ARTIST RESEARCH - Genre

Genres they are associated with:

• Britpop
• Alt rock (alternate rock)
• Indie rock (Independent rock)
• Glam rock/Glam pop
• Electronic rock (late 90s/early 00s)
• Art rock

GLAM ROCK

• Sample of a Shock + Awe, a book on glam rock by Simon Reynolds.

BRITPOP

Linked to Cool Britannia (Bowie mocked it in this interview with Jeremy Paxman)

They are forever associated with the term, as can be seen for example in the YouTube description of this interview with them about their reunion:

*TBA*

WatchMojo's Top 10 Britpop Anthems.

Other images connected with Britpop.

This article has a strong opinion on that:

In the 90s many were bigger, but few were better than Suede at their best, led by the dynamic duo of "glamly androgynous Dickensian whippet" Brett Anderson and "Danger High Voltage" whirlwind guitarist Bernard Butler. Just don't call 'em Britpop.

Another comment on YouTube:

Lengthier article:

The mainstream media are currently engaged in a collective misty-eyed throwback to the 'glory days' of the mid 90s. Luke Turner, who was a teenager at the time, argues that the current canonisation of Britpop is as musically and socially conservative as 1960s nostalgia

Back in 1995 I was Britpop's target market, and I ought to be right in the middle of the mod t-shirt bullseye of this current raid on the memory banks. I had become, as young white men from England who avidly read the NME are wont to, a rather conservative teenager when it came to my music taste, buying into the limited narrative that I was offered by the music press. Until Britpop, my listening tastes were fairly broad, taking in anything from The KLF to chart pop, early Prodigy and rave, Soundgarden, Leonard Cohen, Boney M and the Top Gun soundtrack. Britpop's narrow aesthetic, and that of the media that lauded it, ruined all that, turning me into the kind of wally who'd list the 'right' bands on their school ruler. It took me years to recover, and it was only really the rise of detestable lad culture as a core aspect of Britpop that helped wean me off the stuff.This is why I find the current media storm around Britpop's anniversary so troubling. It's a celebration of the very conservative, a backward glance to something that was already backwards-looking. It's not twee, exactly, but it is very Keep Calm And Carry On, it is very cosy, it is very mod, parochial, flag-wavy - "Yanks go home" mag covers, and so on. Indeed, a Google image search of the term 'Britpop' occupies the overlapping point of the Venn diagram between Oasis' fanbase, UKIP's youth wing, and a crap London souvenir stall. I'm not denigrating the entire movement, or even my own teenage self, or anyone else who lived through the time and loved the music. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here: the bath of Britpop was, after all, an entirely dubious concept in the first place, and one largely invented by a lazy media. There were some great albums released back then, just as there are great albums released in any given year, and may of them stand up outside this spurious scene. I've written extensively on Suede in the past, at first because I felt their reputation was in such dire straits before their reunion that they deserved to be able to make their point, and more recently because their new material - in the form of last year's Bloodsports album - proves they're still capable of writing music as good as the stuff that made them accidentally invent Britpop in the first place. An aside: before you all start clamouring, yes The Quietus will be running anniversary features on some of them, but always looking to find new insights and angles, and never at the expense of our coverage of new music.The likes of Suede's Dog Man Star and Pulp's Different Class will forever rank among my all-time favourites. The latter is arguably more relevant today then when it was released - see the incredible class fury of the wonderful, vicious 'I Spy'. Pulp were one of the most political groups ever to get to the top of the charts, something that's often overlooked. Parklife? No thanks - it's smug and complacent, aside from the ballads, and you should never trust a band whose best songs are their ballads. We could go on.Memory of your teenage years is always unreliable, and we certainly don't need the mediator of the British media's rose-tinted spectacles to convince us that the greatest years of your life were when you'd just done your GCSEs, were still living at home, couldn't drink, and found negotiations with sexually attractive people as intractable as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Imagine it! One suspects that, exactly as was the case with the 1960s, a few people who did have what they thought was a marvellous time (a bleeding nose underneath a table at the Groucho with Keith Allen and Alex James, perhaps) are now in the position to call the shots and dictate the narrative of what we are all told to remember. At some point we must break this cycle, this endless fetishising of both the past and youthful memory of it - a habit that the Baby Boomers (as I wrote here) are most guilty of, of course. Perhaps with 2013's Britpopathon, this is actually happening. Mine is not the only dissenting voice - take, for one example, Quietus writer Nick Southall, who presents a very different take on things, from the perspective of a teenager living in rural Devon. What's interesting about the reaction of so many of my generation to this wave of Britpop guff is how mortified so many of us are with it. This is the first 'Golden Age' to be remembered by a generation who, in their late teens, discovered the internet, and who by now are engaged in and comfortable with social media. The fracturing of music since the mid-1990s means that we're all a few steps ahead of the mainstream newspapers, magazines and radio stations, and I've seen and participated in a lot of very heated debates and threads on Facebook about the whole thing over the past week or so. Some of the participants have been journalists who were working at the time and have a very different take on events from the 'everyone pissed at the Good Mixer' narrative that we're always being fed. Perhaps the tired hagiography of a few hot months twenty-odd years ago isn't necessarily striking the kind of chord that BBC 6 Music presumably hope will be represented in RAJAR figures in a few months' time.I hope so, because Britpop nostalgia, like 60s nostalgia, like any nostalgia, is by its very nature something that halts progress, that stymies creativity and evolution, oftentimes exactly when it's most needed. Much as I might wish Jarvis Cocker would have a bit of a break from being a National Treasure, and come back with a Pulp album as biting in its politics and pop as those he made in the 90s, I'd rather hear that from a new artist in the charts. As ever with the celebration of Golden Ages, the true casualty is not the slightly embarrassed older listener who is, after all, perfectly capable of switching off, but the younger artist and music fan who is not getting exposure, who is being denied a contemporary culture of their own, and who, worst of all, is being told tough luck, the best things are already in the past. You missed out. Given the appalling situation with education in our country, increasing inequality, a bleak job market and a ludicrous housing situation, Britain's youth do not need to be fed with the lie that everything was better when Lammo and Whiley were on Radio One and you could pick up a Kula Shaker single for 99p*. Part of being a music critic ought to be about disassociating your ears from the obscurant hormone rush of discovering and falling in love with music for the first time as a teenager. Those of us who have the means and the capacity to write owe it to them not to patronisingly hold up our own past lives as somehow superior to theirs, being lived and struggled through right now. After Elastica left the stage on July 6th 1995 my then girlfriend and I took the train home. We somehow ended up climbing over the fence into the local park where, fumbling and awkward, we had sex on the grass, next to the swings. I saw stars, but they were just the ones through the trees in the clear summer sky. We went home in silence. Do you remember the first time? Me? I can't remember a worse time.

Negative opinion piece by The Guardian:

If you look at those groups on Select's Britpop cover, what united them was not a slavish devotion to anything, but their peculiarly quirky representations of Britishness. Suede's was the easiest to caricature, all council flats, bad drugs and transgressive sex. 

Opinions on how the second album Dog Man Star, particular the lead single We Are The Pigs, was a rejection of Britpop, an allegic reaction Placebo would say:

From Pitchfork's Top 200 1990s Tracks

From a Guardian Top 10 Suede songs review by Ben Hewitt:

Suede were Britpop. Not just a mere cog in it but the oil that first greased the machine. They were the ones who, before they even released a single, were hailed by Melody Maker as Britain’s best new band; the ones who the music press, desperate for a something new they could own, backed to do it for Blighty and stick one on the Yanks. And yet Suede hated Britpop: the crass Carry-On humour, the cartoon laddism, the brutish and boozy boorishness – it left them cold. Such isolation fed into their second album Dog Man Star, a darkly extravagant masterpiece that stood against everything the movement they helped spawn had become. Just compare, for example, any of Oasis’s hymns to living big dreams in the big city and having it large with We Are the Pigs, in which London is turned into a thuggish dystopian playground, or a sexier version of Threads.

The "Dark Side" of Britpop:

http://www.wow247.co.uk/2015/11/06/dark-side-of-britpop/

IN CONCLUSION, 
high art vs pop culture? Philipp Tagg's axiom

Switching between pop and art music?

In the 90s they were aiming for the charts, with the third studio album, Coming Up, they were going down a more pop music route.