Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Champagne Supernova Edition Part 2
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2023
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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. |
| 0:13.0 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris |
| 0:22.6 | Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:28.0 | On our last episode, we talked about how a wave of UK indie, Manchester, and Shugays rock |
| 0:36.7 | eventually coalesced into Britpop through the hits of |
| 0:41.6 | Swade, Elastica, Pulp, and, of course, Blur, and Oasis. We're now heading into the summer |
| 0:49.9 | of 1995, and those two bands, Blur and Oasis, each coming off a smash multi-platinum |
| 0:58.6 | 1994 album, are about to put themselves on a summer 95 chart collision course. |
| 1:06.0 | In April 1995, Oasis scored their first UK number one song. |
| 1:13.1 | Some Might Say was a standalone single that would later appear on Oasis still in the works second album. It was all a part of day. |
| 1:31.2 | It was all a part of songwriter Noel Gallagher's emergence as British rock royalty. |
| 1:39.3 | Just weeks later, Gallagher appeared on the chart-topping album Stanley Road by Paul Weller, |
| 1:47.1 | veteran frontman of Mod Punkers The Jam. |
| 1:51.4 | Noel could be heard playing guitar on Weller's cover of Dr. John's, I Walk on Gilded Splinters. |
| 1:59.1 | Walk on Gilded Splinters with the Morrissey, Weller was an 80s veteran made new |
| 2:13.6 | by the emergence of Britpop. |
| 2:17.0 | Unlike Madchester or Shugays, Britpop was |
| 2:21.3 | sonically wide-ranging and omnivorous. Anything that sounded catchy, guitar-based, and |
| 2:28.5 | culturally British could qualify as Britpop. And the movement improved several band's fortunes. |
| 2:37.6 | For example, Sean Ryder of the now-defunct Happy Mondays |
| 2:42.1 | reinvented himself with a new group, Black Grape, |
| 2:46.2 | that was not far removed from the old band's baggy sound. |
... |
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