasis song about a “Wonderwall.”

Why did Britpop fire up Old Blighty and flop with the Yanks? Join Chris Molanphy as he tries to define Britppop—was it a scene? a sound? a movement?—and explains how the music boomed and busted faster than a cannonball.

Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music.
0:03.7	Hey there, Hit Parade listeners.
0:06.4	What you're about to hear is part one of this episode.
0:10.2	Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month.
0:13.9	Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops?
0:17.7	Sign up for Slate Plus.
0:19.3	It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed
0:23.4	journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com slash hitparade plus. You'll get to hear every
0:30.6	hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus, Hit Parade The Bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our
0:40.6	episode topics, and Pop Chart Trivia. Once again, to join that's slate.com slash hitparade plus.
0:48.1	Thanks. And now, please enjoy part one of this Hit Parade episode.
1:13.8	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malamphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?
1:20.5	On today's show, 28 years ago, in May of 1995, this single, Connection by the band Elastica, rose to number two on
1:32.9	Billboard's modern rock tracks chart. The song was ubiquitous on U.S. alternative radio at the time,
1:40.5	and even crossing over to certain top 40 pop stations.
1:44.8	It had a danceable beat and a bit of punk attitude.
1:54.3	To American listeners, Elastika were just the latest new band to offer catchy punk-adjacent rock at the peak of alternative nation.
2:09.6	The band would even join the traveling Lollapalooza Festival that summer. But a few things about this band and this song sailed over the heads of my fellow
2:22.6	Yanks.
2:23.6	For one thing, connection was a cheeky homage to previous waves of British art punk.
2:31.6	Think of an o more divided by two.
2:36.1	Something ain't nothing.
	...

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