Hey you kids! Get the hell off my lawn! With your gameboys and iPods and knife crime. You don’t know you’re born. Back in my day we’d walk seven miles to pick up a CD from our local record store. Uphill. Both ways. The guy there would look down at us from behind the counter and we’d feel small. And we LIKED IT…
etc…
But seriously, over the last few years, the way we consume music has changed beyond recognition. The so called ‘iPod generation’ (a horrible, if functional turn of phrase) get their musical kicks in ways – 10 years ago – I would never have imagined. They’re both lucky and unlucky, as they will never experience the things on the list that follows…
Over the 20 years of its existence, you could accuse Warp Records of being many things – singular, bloody-minded, wilful, arrogant even – but populist is definitely not something that you could have leveled at the influential indie.
As a label, Warp has always ploughed its own furrow, danced to the beat of its own 808 etc… Which is why the label founder (I presume it was he) Steve Beckett’s decision to open up the choice of the tracklisting for the label’s 20th anniversary retrospective album to something as mundane and populist as a public vote was so baffling – I wouldn’t even trust the general public to decide what trousers I was going to wear on a night out. The Warp of old would have just chosen 20 tracks, slapped them on a CD (exquisitely-packaged, naturally), lovingly flicked its fans the V-sign and been done with it.
A recent Guardian article drew the attention to this.
A comprehensive guide to the Britpop years. Hey, everybody! Remember ‘Britpop’? Crap, wasn’t it?
“Well, that depends”, you may respond, “on whether you construct a picture of an era from various sell-through compilations and poorly-recalled media events or whether you maintain a vivid, quasi-synesthetic recollection of the era in your own imagination.”
