The new millennium ushered in an awkward moment for British music. After 2000, most of the bands that epitomized '90s Britain were not producing new material. Radiohead released nothing between Amnesiac (2001) and Hail To TheProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0
hief (2003), Oasis released Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants in 2000 and fell silent for two years, Blur went on a semi-serious hiatus between 13 (1999) and Think Tank (2003) and Muse and Coldplay had just released their first albums and were hardly the arena-sellouts they have become. A generation of English hipsters had to look across the Atlantic for culture for the first time since Seattle and flannel were cool. The Oxford epics and the London soul-searchers gave way to New York minimalism and Detriot simplicity. The Strokes, Interpol and the White Stripes reveled in sparse instrumentation and so did the British public. All of a sudden, bleeps and bloops and tracks of feedback were replaced by shoddy angular guitar lines, fast drums and tight pants.
Peter Doherty listened up and formed The Libertines, kicking off a new music revolution. While they more than did the genre justice, the door was opened for countless imitators. The constant bastardization of what came before led to bands like Razorlight, the embodiment of style over substance, and Editors, who sounded exactly like Interpol (who themselves are really no more than a wet Joy Division). Clubs like KOKO stopped booking bands like Mogwai, Muse and Gomez, replacing them with Art Brut, Klaxons and The Automatic.
Despite a paltry offering of bands worth writing home about, it’s hard to write off British music entirely. Franz Ferdinand and Kasabian’s eponymous debuts in 2004 were stylish but still had balls. Even Editors’ first album had some brooding goodness about it. The Zutons, Bloc Party and British Sea Power all had solid debuts as well. After Britain got over reliving their punk past, the English scene seemed pretty healthy.
However, with the advent of MySpace and the subsequent ability to put up songs for the whole world to hear, every band felt they had a real chance of becoming the next big thing. The high school act that first broke through was Arctic Monkeys in January 2006. They ushered in the cult of the simplistic, opening the doors for The Fratellis, The Kooks, Good Shoes, The View and countless other bands who could be out-played by a one-armed Johnny Rotten. The UK media, which buys into hype as often as it sparks it, fanned the flames and the screaming fans of the British public ate it up.
How did we go from a culture where 13 — one of Damon Albarn’s most nakedly honest efforts — was top of the charts and certified platinum in the UK to one where Razorlight’s self-titled effort goes four times platinum, in less than a decade? Has indie music become such a part of the mainstream that its been completely dumbed down, or did we just stop listening?
