Morning Glory and Lots of Different Stories

I've been finishing off Szatmary's book "Rockin' in Time", and last night i was reading a part on the late 90s and early 00s when it was all about the Spice Girls and the Limp Bizkits. There have always been opposites in mainstream music. What i mean is, lets say if "artist 1" does something, then another artist (lets call it "artist 2") would do something completely different to rebel against "artist 1". For example, in the mid 70s there was disco where the important people were the ones in the audience... the people on the dancefloor! Then there was stadium rock (eg. Kiss) where all attention was on the band onstage, and unlike disco, the audience was not as important. (Capitalism vs. Marxism?)

In the late 90s, we had the teenyboppers who were happy and spoiled, and the rap metal kids who were angry and wanted a heavier alternative to rebel against the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys. I fell into neither category, strangely. Instead i was into the depressed British bands of that time (eg. Travis, Coldplay, Doves, Idlewild) as well as surviving Brits from the mid-90s, like Oasis, Blur, and The Charlatans.

I can't give you a simple answer as to why i chose to be so different, but what i can say is bands like Oasis and Travis were real and not fabricated like the Spice Girls and S Club 7. And unlike Limp Bizkit and Slipknot, these bands had a thing called "talent". And they applied this talent to the actual music and not the dance moves!

I guess i also felt unwelcomed by the two groups and tried to run as far away from the mainstream as possible, searching for my own place in this world. I began with radio friendly bands like Oasis and Blur and then dug deeper into the lesser known bands like Gomez, Idlewild and Primal Scream. (Thank you internet!) Eventually, almost all music i liked was underground and i was discovering bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes ages before they would get on the radio.

So if you're ever sitting in my car wondering why i'm playing all this weird music you've never heard, now you know why!