Imagine this: Sunday afternoons spent with your siblings crowded by the household radio; in a pre-smartphone age, entertainment was more a scheduled ritual than a reflex to a technology-addicted twitch. The weekly chart battle for that week’s top selling single and to be crowned number one was a national event, whatever your age. Pop stars, in the 90s and prior, were universal, and rock stars, well, they were something else.
Spring of 1995 and “Cool Britannia” was in. Homegrown music dominated the UK charts. They say you had to be there, but the ripple of time proves otherwise. Canonized in lore and many a history book, the chart-battle between Oasis and Blur, the country’s two biggest bands, sparked a divide across Britain now unimaginable in today’s algorithmic music discovery.
It all began when Blur’s Damon Albarn decided to change the release date of their new single to directly compete with that of fellow Brit rock band, Oasis. Coined the “Battle of Britpop” by renowned music magazine NME, and spurred by an antagonistic press, house party feuds turned into tabloid tribalism as the bands competed for the top spot, the respective frontmen either dodging barbs or whipping up fans in their corner. Those same fans waited with bated breath by the radio for the confirmation to be made; for the record, Blur won, selling 274,000 copies of ‘Country House’ to Oasis’ 216,000 copies of ‘Roll with It’.
While the tale of two cocksure rock stars and a friendly rivalry turned sour is entertainment enough, the cultural grip of the Battle of Britpop belied a societal trend. In a nation built on hierarchy, regional and economic classism persists, with laddish, working-class upstarts Oasis representing the bolshy spirit of the North, versus university-educated, middle-class hipsters Blur of the South.
It went deeper than the music, in fact the music was just an excuse to take the lid off the boiling kettle of social tension in the wake of 18 years of UK Conservative Party rule that had seen further divisions between the working and middle classes. By the time former UK Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair won a landslide victory in 1997, the decade had swung into a rebellious, patriotic echo of 1960s Britain, and the brush between Oasis and Blur became symbolic of frustration and evoking the desire for change – a distilled unrest that permeated transatlantic.
This appetite for celebrity downfall wasn’t contained to Britain; in America and around the world, the mid-90s marked a turning point in how the public consumed and participated in scandal. Just as the Britpop battle exposed Britain’s class divisions through celebrity proxy wars, a wave of international scandals revealed cracks in the polished veneer of power and fame everywhere.
From January to October of 1995, the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial played out for all to see; between 1995 and 1997, Baywatch actor and It Girl Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee were swept up in the undulating saga of their leaked sex tape; later, in 1998, US President Bill Clinton was revealed as having had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Suddenly, the people in the newspapers and on our TV screens were not so perfect after all, and through their own imperfection made the concept of celebrity touchable for the everyman. Having an opinion on the extreme turmoils of the rich, famous, and powerful was not enough to satiate the thirst of the public: people needed to feel involved.
