The 8 best Britpop tracks of all time
Britpop
A mid-nineties British argument that guitar pop should sound English again — Kinks chords, local vocabulary and a self-conscious rejection of American grunge — conducted largely in the London press and briefly in the singles chart.
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Pulp / Common People
Jarvis Cocker's account of a rich student who wanted to slum it, and by several distances the best lyric of the era. Class rage as a disco record.
Oasis / Live Forever
Noel Gallagher wrote it as a direct answer to Nirvana's I Hate Myself and Want to Die. Whatever one thinks of the band, the argument is stated cleanly.
Blur / Girls & Boys
A disco bassline, a synth line and Damon Albarn sneering at package holidays. Far stranger than its chart position suggests.
Blur / The Universal
Strings, a slow build, and a lyric about a future where everything is fine and nothing is. The band's best song and the least like the rest of the movement.
Supergrass / Alright
Two minutes of piano and delight, by three teenagers who meant it. The one Britpop record with no irony anywhere in it.
Elastica / Connection
A Wire riff, borrowed closely enough that the publishing was settled out of court. Justine Frischmann's band were the movement's sharpest and shortest.
Manic Street Preachers / A Design for Life
"Libraries gave us power." Written after their guitarist disappeared, and it turns the era's flag-waving into something with actual grief in it.
Oasis / Wonderwall
Ubiquitous to the point of parody, and worth hearing again. The chord sequence is a very good chord sequence, whatever the last thirty years have done to it.