Difficult Music

This is pop (yeah, yeah)
I recently found an old videotape with excerpts from a Britpop special on it. The show (Britpop Now! was the title, I think) was hosted by Damon out of Blur, and featured a bunch of bands playing their one good song live in the studio. I remember the tone of Damon's 'tween-song patter was all Cool Britannia, "our pop's better than your pop" kinda stuff.

He was right, I suppose. But what was the competition at the time? Green Day and Silverchair?

PJ Harvey was on the show, belting out "Meet Ze Monsta" and looking alarmingly skeletal. I remember Elastica were on it, but I missed recording their bit. The Manics and Supergrass got lost too. For some reason I kept songs by Echobelly and Menswe@r on the tape. Whatever happened to them? Were they banished from the British Isles for being irredeemably chirpy and poptastic?

For that matter, what happened to the Primitives, the Darling Buds, and all those other NME cover stars from years gone by? No one can bang out an immortal pop single and then disappear off the face of the earth like those Brits.

I like a lot of that stuff, but the "here today, gone tomorrow" aspect of it doesn't fit with my musical worldview. Forcing my ethos on that kind of disposable pop music (i.e. trying to convince myself and anyone who'll listen that no good music is disposable, even if popular taste consigns it to the cultural scrapheap) seems odd when I consider how the rest of the world sees it.

Ultimately I don't care. It works for me. And if that means I deserve a good kicking for thinking that Bandwagonesque and The Eight-Legged Groove Machine are still pretty cool, then so be it.