Britpop as a representation of Britishness essays

Britpop as a representation of Britishness essays Nowadays, Britpop is known merely as a musical genre, represented especially by present-day groups such as Coldplay and Radiohead. However, it was started in the early 1990s and, similarly to most of popular art, it contains a wide range of elements of the culture in which it was born. Britpop is then, from this point of view, a representation of what is usually called Britishness. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines Britpop as a type of popular music played by British groups in the 1990s, influenced by a variety of British musical traditions (2000). This concept can be enlarged by saying that the expression was originally created by the media around 1995 to describe the music and image style of new British bands such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp. To be exact, the birthplace of Britpop was Camden Town (North-West London), where members of those three bands had lived at the beginning of their musical careers. When Britpop came out, grunge, an US neo-punk style which had previously been to the fore, had declined and therefore Britain was able to re-establish its trend-setting role in the worlds popular music industry. Actually, many people regards Britpop as a marketing or even a political strategy, arguing that the bloodthirsty tabloid media turned niche-market indie-rock stars into mainstream celebrities (The Age Online Newspaper, 2003). In spite of that, its value as a way of representing Britishness, that is to say, the group of elements that characterises the British culture, can be unquestionably recovered. Throughout the changes that the different cultures suffer, especially nowadays with the current processes of globalisation, individuals belonging to each cultural background seek ways in which they can find identity. One of those ways is by means of music; in turn, the music of each culture tends to be a representation of the various aspects of that society. In order to inve...