Quietus article: https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/blur-modern-life-is-rubbish-review-britpop/
Luke Turner’s thorough, and somewhat combative, reflection on the cultural significance of Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish album, 25 years after its release, contains, imho, some good insights as well as, in my view, some unjustifiable and unsubstantiated angles of critique. Now over 30 years since its release, and following some superb concerts in 2023 which were very ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ heavy, I decided to put some thoughts together in response to The Quietus’ 25th anniversary article.
Luke Turner justifiably considers John Major’s ‘country of long shadows on county grounds’ to be a caricatured and limited vision of Englishness, but in my view he connects this somewhat unfairly to the so-called ‘Britpop’ era by suggesting that Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish ‘set the tone for jingoism.’ To me there is nothing jingoistic about the album, and very few examples of patriotism, let alone jingoism, are easily found in the work of other artists of the time. My belief is that Modern Life is Rubbish is not part of a causal chain which led to increasingly worrying manifestations of nationalism over the years since its release.
Modern Life is Rubbish starts off with a hymn to the metropolis as the Waterloo of Terry and Julie is transposed to Primrose Hill for Susan and Jim, with all of us apparently lost on the literal and metaphorical ‘Westway’ of modern life, and includes tales of commuting (Advert, Colin Zeal, Starshaped) and the weekly rhythms and pressures of life, including late night drinks, numbed Sunday rituals and strained expressions of angst in the wake of a nightmare tour of America. There is chaos and tension, notably in the concert intro of Intermission and outro of Commercial Break, as counterpoints to the crafted neatness and perfectionism of the production (which receives some justified criticism later in Turner’s article). But where is the jingoism?
Following accusations of a jingoistic tone, or jingoistic-tone-setting-potential, Turner then understandably distances himself from the album on the basis of his current distance from the person he was when he first listened to it during his GCSEs. The formative nature of this time is crucial, I believe, to the present element of antipathy towards the album. The essence of the criticism is that by virtue of arising from a specific cultural moment, the album is locked in time and is therefore harder to extract from the subjective experiences and memories of the listener than other albums might be. Furthermore the ‘legislated nostalgia’ of false memory creates a romanticised and potentially small-minded, backwards-looking version of England which in its power and strangeness compounds the binding effect of the imagery to the present emotions and experiences of an incipient and impressionable younger self looking to the future. The nostalgia therefore has a doubly compelling (or revolting) effect. A present day listen catapulted the writer back to a transitional moment in his life, while the content was of ‘legislated’ false nostalgia which is intolerable due to the perceived narrowness of its Englishness, made narrower in retrospect by subsequent (albeit unrelated) expressions of nationalism.
To change the subject, I had a similar experience with Amy Grant’s Heart in Motion album, which I listened to again recently with great ambivalence. This is because it was the one tape in the car stereo during a holiday in Cornwall in 1992 which culminated in a serious injury to my dad and a traumatic air-lifting to Truro hospital. There is a kind of retro-engineered melancholy to the music, even now. In truth, I remember the music feeling melancholic before the accident happened. Furthermore the faith dimension of the album is also met with real ambivalence now; at the time, Grant released music via two record labels, one Christian and one mainstream. ‘Hope Set High’, the ‘Christian’ release, feels complicatedly moving to me, while ‘Baby Baby’ feels light and throwaway. More depth on the album is provided by ‘How Can We See That Far’, (The same sun that melts the wax can harden clay…’). The Christian faith proclaimed by ‘If there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus’ is not problematic to me in itself, but only because of the southern fundamentalist Christian milieu that would interpret that line in binary and exclusive terms.
Furthermore, Turner uses Albarn’s cultural critique – that modern life is based on an accretion of rubbish from which it has become impossible to forge anything new – as a (compelling) template for his criticism of the album. On the other hand, Albarn was articulating an artistic statement which contained exaggeration and parody. Too literal a reading of this would indeed be ‘depressing’, but Albarn’s subsequent creative output shows that he is inventive and can change perspective; had this not been the case, I might agree more strongly with the criticism that the album is inward-looking, backwards-looking or trapped in time. For me, the subsequent work has a liberating effect on how the album is interpreted because of – rather than despite – the fact that it was of that early 90s moment, and nothing more. It doesn’t project forward into small-minded patriotic impulses or the rise of The Referendum or UKIP parties. It may have looked backwards, but in a parodic, mythologising celebration of the minutiae of English quirkiness of cultural detail and psychology rather than as a dark expressi0n of nationalism.
A relevant antecedent is The Kinks‘ Village Green Preservation Society. This is also steeped in ‘legislated nostalgia’, a peculiarly English fantasy world of steam trains, cats, riverside idylls and old friends ‘playing cricket in the thunder and the rain.’ This is right at the heart of John Major’s caricature of Englishness, yet – partly because it’s a ‘legislated’ fantasy world – I don’t think it’s a depressing listen in 2024. I’m not suggesting that the two albums are of equal quality, but that neither are nationalistic – or jingoistic – and that there is little awkward, empty or irrelevant about them when listened to in the present day. Both albums were in part countercultural, initially misunderstood reactions to American culture, and both artists then swung back the other way dramatically, with The Kinks embracing stadium rock and Albarn elements of an American low-fi sound influenced by the grunge music Modern Life is Rubbish reacted against.
Did Modern Life is Rubbish ‘set the template for Britpop’, as asserted by the article? If so, how valid is criticism of that fact? Blur can’t be blamed for the supposedly average music which followed in their wake, just as Nirvana can’t be blamed for the acts Albarn identified as Nirvana copycats in his narration of the 1995 documentary ‘Britpop Now’. On that note, while the quality of music may have been variable on that programme, I don’t recall any jingoism. I remember Gene’s haunting rendition of London Can You Wait, Echobelly’s King of the Kerb, which seemed to criticise a local gangster or pimp, and Elastica’s Connection. Some specificity of cultural reference, then, but not really any patriotism, let alone nationalism or jingoism.
A baffling charge against the album, though – to me anyway – is that of ‘complacency’. Modern Life is Rubbish is original, finely wrought, musically complex and lyrically fresh, especially, for example, in classics such as For Tomorrow, Starshaped, Chemical World and Villa Rosie, three of which were reprised at the opening of Wolverhampton Halls in 2023, sounding as electric and fresh as ever. It is undeniable, though, that Damon calculated what would fit the cultural moment. His statement, quoted by Turner, that Blur was ‘more of a head thing…and have always been a concept’ is unavoidable, revealing his consciousness of not writing in the first person much and leaving the album open to Turner’s criticism that it lacks a certain soulfulness or personal voice to mediate between and infuse the character studies. Applying knowledge of Blur’s biography, however, it’s possible to see that they wrote from a personal perspective, albeit obliquely, on songs such as Blue Jeans, Sing (on 1991’s Leisure) and End of a Century (Parklife).
While I understand the criticism that the album lacked an unambiguous personal voice, what I don’t believe it lacked was heart: it was a personal fightback from the band against the threat of being dropped by their record label, and was an artistically bold statement in the context of the music of the time. The album arose from personal dissatisfaction with both music and the wider culture: does it matter that they wanted to celebrate London in all its griminess, set against romantic notions of a bucolic escape tainted by knowledge of drugs and the corruption of innocence? Why should they have made a different statement? While admitting that ‘much of the songwriting is great’, Turner feels that the album still ‘grates’ – ‘infuriates’, even. He writes that the ‘wonderful songs’ are ‘curiously flat’ due to the production, which admittedly is characterised by many layers of Stephen Street’s perfectionism. An interesting aesthetic choice presented itself to the band, and I wonder how the album would have felt then and would feel now if Andy Partridge had produced it as originally intended: the demos he made were much freer interpretations of songs such as Coping and Sunday Sunday.
Just as I don’t think the lyrics are all ‘backwards-looking’ (much of them were rooted firmly in the present), I also don’t think their vision is ‘rose-tinted’: drug references begin with For Tomorrow‘s ‘seamless line’ and continue in various guises throughout, most obviously in Chemical World but also more subtly in Sunday Sunday, Advert, Colin Zeal and Coping where the numbing effects of consumerism and bland routine are skilfully disparaged. This is reinforced by Starshaped, the quirky and lovable tour film referred to in Turner’s article. In a neat Fred Perry, Damon reports with sweeping gestures from the convenience store aisles of Heston services: ‘And here you have your culture: and here you have your sugars.’
Modern Life is Rubbish also presents the theme of individuals straining under the pressures of modern life, in Coping, Pressure on Julian, For Tomorrow, Advert, Starshaped and Chemical World. Resigned, another first person narrative rather than a ‘character’ song, is arguably the most moving on the album, though other close contenders are Blue Jeans and, for me, the strange, almost surreal and (I agree with Turner here) ‘hard to inhabit’ character portraits of Starshaped and Villa Rosie. Turner’s connection between Blur and The Libertines in the phrase ‘muddled Albion’ is perfect. Of course England is muddled, as are notions of national identity: if they aren’t muddled, the danger is then of the certainty of dualistic ‘us and them’ patriotic thinking and, indeed, jingoism: which I do not believe Blur, or the other ‘Britpop’ bands which followed them, are guilty of.
To counter the review’s conclusion that Modern Life is Rubbish was part of ‘the retromania of the 90s’ and as such was ‘part of the first stirrings of the little Englander mentality that has poisoned our cultural life since’, I do not see any causal relationship between an album such as Modern Life is Rubbish and the ‘little Englander mentality’ of UKIP, Nigel Farage and all the other unsavoury far right agents that have indeed ‘poisoned our cultural life’. Rather, Blur’s fraught and often anxious character sketches of those caught up in modern life – with subtly drawn autobiographical undercurrents – exist in a separate cultural stream that has antecedents in The Kinks, The Jam, XTC and others acknowledged by Turner as Blur’s obvious influences. One band’s articulation of a cultural moment in all its complexity, strangeness and time-bound or timeless relevance can be co-opted or abused by darker forces but cannot be held responsible for them.
Wilderspool Causeway 