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Read other letters about this article
"And if it SOUNDS good, it IS good." That's really deep. I hope you don't mind that every uncurious listener of dreck from Pat Boone to Vengaboys to Bowling For Soup has essenentially copped that justification for being loyal to derivative blandities. It sounds good to my untrained ears, therefore I don't have to seek out a fuller perspective or more exciting options.
I really wanted to dig Reynolds' piece, having devoured his pro-rave screed Generation Ecstasy. I got a couple cheap laughs at cloistered indie kids and clumsy Britkissers, but as others have noted, it's disheartening to see Reynolds join Sasha Frere-Jones' choir of "Needs More Black Music". It's certainly one thing to say AR Kane is a great band, it's entirely another to say Curve isn't a great band because they don't sond like AR Kane. Curve isn't a great band because whatever they did well, they didn't do enough of it.
Leaving that out, the central critique seems to be that Britpop was musically, largely boring. And I have to agree. The really interesting shit was being made up north, by Death in June and Nurse With Wound and Current 93 (all of which were unadhered to any ethnic influences, black, white or otherwise - and forget the unremembered 60s). Disco Inferno released some of the densest pop ever, filled with tape loops, found sound, and no desire to capture a zeitgeist. Happy Mondays I'll always feel loyalty toward, because Shaun Ryder was a lyrical shaman, and his crew did have a loopy affinity for the groove (when they went all-out house, results were mixed, but as a shambolic dance band they were titans).
But really, most American critiques of the scene are skewed. The NME put out a Britpop retrospecticus a few years back, and even its editors couldn't help but crow that they fostered the idea of a "Britpop" scene, and they loved every lager-swilling, "Three Lions"-singing, Damon-baiting minute of it. Britpop was the sound of a young nation waking up and getting dumb. It had its moments, but largely it was a time for foppish experiments and appeals to lad-dom. Like the mods, it was always about the scene, the energy, more than the music. And in that regard, the scene didn't need Bo Diddley riffs or Sun Ra loopiness to enliven it.
