Britpop is back! We’ve been hearing so much of that these past few years, we’re starting to forget when it actually came back, or when it went away for that matter. Because at some point it did go away—at least the politically charged, quintessentially British version of Britpop did. Sure, the Brits are still making rock music, but even the Arctic Monkeys, with their heavy Sheffield accents, became an L.A. band eventually. For most other bands today, their Britishness is a sidebar, a bit of trivia.
It’s part of the reason why Britpop’s return is being welcomed with open arms. Anything with a time-capsuled signature—post-Thatcher, anti-grunge—does well for our nostalgia-obsessive culture. The genre, which peaked in the '90s, was marked by bands with mononymous names and one infamous feud between Blur and Oasis in 1995 that the media dubbed "Battle of Britpop." Whether it was innocuous or real depends on who you ask, but Britpop meant a lot to many music fans at the time. But come 21st century, many of those groups went on hiatuses, or quietly disappeared, only to return and wear the "comeback" badge loud and proud.
Last week, when Blur finally announced a new record, two weeks before the release of Noel Gallagher’s new solo record, Chasing Yesterday, the media (or Twitter—which I guess is the same thing now) had a field day with jokes about Battle of Britpop: Round 2. Twenty years has passed! Who will win this time! Do we have the capacity to care? In 1995, the feud was about Blur and Oasis putting out singles on the same day ("Country House" and "Roll With It", respectively) and seeing who gets a bigger hit. In 2015, the footnoted name of this battle will unfortunately be, "Who sucks less now?"
There’s a lot riding on Blur’s return, though. For one, they’ve been teasing a new album ever since their set of Hyde Park reunion gigs in 2009, only to flip-flop their answer of whether it’s really in the works, but last week they made it all official. The Magic Whip, due April 27. There was even a single and a video ("Go Out"), just in case you thought maybe Albarn was trolling. Beloved guitarist Graham Coxon—who last played on record with Blur on 1999’s 13—was back, too. Everything, on the surface, was back on track.
Call it what you will, stoke the flames of a no longer existing feud, but this "comeback" isn’t really a return of Britpop; it’s a return of bands that used to be Britpop. Neither Blur nor Oasis is going to stir the nation, or young music fans, the same way they once did. Part of why a "Battle of Britpop" won’t work this time around is that Blur hasn’t been very "British" in about 20 years. These aren’t the same chaps who made "Parklife"—nothing from Blur (or anyone, for that matter) will ever sound as British as that. The sound of guitar pop cum middle-class hedonism that once defined them is lost in the past. Albarn’s other, far less British projects have made that kind of stylistic cloister impossible.
By the 2000s, the once cheeky frontman had ditched his Britpopping ways for hip-hop project Gorillaz (which released songs referencing Clint Eastwood, like "Dirty Harry") and the Good, the Bad & the Queen, which is, of course, a reference to Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If cowboy movies are the most American things in pop culture, then Clint Eastwood stands at the top of that pyramid, and Albarn was explicitly making several tributes to one of the most American men. All this from a guy who once made his biggest hit—"Song 2"— parodying America’s genre, grunge (Britpop’s mortal enemy), and sneered at America’s consumerist ways ("Magic America") and narcissism ("Miss America"). In "Look Inside America", he even sings, "Look inside America/ She’s alright, she’s alright/ Sitting out the distance/ But I’m not trying to make her mine." Where had that Damon Albarn gone?
In 2002, Albarn turned towards Africa with Mali Music, and later even collaborated with Malian duo Amadou & Mariam on "Africa Express" in 2007. The following year, he composed music for a Chinese opera, Monkey: Journey to the West (2008). The London bloke had become a globe-trotter. The forthcoming The Magic Whip revisits the East Asian world Damon Albarn seems to have become engrossed with. If Blur’s aesthetic was once Banksy and an England run by dogs, it was now neon signs and Chinese characters. While "Go Out" doesn’t necessarily reflect that—it’s more on-the-brink-of-the-2000s Blur—it’s the sound of exiting the London scene.
Blur has come worlds away from Britpop now, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing—it’s just not the comeback we’ve been anticipating. If we listen to this record without letting nostalgia cloud us, it’ll probably sound a whole lot better.