The new thing in the 1990s was, of course, that pop music was already able to reference a British sound, thanks to the success of earlier British groups in imprinting their musical styles on the minds of audiences around the world. For example, when Damon Albarn, born and raised in Essex, chose to project a Cockney character, it owed more to the older music-hall Cockney than the entertainment found at that time in working-men's clubs of London's East End. It should not be forgotten that the Beatles, the Kinks, and others drew upon existing signifiers of Britishness and Englishness, and that many earlier lyrical and musical conventions they used were also available for reworking in the 1990s. However, it is also necessary to relate those British sounds to a pool of musical and discursive means of constructing and valorizing Britishness that has been in existence since the late nineteenth century. The issue, in a nutshell, is whether Britpop works by way of simply copying earlier styles, or whether there is an attempt to make creative use of those aspects of songs that might now, in the twenty-first century, be regarded as exemplifying the musical vocabulary of a British pop language. The view that the Beatles have been shamelessly plagiarized by Oasis, or the Kinks by Blur, is challenged. In doing so, it reveals the shifting meanings that result when apparently similar messages are articulated at differing historic junctures, and raises questions about Britishness and Englishness in popular music. This chapter explores the musical links between 1990s Britpop and the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s.
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