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What Happened To Rock Under Blair?














What has been the predominant musical sound during Tony Blair's premiership? You might disagree, but I'd plump for what one critic recently dubbed mortgage rock: the portentous, wistful, stadium-filling, ballad-heavy, post-Britpop genre that gets played in the background when an English team gets knocked out of an international sporting tournament, or an unsuccessful X-Factor hopeful collapses weeping into the arms of Kate Thornton. In fairness, it wasn't really around when Blair took office, although the records that influenced it were: Wonderwall, OK Computer, The Drugs Don't Work. For the entirety of this decade it's been, for better or worse, the sine qua non of British rock: you would think the record-buying public would be sick of it by now, seven years after Coldplay's debut, but no. They keep buying it: it was Snow Patrol, not the Arctic Monkeys, who made the best-selling album of last year.

What does its predominance tell you about the Blair years? You could argue that it's rock music as light entertainment, with all the edges sanded off: it's not furiously angry or inconsolably upset or wildly nihilistic in its pursuit of fun. It's the sound of economic prosperity. There's something about it that suggests a vague sense of melancholy, or dissatisfaction, as if things haven't turned out quite the way people expected.

The one thing rock and pop music hasn't done much in the Blair years is protest. Plenty of artists have political causes, but they don't seem to write many songs about them. Chris Martin wants to Make Trade Fair, but he clearly feels it's more expedient to write that on his hand than to sing about it on a Coldplay album. Dozens of artists recently put their name to a CND advert decrying the replacement of Trident - everyone from Razorlight and Kaiser Chiefs to rappers Sway and Roots Manuva - but I'd bet none of them write a song about it. You could have argued that a lot of the big, contentious issues during the Blair years don't really make for striking protest songs: the most skilled songwriter would be hard pushed to come up with something catchy about top-up fees or City Academies or Private Finance Initiative. More surprising is the fact that there hasn't been a British equivalent of, say, Green Day's American Idiot - a huge band delivering a rip-roaring, fuck-you, call-to-arms about the war in Iraq. The biggest British band that regularly express dissent with the government are Radiohead, but they don't sound angry so much as at best, terribly disappointed and at worst, utterly defeated: brilliant and moving as Thom Yorke's song about the suicide of Dr David Kelly, Harrowdown Hill is, it's hardly a stirring man-the-barricades anthem.

I wonder if rock music apparently losing its power or will to protest has anything to do with the way New Labour so successfully pursued its support in the mid-90s. If you're looking for a definitive image of rock in that decade, you could do worse than the shot of Noel Gallagher shaking hands with the PM. It's hard for something to retain its anti-establishment cachet when it's effectively been co-opted by the government.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

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