Phonogram: Rue Britannia #4 - "Murder Park"

[laughing_tree]

"A straight fantasy approach suggests that even the idea of music as a transmutatory force is fantastical, as ludicrous as believing fairies are waiting at the bottom of your garden. The non-fiction approach leaves it dry and historical, a piece of pure explanation with none of the raw poetry and inspiration that narrative allows, and is all too important in pop-music. And pure autobiography reduces everything to a grey sludge, the hammer of honesty flattening everything to a vague nihilistic description of 'just what happened,' but misses out what actually happened. Phonogram is about the tension between these three poles, which is the only way I could express the entirety of how pop music works." -- Kieron Gillen

Kohl explores Britpop's memory kingdom:

Comments

[nyadnar17]

All of Gillen's pop/youth culture stuff is bizarre for me to read. Watching characters who are so passionate about vapidness(or at least ideas usually associated with vapidness) move about the world is very strange.

[pyynk]

The memory kingdom issue really plays on the conflicting views of "what Britpop all meant." To many critics and more than a few fans, Britpop was nothing but Oasis and Blur which culminated in the concerts at Knebworth in 1996, one in which over 2.6 million people applied for tickets for the shows, making it the largest ever demand for concert tickets in British history. To others (like Kohl) Britpop was all about intimate performances in places like Camden, especially the Good Mixer which we'll visit later.

The Memory Kingdom is full of references to Britpop's darker side - everything from the crashed train from the cover of Blur's Modern Life is Rubbish, the nameless/faceless masses at Knebworth along with another reference to the classic Oasis album What's the Story Morning Glory, Beth's Ghost pining for Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, and finally Justine Frischmann of Elastica sitting next to her "King" Damon Albarn just prior to his escape to the Americas.

So tl;dr? This seems vapid because the faceless masses (which is what the memory kingdom represents) remember the surface parts (the drugs, Knebworth, the Battle of the Ages), but forget how it all worked together to make something meaningful to so many people.

[halloweenjack]

It just doesn't seem accessible to anyone who either wasn't part of that scene or doesn't want to or doesn't have the time to do an awful lot of research and catching up to figure things out. I bought this volume after having read Gillen and McKelvie's Young Avengers run (on the strength of the excerpts posted in s_d), but this is much more opaque. And I don't think that it's solely a culture gap thing; there are lots of comics both set in Britain and by British writers that are much more accessible.