Working on my Phonomancy
I never really paid attention to Britpop the first time around. I mean, I wasn't completely unaware of what was going on in England. I picked up a Charlatans single here or a Happy Mondays single there, but by the mid-ninties I was more into the holy trinity of PJ Harvey, Bjork, and Tori Amos to be perfectly honest. I eventually grew to appreciate Blur, Pulp, and Elastica, but it was certainly after the massive Britpop-boom of the time.
Recently I had the urge to study up on what happened musically in England in between the end of The Smiths and the rise of Radiohead, and it was all because of a comic book about magic.
The book "Phonogram" follows the exploits of David Kohl, a magician who taps the power of music. A "Phonomancer".
"Music is Magic. You know this already. You've known this from the first time a record sent a divine shiver down your spine or when a band changed the way you dressed forever. How does something that's just noises arranged in sequence do that? No-one knows. It's just - magic. Everyone knows that. It's just that some realize that it's more than metaphor. The people in question are the Phonomancers, these urban-pop-obsessive magicians who channel and exploit this magic to achieve their desires."
It just so happens that David Kohl gained his awareness of magic during the rise of Britpop, and the entire series name-checks, rhapsodizes, and editorializes on that heady period in UK culture. I won't go in detail over the plot, but if you have any affinity for comics or pop-culture you'll be pleased with this book. The comic in turn lead me to an altogether different work, John Harris' "Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock" which lays out the rise of the English-centric attitude in the face of Grunge dominance.
The book doesn't have much of a happy ending. While some participants in Britpop (willing or not) have gone on to successful post-Britpop careers, it seemed to effectively cripple the English indie scene created during the rise of Punk. Even the Britpop-loving Phonogram references the time as a "cultural Chernobyl". But then the mid-90s seemed to be the last gasp of "movement" oriented music. As the Internet swelled everyone's music collections, the need for generation-defining unified scenes seems to fade more every year. We are now in the age where a scene might gain critical and fan attention for a year or two (see: Electroclash, Freak-folk, and Post-post-Punk), but then fade back into the mists where only the true believers can find them.
Perhaps Britpop signaled the final co-opting of the punk era. A bit of cultural leftovers that needed to be tossed before something truly new could happen. Then again maybe music journalists and obsessives like me tend to read far too much importance into bands. I'm just glad that I've gained a deeper enjoyment of some of the Britpop bands, and feel I have a better idea of their cultural importance. In any case I think the idea of a "phonomancer" is cool.
