The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

The latter half of the 1980s had seen the beginnings of destabilizing cultural status and blurring aesthetic boundaries. Terms such as ‘accelerated’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘dystopic’ were in currency, conveying the sense of a new, volatile, high-speed culture – the future was beginning with the ruination of history. From the Alessi kettle to your average maroon and turquoise balustraded business park office building, the Three Ps of post-modernism were making their presence felt: punning, plagiarism and parody. What larks Pip, old chap, what larks.

As if to mark the moment, the ‘semiotext(e)’ booklets by or on the principal cast and chorus of post-modern thinking (and that little bracketed ‘e’ said it all, somehow) from Baudrillard, through Foucault to Virilio, had neat, uniform, black covers – were aesthetically exquisite handbooks of the avant-garde – and somehow seemed emblematic of the sheer fashionability, at that time, of critical theory. They had frankly funky titles such as Pure War or Foucault Live, and generally sexed up the dusty world of critical theory in much the same way that business publishing would get down and groovy a decade later – in fact, the two facelifts would be linked.

Here, also, was the idea of the city itself becoming a critical theoretical text: a sort of moodily lit, sci-fi urban landscape, articulating the semantics of cultural meltdown. And the language (jargon, jive talk, call it what you will) of this latest criticism was very romantic, in a New Romantic sort of way, as it seemed to conflate the rhetoric of science with the imagery of dandyism, positing the critic as a kind of chic urban guerrilla über-technician, carrying out missions of anthropological field work.

This seemed also to echo – be a consequence of, in terms of image – that era of the late 1970s which the singer with the Human League, Philip Oakey, would describe in 2001 as ‘the alienated synthesist period’ – the chisel-faced romantic, playing musique modern(e) in a grey room. Urban infrastructure and information theory to the critical theorists (they were landscape poets, by temperament) of the middle to late 1980s, was what the Lake District had been to Victorian Romantics, the mountains of Nepal to a traveller on the Magic Bus, or the peaks of Bavaria to Pantheist seekers of the Sublime.

(The 1980s would also see the menus of fashionable restaurants employ a kind of lyric poetry, further Sublime, in the descriptions of dishes: ‘shards of baby halibut wrapped in a fluffy cardigan of raspberry coulis, dancing on a mist of chives …’ In the Nineties, he-man chefs like Marco Pierre White (think Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life, shouting at crows and kicking over easels) and the rugged snappiness of cucina rustica would be a neat indicator of the general push towards Authenticity – the triumph of ingredients over adjectives. But the list-based poetry of food description would endure, largely on the packaging of supermarket premium-range thermodestabilized theme snacks.)

As the Nineties arrived, the sites for this critical theoretical romanticism would expand outwards, across the decade, from the city (from the capital, in fact) to engage first with ideas of suburbia, then provincial urban hinterland, and ultimately the nowhere-zones of service-area Britain – the edges of motorways and mirror-glassed retail parks. By the start of the twenty-first century (as the novelist Jeff Noon would assert about the regeneration of Manchester) entire cities would seem like one big shop: a mono-environment of white-laminated MDF shelving, brushed-metal light fittings and natural-effect bleached oak floors – the whole thing defined by the total consumer experience. Subsequently, the school of romantic critical theory would become fixated on a whole new landscape, of brands and logos and commerce: the poetical Sublime of business culture, corporations and the Internet.

But that was all ten years around the corner. What about the culture-vulturing city slickers, where did they come in? From a schism, in fact. The contortions of critical theory towards the end of the Eighties – as ideas, as fashion, as informants of advertising, arts education and retail culture – could be said to have divided a generational sensibility.

On the one hand, applied post-modernism in culture and commerce would come to seem like one of the voodoo arts carried out by the Demon Kings of yuppiedom – a grand denial of Content, grating and dicing the sanctity of Meaning into little more than a bucketful of marketable pixels, hand-sorted by media-sodden focus groups. A grand liberation, perhaps. On the other, there was the sense in which the cultural climate that had allowed post-modernism to flourish – a sudden explosion of media, technology and image making – was also, somehow, more than anything, well … like the end of something: a realization on that dreary December evening, those pedal-dampened, difficult chords, that snapped violin string …

These opposed opinions were well illustrated in the world of contemporary art.

Through the middle to late 1980s, the rise to prominence of young Scottish painters from Glasgow School of Art – most notably Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski – had delivered a muscular, enigmatic body of deeply literary painting that seemed to articulate – literally depict – the anxiety, doubt and confusion of a twilit, pre-post-modern generation. The aesthetic and philosophical agenda of these painters could seem like an update of that concerning the Neo-Romantic artists of the 1940s (John Minton et al.), which has been aptly labelled by the historian Dr David Mellor to include ‘nostalgia and anxiety, myth-making, organic fantasies’.

As such, these young Scottish artists were also the last gasp (for a while, at least) of a particular artistic sensibility, honed and empowered through atelier skills, responsive to the history of painting. In their different styles, both Campbell and Wiszniewski seemed to focus on the character, or type, that Peter York might once have described as ‘the neurotic boy outsider’: the romantic, aesthetic, self-questioning young man, existentially challenged and a teensy bit self-obsessed. Campbell’s stock character at the time was a kind of lost rambler – dressed somewhat in the clothes (grouse-moor tweeds at a glance) that ex-Skid turned model and TV presenter, Richard Jobson, had worn during his ‘Armory Show’ poet phase – and crossing a landscape of self-contradicting signposts and strange, semi-mystical features. Wiszniewski – in his paintings from the mid-Eighties, at any rate – depicted limp-fringed, sensual-mouthed, pretty-eyed young men wearing white shirts and tie, collar loosened, like Rupert Brookes or Rupert Everetts of the modern city. As with Campbell’s ramblers, these romantic, alienated young men appeared caught in a cat’s cradle of contradictory, entropic states. (Both painters looked remarkably like their chosen characters – archaically handsome in a Georgian kind of way.)

A powerfully atmospheric colour drawing by Wiszniewski from 1986, ‘Culture Vulturing City Slickers’ might be said to sum up this particular era: two of the painter’s urbane, entranced young men, immobile and strangely allegorical (one of them is clasping an affectionate alligator) against a dowdy, bronze-coloured twilight, which settles like sediment on Town Hall architecture and period streetlamps. But allegorical of what?

The young men are caught in the sunset of anxiety perhaps – as Damien Hirst’s massively influential ‘Freeze’ exhibition (one of the starting whistles for the 1990s) with its deft and super-self-assured rearranging of intentionality, was barely a couple of years away. For with ‘Freeze’ (not to mention its epiphenomenal seismic impact) the artist would seem to lose the right to fail. No more anxiety, no more lost young men. Wiszniewski’s City Slickers have an air, if not of doomed youth, then of youth in a kind of psychological transit camp of the emotions, stuck between Either and Or – rigidity or flux, spirituality or nihilism.

In the catalogue for Wiszniewski’s exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, held in the winter of 1987, the artist is described as a part of ‘the New Image Glasgow phenomenon’; it is also suggested ‘that a condition of ambiguity is more appropriate to the spirit in which’ Stephen Campbell’s pictures are painted. Here, then, was the phenomenon of a condition of ambiguity – the culture-vulturing city slicker position.

Represented by the Marlborough Gallery and Nicola Jacobs Gallery, respectively (Albemarle Street and Cork Street), Campbell and Wiszniewski both caught the Eighties art prices boom. It was one of the ironies of the period – during the Ascent of the Demon Kings of Yuppiedom – that paintings depicting states of anxiety, stasis or confusion should have made big money off the enterprise economy. But neurotic art tends to sell well during times of Boom Economy, cf. the cost of a Warhol during Reagan’s presidency.

So then what? The phenomenon of ‘New Image Glasgow’ more or less disappeared, its ethos in decline. The painters didn’t sink without a bubble, but almost: they became Newly Marginalized as Reactionary, or whimsical, which would become the stock Nineties way of dealing with cultural opposition.

From this point on, to the closing years of the Nineties, Tom Wolfe’s phrase about the art scene of the late Sixties, and ‘Cultureburg’s’ need to be ‘cosily anti-bourgeois’ would seldom seem more relevant. For throughout the Nineties, as the margins became the mainstream – typified by television comedy and the mediation of Young British Art (the latter, in fact, being a complex and eclectic generational grouping of artists, who happened to comprise, as a phenomenon, a good story) – so the newly perceived Reactionary (for instance, a certain kind of painting itself being considered reactionary) would become the New Margins – the anxiety dumps, the unfashionably alcoholic, the not Post Anxiety …

When you saw those culture-vulturing city slickers, sitting there in the submarine twilight, you could have had the feeling that they’d been there for ever, and would just stay in one place, immobile, entranced … Would anything – as Pierre, with a slight, upward twitch of his right hand, summons up another staccato, slippery snooker ball, clunky chord – ever disturb them?

BritPop Revisited

To anyone over thirty, drifting with a faintly puzzled expression towards the reflectiveness of early middle age, the phenomenon of BritPop and its expansion into the BritCulture of neo-Swinging London could be tantamount to discovering a premature liver spot and being seized with a sense of one’s own mortality. Suddenly, popular culture, as the freewheeling go-kart of carefree youth, seemed to be pronouncing its disaffection with even those members of the older generation who had cut their teeth on Bowie’s glam angst, rallied to the energizing bloody-mindedness of punk and pursued the vertiginous mutations of ambient dance music with something more than casual interest. BritPop, as a vivacious new player in popular culture, seemed to source from past pop in a way that could bring on a chronic attack of déjà vu in anyone who could remember, however vaguely, the originals.

This was youth flaunting the shock of the old, and they did it with style and wit. True, there were going to be some other diversions on this magical mystery tour down memory’s dual carriageway, from the cul-de-sac of ‘nouveau romo’s’ reawakening of New Romantic synth-pop to the lay-by of Easy Listening revivalism, but BritPop was the real picnic at the end of the journey. And it was strictly for the kids – even if the adults tried to join in.

But the liberty of youth, as Elizabethan sonneteers never tired of mentioning, is a short-lived condition. The transatlantic triumph of the Spice Girls repositioned the banner of youth supremacy yet again. Liam and Patsy, as the John and Yoko of the National Lottery generation, might well be officializing the triumph of Brit-Culture on the cover of Vanity Fair, but it’s the navel-pierced girl power of Spice Girls that is really calling to the pocket-money. Spice was the fastest selling CD of 1996, and America had already fallen to the charms of its performers. The younger sisters of TopShopPop seem poised to oust the elder brothers of BritPop, thus marking yet another revolution of pop’s indefatigable loop, in which the prayers and protests of one generation are translated into the language of the next. Sally might wait – to paraphrase Oasis – but the Spice Girls won’t. And BritPop, in retrospect, for all its dismissive swagger, might prove to have been more subtle than we thought.

The story of BritPop all began, really, with Suede’s suburban urchin poetry of love, lust and loneliness on the streets of contemporary London. Suede were from Haywards Heath, and their mixture of limp-wristed petulance and deeply depressed meditation owed as much to the musical style of David Bowie as it did to the poetic anatomizing of Britain that had been put forward by Morrissey. They were like a pink marble mezzanine, generationally, between the melancholy notions of Britishness delivered by late indie groups, and the boyish exuberance that took off with BritPop proper. Suede, sexually ambiguous and dead clever, were the end of one pop sensibility and the launchpad for the next. And they wrote some great songs: ‘On a high wire, dressed in a leotard, there wobbles one hell of a retard …’ The oldies, at a pinch, could relate to that.

But by the time that the BritPop princelings Supergrass, with a rubber-mouthed assurance that touched on the brattish self-confidence of the adolescent Mick Jagger, had rocketed up the pop charts with the simple slogan ‘We are young! We are free!’, it seemed as though a historic marker had been planted with jaunty arrogance in the massive sandbank of sensibility that separated the consumers of pop who were born in the early 1960s, from those who had first blinked into the light towards the middle of the 1970s. What was being proclaimed was a kind of heritage pop, in which the styling and values of an earlier England – the England of the Beatles and brand-new Wimpy Bars – was evoked by Thatcher’s grown-up children to offer a cultural database of received ideas of Britishness, from which a response to the realities of Major’s classless Britain could be impishly composed. For the kids, it was rather like running riot in an interactive museum of English popular culture. BritPop, importantly, seemed to lack the anxiety and self-referring irony of the pop that had come just before it. It seemed, somehow, deeply materialistic.

But pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the landscape of the national mood and marking those points where the major trade routes of social trends are traversed by the underground tunnels of the zeitgeist. In the case of BritPop, the phenomenon as a whole could be seen to combine an infantilist nostalgia for the popular culture of its practitioners’ adolescence, with the born-again maleness of laddism nouveau.

This was demonstrated by Oasis, who just missed literalizing, by a single letter, their justifiable claim to enjoying yet another annus mirabilis in 1996, when a Gallagher brother mimed the insertion of his Brit Award into his backside. The maleness of BritPop took the healthy irreverence of the young Beatles and mixed it with a dollop of Viz comic’s reactionary humour. And, once again, both BritPop and the laddism of Viz – or Loaded – seemed to be yearning for the freedom of a second adolescence in a younger and less complicated Britain.

In their vastly differing ways, the superstar groups of BritPops – Oasis, Blur, Supergrass and Pulp – were reworking the pop heritage they had inherited as teenagers. Fairly soon, it would be claimed that if Oasis were inspired by the Beatles, then Pulp were impersonating the Kinks, Supergrass were doing a passable imitation of the Spencer Davis Group and Blur were somewhere between the Small Faces and Georgie Fame. Small wonder that the movement should rally to a reinvented Paul Weller as the godfather of Mod revivalism. As Tony Parsons remarked in his review for Prospect magazine of Martha Bayles’s Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music: ‘BritPop is traditional rock. Its appeal is that it is at once shiny and new while also replete with nostalgia – pop music is coming home.’

And BritPop was coming home at a time, during the slow recovery from the Recession of 1990, which had seen the end of designer elitism and the fetishing of new technology as a viable chassis for the pop and Fleet Street style press. As the adult heirs of Thatcher’s Britain, more or less force-fed the reality and consequences of rampant cultural materialism, it seemed as though the BritPop kids could only look back to an England before Prozac and a pop before post-modernism. As their one-word names suggested, these groups were half in love with the simplicity of a Sixties childhood or Seventies rites of passage, when the colours on colour TV were too hot to watch without eye-strain, and the tank-topped dolly birds of situation comedy were bubbling with suggestiveness to the damp innuendo of their mutton-chop-sideburned suitors. Hence the assertion by Simon Reynolds, in his essay on BritPop for Frieze magazine, that the movement could not justify its label as ‘the new Mod’ because it was based almost entirely on personal and cultural nostalgia. The original Mods would sooner have handed back their button-down shirts than admit to a nostalgia for anything.

Partly an infantilist comedy of recognition, and partly a defiant rejection of cultural anxiety, BritPop put forward a pop ethos that Blur summed up in the title of their CD, Modern Life is Rubbish. With a founding theology of apolitical infantilism, the movement had distanced itself from both the multiculturalism of dance music and the white nihilism of grunge’s screamed de profundis from the teenage bedrooms of middle-class America. What BritPop promised, with a disingenuous simplicity that belied its subtle protest, were some catchy tunes and a rattling good time.

As such, amid the fiscal neurasthenia of the early 1990s, in a pop cultural climate that revived archaic notions of gender and sexuality by turning young men into lads and young women into ‘babes’, BritPop was attempting to reclaim a lost innocence on the one hand, but indulging a new hedonism on – or with – the other. Or, to quote Blur, the complexities of sexual politics could be reduced to the seemingly infinite chant of ‘Boys who like girls who like boys’, and so on. And so BritPop, in many ways, was like a suburban teenage party as it might be reconstructed by today’s young adults from their memories of youth.

But despite its seeming espousal of a wanton dumbness, a few BritPop tracks were both musically accomplished and lyrically clever.

For all its opacity and pouting, the movement produced some glorious pop moments, from Pulp’s ‘I Want to Live Like Common People’ to the thunderous title track of Oasis’s second CD, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, which confounded its detractors with their impassioned articulations of defiance in the face of modern life’s rubbish. At their best, these were serious and sincere pop songs, which used archaic formats and styling to pass comment on society as they found it. The message, in BritPop, was subordinate to the medium – a neat reversal of the up-front conscience raising of traditional protest songs.

This mixing of intentions was much in evidence on Pulp’s controversial Sorted for Es and Whizz, which was seized upon by anti-drugs lobbyists to represent a massive misjudgement on the part of the group with regards to its ambiguous handling of a sensitive subject. It might have been one small step for Jarvis Cocker on to Michael Jackson’s heavily defended stage at ‘that’ awards ceremony, but it was a mighty leap for BritPop as the scourge and cartoon folk devils of the transatlantic pop establishment. Rooted in the past but sniping at the present, BritPop made its political points by never referring to politics. Noel or Damon might offer a cursory nod to New Labour, but there was none of the community knees-up and flag-waving which had typified the politicized pop events laid on by Red Wedge or Rock Against Racism during the early years of the 1980s. Rather, the politics of BritPop were summed up in the lyrics of Oasis’s ground-breaking single ‘Whatever’ (1994), with its demand for personal freedom – ‘I’m free, to do whatever I, whatever I choose,’ – being snarled by Liam over Noel’s evocative homage to the reversed orchestration on the Beatles’ psychedelic nursery rhyme of 1967, ‘I am the Walrus’. And, ironically, this plea for individualism would breed a new breed of conformism within BritPop’s massive fan base. In the end, the democracy between the performers and fans that punk had attempted to instigate, and that dance music simply took for granted, was wholly dismantled by BritPop’s reawakening of an earlier rock and roll orthodoxy. Jarvis and Co. might have been the Citizen Smiths of modern Britain, but their triumph lay in a powerful coalition between media and marketing.

As BritPop spilt over into the ‘BritCulture’ of BritArt and the heavily over-mediated ‘neo-Swinging London’, as championed by British glossy magazines from GQ to the Telegraph Magazine and Elle, so a new aristocracy of wholly metropolitan socialites, art dealers, PR gurus and restaurateurs would benefit from the mini-boom. For Noel and Liam Gallagher, from the depressed suburb of Burnage, south Manchester, there must have been a delicious sense of victory in realizing that the old escape route from working-class drudgery through football or pop was still open – and it could still make the toffs dance to their tune. As is traditional in English popular culture, from Mick Jagger’s charming of the British aristocracy, the yobs were calling the shots to the snobs. Hence Noel Gallagher, on the television programme ‘TFI Friday’, displaying his neatly shoed foot to a fawning Chris Evans and barking the one word, ‘Gucci’. BritPop had not merely come home, it was thinking of buying the house. Which was rather why Liam Gallagher cancelled an American tour.

What did become evident, however, was that by invoking both the sound and sensibility of English popular culture of earlier eras – be that the High Psychedelia of Sixties opulence or the cheerful cheesiness of Seventies kitsch – the ultimate destination of BritPop’s targeted revivalism was a kind of ‘virtual’ pop, in which the stars and the fans appeared like holograms of their distant and mutated originals. And, ironically, the Beatles themselves would release what amounted to a ‘virtual’ single, ‘Free as a Bird’, with Lennon’s vocals collaged into new material, just as Oasismania was nearing its peak. With a sigh of relief and a power surge on the National Grid, the country was once more united in its traditional twin obsession with northern working-class pop and the Royal Family – Princess Diana having screened her ‘Panorama’ special just minutes after the world première of the Beatles’ virtual video. This, if ever there was one, was a triumph for Sixties revivalism, and the Beatles had descended as though from Pop Heaven to anoint Noel and Liam – within air-space of Royalty – as the successors to the original BritPop throne.

BritPop, as a media phenomenon attendant on the supposed rivalry between Blur and Oasis, had arrived at a time when years of Conservative government had all but conditioned several generations of young people into believing that politics were irrelevant – save as a distant force of despotism, reflexively acknowledged in a half-hearted way to challenge the legality of raves or keep homeless people in the streets. Now, it would seem as though the maturing establishment of BritPop can either follow the formulaic patterns of rock orthodoxy – the ‘difficult’ new album, solo projects, rumours of overdose, and, to quote Blur, ‘a big house in the country’ – or batten down the hatches in the face of the Spice Girls and the pre-teen pop parade.

Like Boyzone and Take That before them, the Spice Girls are an arch-conservative construct whose media-friendly sex appeal is shot through with the commonsensical philosophies traditionally ascribed to well-behaved but fun-loving teenagers. The Spice Girls are naughty but nice, with a vote-winning dash of cosmetic militancy. Need we look any further than the coy chorus of, ‘If you wanna be my luvah, first you gotta be my friend’ to realize that they follow in a long line of safe pop phenomena that stretches all the way back to Cliff Richard and his pals in Summer Holiday? If BritPop plundered from pop’s past, in the name of Prog Mod revivalism, then the Spice Girls look back to the Mop Top era of Beatlemania, before the music turned weird, and the youthful Fab Four were cheeky professionals on the stage of the Royal Variety Show.

And so this latest phenomenon in British pop is retreating yet again, in terms of its ethos, from the psychedelic garden of 1968 to the positive Eden of 1964. After all, the Spice Girls approached Richard Lester, who directed the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, to create their first full-length feature film. Who knows, if BritPop gives way to girl power then Britain might need the Spice Girls like Russia needed a communist Elvis. They could yet become the official state pop of advanced democratic consumerism – the sound of a bright new Britain.

‘… on an ever tightening coil …’

In the big grey apartment, the submarine light seemed to turn moss-green. The grey-painted frame of one of the tall sash windows rattled suddenly, buffeted by the wind. There were going to be some changes around here. During the next ten years, certain … ideas would emerge from the culture, pretty much organically, the sheer brute force of which would take some getting used to. The list would run something like this:

1. Throughout the 1990s, many of the very qualities being demonized as evil Thatcherite 1980s acquisitive competitive cultural bullishness – the whole yuppie arrogance of ‘greed is good’, for instance, or ‘second is nowhere’ – would be simultaneously rehabilitated by popular culture, media and advertising as ‘Attitude’.

2. Pop, for the most part, would cease to be a venue for new ideas and become a site for recycling old ideas.

3. Anxiety and doubt, as an energizing force within cultural practice, would be domesticated and disarmed by a) the comedy of recognition and b) market-formatted cultural production. The effect of these factors produced a culture that appeared to have been designed, by media, retail and advertising. Contemporary art would become fixated on issues of pre-mediation and mediation itself.

4. Brute Authenticity would replace Brute Irony as the temper of the zeitgeist.

5. A consequence of the above would be a pan-media return to gender stereotyping.

6. As the 1990s became fixated on brands and retail culture, so the Trojan Horse of cultural materialism would be Infantilism – seducing the consumer with cosy treats: the caffe latte and the loft conversion. By the year 2000, frothy coffee would appear to be the multi-purpose signifier of urban, credit-based consumer society – the Death by Cappuccino effect.

7. In the 1990s, the cross-cultural pursuit of Authenticity would also provide the ‘bread and circuses’ (most importantly, Popular Factual Programming – ‘reality’ and ‘conflict’ TV – an obsession with ‘celebrity’ and confessional journalism) with which to distract the consumer from the sheer fragility (as demonstrated by the near civic panic during the petrol shortages) of consumer society.

8. This obsession with Authenticity would declare realism to be synonymous with dysfunctionalism.

9. As a site for cultural production, all aspects of the middle classes would be deemed toxic, if not radioactive.

10. By the year 2000, Call Centre Britain would be firmly established. The rhetoric of advertising and retail – the slogans of the Benign Corporation (‘Because Life’s Complicated Enough!’, ‘Every Little Helps!’, ‘What Can We Do to Make It Happen?’) would be based on an idea of intimacy, empathy and personal contact with the customer. The reality behind the rhetoric would be a culture of endlessly deferred accountability, in which there was no one, ultimately, whom the consumer could challenge as responsible for the fair running of The System. Translated into the dynamics of a family, the consumers became children (remember the Trojan Horse of Infantilism a little earlier on?) to the parents of the Benign Corporation, who promised comfort but handed out abandonment.