Legacy Piece: Britpop; What Was Its Impact on Modern Music in Retrospect?
"Who wants to be an Indie Noise-Freak, alienating everybody?" - Damon Albarn
"I wound up becoming an A&R man at London Records in the 1990s, during the boom of Britpop, the last great gold rush of the music industry. I saw incredible greed and terrible behaviour. I was greedy and terribly behaved. " - John Niven
Since the last Legacy Piece was about the Garage Rock and Post-Punk Revivals, it would only make sense for the second Legacy Piece to be on the spiritual predecessor to that movement; Britpop. Similarly to the Garage Rock and Post-Punk Revivals, the Britpop wave was all about revisiting where rock had been in the past and modernizing those classic sounds with modern production and alternative influences, just with the revisit being more on the popular rock canon instead of the underground, as was the case for the Garage Rock and Post Punk Revivals. It was a media giant during its heyday in British music and is considered to still have some followers in the modern day and have been a major impact on British music of the last 20-30 years.
Britpop, for those who don't know, was a name attributed to a broad variety of new styles of British Alternative Rock from the United Kingdom that focused on lighter and more melodic, generally "rockist" music (in that the movement called back to the rock canon of the 60's in terms of general aesthetic and sonic inspiration). The wave as a whole formed in the early 90's as a reaction against the then massive American Grunge scene that had flooded into British popular music from overseas as well as the local shoegazing scene that had been dominant in the British underground for several years by that point. Both musical styles had become infamous for their self-depreciating, angry and shy lyrical atmospheres and generally noisy and uncommercial soundscapes, resulting in their being a call for a new style in music and a general shift in how many of the Indie Bands began to portray themselves, leading to the aforementioned lighter style. This movement came up alongside a new cultural phenomenon known as Cool Britannia, which sought to idolize British culture and history, particular the days of the Swinging Sixties, leading to what would become Britpop becoming pretty intertwined with this new surge of nationalism.
Sonically, Britpop is hard to describe due to the sheer amount of styles that got wrapped up under the movement's banner, but there are a few common stylistic similarities. The most recognizable similarities would be the fairly common influence of Power Pop and British Invasion style music of the 60's (from the early R&B influenced stuff, all the way to the Psychedelia), with a focus on melody and a cleaner tone instrumentally (though typically contrasted with sarcastic lyrics) as well as the felt influence of the then recent Madchester Dance Scene, resulting in dance beat influences bleeding through in the rhythm sections. The other predominant influence comes from the Post Punk and New Wave bands that had existed in the underground in the previous decade as well as some of the Shoegaze bands that were popular right before Britpop (when I say shoegaze, I mean more along the lines of Ride, instead of My Bloody Valentine). Throw in the Arena Rock stylings of Glam with string sections and loud, reverbed guitars and you had the general influences that made many of the bands of the day. The sounds of the movement shifted as the movement went on however, with less influence being taken from Psychedelia and 60's British Rock and gradually focusing more on guitar overdubs and in-your-face punchiness.
Britpop's time in the limelight is seen to have lasted from about 1993 with the breakthrough of Suede and Blur in the popular music scape and lasted until about 1997, with the death of Princess Diana in a car crash putting a major dash in the Cool Britannia movement while Oasis' much hyped third album Be Here Now was met with extreme backlash and came to represent everything that had become wrong with the movement in the public consciousness (overproduced, loud and arrogant, derivative, tendency towards Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll mindsets, etc.). Meanwhile, with the release of Radiohead's Ok Computer and Blur's eponymous album (which drifted away from their prior Britpoppy material and instead adapted more American varieties of Alternative Rock), there was a clamoring for a more introspective and less nationalistic brand of guitar-driven music, leading to the popularity of what became known as Post-Britpop, which would go on to be the dominant British rock music for a time in the following decade (before becoming criticized for being overly derivative, melodic, "whiny," and "boring" and similarly falling from grace during the late 2000's and early 2010's).
With how long Britpop remained in the public discourse, both in its initial form, and through its later Post-Britpop form, the question comes to mind; what was Britpop's ultimate long-lasting legacy and impact on modern music, and what has the general consensus of the movements been as of lately in retrospect?