Just bought myself a weekend ticket for this - don’t know (yet) if I’ll have company, cos it’s not until May and it was an impulse decision. A decision based on two bands, one Irish and one international, out of an impressive list (most of which I’m under-familiar with): Wounds, and Iceage.
Two competing visions of punk, you could say: one a hardcore band aurally reminiscent to me of the chaotic hardcore of the early 90s, but apparently derived through the thrash-y angsts of 00s ‘Moshspace’ groups, the other a paradoxically fresh- but retro-sounding punk band crossing the gap between the morbid post-punk of the early 80s and the fuzzy abandon of modern lo-fi guitar rock (e.g. Male Bonding, only edgier). That one has just been kicking around the Dublin scene - and some excursions abroad to the UK at least, I think - for a while trying to record an album in between serious mishaps, while the other has had their debut LP catapulted into prominence all the way across the Atlantic from Denmark to the readers of Pitchfork (who are of course global, too), I’d like to say is irrelevant if only because I’m seeking to avoid parochial judgements of quality. As it is, I hope neither pull out, because I’m looking to replicate my singular live experience of the former (supporting Joe Lally with more well-known Irish metallers Adebisi Shank), and constructing a fuller interpretation of the latter’s album, New Brigade.
![perpetua:
Here is a complete scan of Yanks Go Home, an article from the defunct British music magazine Select that arguably first defined the Britpop movement. Be sure to check out the interview with Jarvis Cocker in which he says that he does not care for Americans corrupting the Queen’s language and grammar. (via Scott Plagenhoef)
Americans (and other aliens) may not recognise that the title and the illustration are a skit on the theme to hit 1968-77 BBC comedy Dad’s Army, about the British Home Guard in the Second World War, titled ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr. Hitler’. So Kurt Cobain is literally Hitler!
It’s pretty funny, (slightly) tongue-in-cheek anti-Americanism that I guess would be of particular interest to anyone charting the development of ‘Britishness’ as a sense of cultural identity - which is essentially interchangeable with ‘Englishness’, to the detriment of either concept, and the exclusion of Scottishness, Welsh-ness and (gulp) Irishness - but I like this view of transatlantic, artistic relations:
“We don’t want plaid. We want crimplene, glamour, wit and irony.”
Then there’s a piece about “sav[ing] the Union Jack from the Nazis”, which ties in with the Dad’s Army theme but is actually about trying to have a similar attitude to displaying the British flag as American artists have with theirs:
“When Axl Rose cavorts about in cycle shorts bearing the Stars and Stripes (a flag with its own stains) it’s rock and roll theatre. Bruce Springsteen uses the Stripes to shame Reagan’s America. Yet Morrissey waves the Union Jack in a ham-fisted bid to question the sterile consensus on the flag, and suddenly he’s a Nazi.”
Apart from Helena Bonham Carter sewing it into her tights, I’m not sure how much things have moved on with the flag question since. I do notice, however, that alternative British music in the 90s comes exclusively from Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) and not the UK (incl. Northern Ireland). So no Ash, Divine Comedy, Therapy? or That Petrol Emotion. Although to be fair that’s always going to be a tricky problem, either politically - in the less-than settled 90s - or visually - having a floating statelet in the middle of the picture complicates things in more ways than one.](http://selectmagazinescans.netii.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/britpop1.jpg)
