Flip, Switch, Reverse

This isn’t our idea. In fact, we stole it off someone else. It is, however, well worth repeating due to it being pretty much spot on.

Think back to the late nineties. A glorious time. A time when any old bird with a nice frock and good make-up could rocket to the top of the charts, provided they had a suitably titillating video. The quality of the music barely mattered, it was more about the tits.

Maybe it wasn’t that glorious.

Anyway, the point is that at this time, there was a form of music called “alternative” that a lot of people liked. Not as many as liked old birds in frocks, but still. Alternative music was of a very high quality. It had to be otherwise no one would buy it, so discerning were the genre’s fans.

Basically, it was very easy for record companies to sell pop music, but a bit harder for them to shift alternative records, because they actually had to be good (that’s not to say there were no good pop songs at the time - quite the opposite - there were just a lot of bad ones too).

Fast forward to the present day and we find ourselves in much the same situation, except now it is pop music that actually has to be good in order to sell, whereas any two-bit bunch of scruffs in a Topman hat n’ scarf combo can find themselves lauded as the next big thing, as long they have a black and white section in their video and say they either like or hate Oasis.

But what brought about this reversal? There are people far better equipped than we are to answer that question, but we’d wager each of the following had a hand somewhere:

Girls Aloud / Xenomania / Richard X etc.
The Strokes
The last Spice Girls album
The Libertines
Topshop playing videos by The Strokes and The Libertines
Soulwax / 2ManyDJs / “Electroclash” etc.
“UK Garage”

Chuck all that and a bit more in a blender six years ago, serve it to the record companies and you end up where we are today. Every fucker wants to be in The Long Blondes. Nobody wants to be in Westlife, apart from [litigious comment removed]. Victoria Newton thinks Rudebox was “experimental”, while Radio 1 have just renamed pop music ‘Daytime’ music.

Despite how this might seem, pop’s not dead. It’s just moved town and changed its appearance. It goes by a few different names. But it’s still there, still alive, and healthier than ever in many ways. It’s really fucking cool now actually. You just have to find it.