Friday Poll Special – The Great Britpop Sorting Hat!

148: I have just checked both my recent posts. I have used we once. The missing words are “I think” in between “that” and “we” in the relevant sentence. Can you take them as read?

The questions you raise in your third paragraph are interesting. I’ve done about 10 years now in Market Research (indeed, I first became aware of Tom – not that I know him, I know of him – through his day job and meandered into this site out of pure interest) and have looked through quite a few projects that talk about human desire to impose order on chaos, to try to generate further understanding of – even communality with – people who share a similar sense of order. Principally this was to do with my job – in order to actually make sense of masses of data for clients and help them take good courses of action, elements of sorting are needed. I found it interesting how much sorting was going on elsewhere when I stopped to think about it though.

Of course, things don’t HAVE to be sorted. Nevertheless, I’ve tended to find some people find sorting helpful, so that they can start to form opinions about things. It also helps these people when others go through their lives helpfully sorting themselves (it allows us to form opinions about them – for instance, all of those guys going on EDL marches have helpfully sorted themselves into a group that I know I don’t want anything to do with, except to stand in opposition against them and the beliefs – and decide on actions that we might want to take) and sorting other objects (so that it is more easy to find them, etc).

Looking at the list provided and then doing some sort of helpful sorting exercise can be helpful. For instance, my opinion of people who comment here is pretty high and, frankly, I think this is sort of a niche site that is likely (again, I think) to attract similar visitors to those who comment. Going through the exercise at 143 allows me to say to myself – maybe I should give Kenickie another listen – after all, a bunch of people who I think know what they’re talking about seem to have a high enough opinion of them that they might be as good as bands that I know I like (and indeed to be close to one of the leading lights of a particular musical scene, so listening to and trying to understand this might help me understand more about Britpop). I think this is helpful. You may think otherwise.

On one level, though the aesthete in each of us would decry the notion, music can benefit from being looked at as a meat packing warehouse for some people – it’s about understanding what goes into certain neat boxes of music and why you might or might not connect with what is in those boxes. More deeply, particularly for younger people, it’s one of the markers (along with fashion and taste in books, TV, and myriad other things) that helps give kids a sense of both themselves and how they might relate to their friends, which groups they are interested in being part of and so on. This stuff is not new – Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers, all of that falls into the same category. Once I’ve got a group, I’ve inevitably got things and people that lie more on the edge of the group; these are also interesting, in my opinion – as things that are on the fringes, if explored, might lead me to more interesting discoveries, widen my horizons and so on.

I guess, put another way, I use FT as a site that interests me, certainly, but there are sites that operate on the fringes that link away from it (some are more fringe than others – most sites have similar agenda but are run by different people). One of these links lead me to TPL. TPL allows me to look at music in a different way, because it’s written differently, explores different music and expands my ideas about what is going on. By moving away from the middle of the FT group and towards a fringe, I’m helping myself – understand more, experience more and develop more. But helpfully, the site has sorted itself to allow me to work out what those fringes are (by use of the links) – and by hanging around long enough, I can work out who those fringes are being written by, so I can work out my likely interest level.

I don’t know whether this stuff answers your questions. It probably doesn’t! Nevertheless, I’ve given it a stab in good faith. I don’t think it is about being afraid of myself, not do I think people who do sorting exercises are necessarily afraid of themselves. What I do think is that, for some, it is a viable way for making sense of the world and allowing themselves to understand, not just other people, but how they might expand their own experiences in ways that interest them. In this sense, sorting can be useful.

I would guess that it is a Lauren Laverne effect to an extent. That said, there might be something else there in terms of the type and and intensity of fandom that Kenickie had/have.

I remember, for instance, The Bluetones soldiering on for years being able to sell out reasonably sized halls because their fans were incredibly loyal (and given what I have learned about the tweeting of the poll, it makes me wonder whether anyone did similar to a Bluetones account/fandom and my memory is faulty – in that they didn’t turn up – or whether your average Bluetones fan is unaware of this poll).

I have finally turfed up some Kenickie. On with the listening, whilst I write up some data.

Having sought out and listened to Kenickie in response to this, I’d say that they definitely meet the criteria for voting for them in this poll. Definitely better than I remembered (I thought they gave good interviews – as Swanstep mentions – but that was the main positive I had in my head about them) and enjoyed the obvious Mackem accent, which gives them a bit of a different spin to the other acts.

Re: Oasis, I have said before and will repeat now – I don’t think they were Britpop. I think they’re stadium rock, mostly due to the anthemic choruses (though I can hear why people think of them as grunge/post grunge – Husker Du references in the SMS thread – or a bit shoegaze).