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@honey.atnoon

@honey.atnoon

@honey.atnoon


Britain is bold, Britain is creative, Britain is spewing at the brim with righteousness and pride. Even on the international stage, Brits can come together and fight for what is theirs. Whether it be in the World Cup or in some arbitrary battle on social media regarding what it means to be a “common person”, Brits will and can unite. In the face of their past injustices, Britain has honed the power to overlook, ignore and misinterpret. Yet, Britain is powerful, organised and the perfect place to be in when you want to remind yourself just how bad things can get. Cool Britannia, Brexit, the Euros, Nigel Farage, as much as Brits can unite in their nostalgic harmony, they can also repel, dismiss, and be extremely divided on matters that, in fact, concern their utmost unity.



Recently, in the face of the World Cup rivalry, a certain type of collective memory has been recited. The type that indulges in the previous format of Britain’s greatness. Immortalising the times of Oasis, Blur and Kate Moss, reigning supreme over us once again, yet this time these figures are rendered from memory rather than reality. England is no longer this kind of England, where Britpop and the Union Jack are symbols of a cultural hegemony. Images of these times are no longer linked to a lived identity, they are a packaged, exported and reissued nostalgic tool. Whilst then, this England appeared to embrace its scars in the pursuit of freedom. Its newly baptised creative genius and national pride were directly linked to, not just nostalgia but, a rather regressive line of thinking that relied heavily on the exclusion of several racial communities. 


@music_scene_uk_

@90s_on_insta


Cool Britannia was not simply a cultural moment that happened, but it was a brand that was built on the backs of those whose lives and realities were turned into aesthetics.


The phrase Cool Britannia originates most broadly from 1997, when Vanity Fair ran its “London Swings Again” cover story with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit draped across a Union Jack bedsheet. That same year, Tony Blair, who now circulates on the internet within several glamourised edits of his political faults, hosted a party at 10 Downing Street. Inviting 200 musicians in an effort to celebrate the close link between the country’s new cool and New Labour’s arrival. This is a symbolic example of not a grassroots cultural movement, but a government curating a cultural moment for export. Even musicians in the room, like Alan McGee, pointed out a feeling of discomfort in watching a movement turned into a photo op, whilst the industry it was relying on was being slowly hollowed out.



What got exported in that photo op was a very specific aesthetic: the working-class lad, the council-estate guitar band, the terraced-street swagger of Britpop. The Gallagher brothers were raised on a council estate in Manchester by a single mother, and much of what Oasis produced ridiculed the very immobile class system that had shaped them. Their lad culture put real, unremarkable faces, faces that had lived a "Parklife", at the centre of the story England told about itself. But the aesthetic sold to the world as the whole of English reinvention was, in fact, a regurgitation. Britpop's guitars were descended from a British Invasion sound that had itself been lifted from Black American R&B and soul; its mod tailoring and its Union Jack iconography were borrowed from a subculture that Caribbean sound systems and ska had shaped a generation earlier. 


Cool Britannia repackaged working-class white youth culture and presented it to the world as though it had invented itself. Meanwhile, the actual sonic innovation of that decade was happening elsewhere, in scenes that never got a Downing Street reception. Jungle and drum'n'bass were being built in London by Black British producers out of breakbeats, dub bass, and Jamaican sound-system culture. The Asian Underground was fusing Indian classical music with soul, jazz, hip-hop, punk, and dub. Cornershop mixing Bollywood strings into Britpop guitar lines, Fun-Da-Mental fusing punk with South Asian identity politics, Asian Dub Foundation dragging dub into confrontation with British racism, Apache Indian and later Panjabi MC pushing bhangra into the charts. This was, by any honest measure, the more inventive, more hybrid, more genuinely "new" British culture of the era. Yet it barely appears in the postcard version.



What got exported in that photo op was a very specific aesthetic: the working-class lad, the council-estate guitar band, the terraced-street swagger of Britpop. The Gallagher brothers were raised on a council estate in Manchester by a single mother, and much of what Oasis produced ridiculed the very immobile class system that had shaped them. Their lad culture put real, unremarkable faces, faces that had lived a "Parklife", at the centre of the story England told about itself. But the aesthetic sold to the world as the whole of English reinvention was, in fact, a regurgitation. Britpop's guitars were descended from a British Invasion sound that had itself been lifted from Black American R&B and soul; its mod tailoring and its Union Jack iconography were borrowed from a subculture that Caribbean sound systems and ska had shaped a generation earlier. 


Cool Britannia repackaged working-class white youth culture and presented it to the world as though it had invented itself. Meanwhile, the actual sonic innovation of that decade was happening elsewhere, in scenes that never got a Downing Street reception. Jungle and drum'n'bass were being built in London by Black British producers out of breakbeats, dub bass, and Jamaican sound-system culture. The Asian Underground was fusing Indian classical music with soul, jazz, hip-hop, punk, and dub. Cornershop mixing Bollywood strings into Britpop guitar lines, Fun-Da-Mental fusing punk with South Asian identity politics, Asian Dub Foundation dragging dub into confrontation with British racism, Apache Indian and later Panjabi MC pushing bhangra into the charts. This was, by any honest measure, the more inventive, more hybrid, more genuinely "new" British culture of the era. Yet it barely appears in the postcard version.



When this gets raised online, a familiar defence surfaces: yes, Cool Britannia prioritised white artists, but whiteness was simply what England was at the time. It's a convenient claim, and it isn't true. England in the 1990s was the England of Windrush's children and grandchildren, of post-war South Asian migration, of Notting Hill Carnival and bhangra nights and jungle raves. A multiracial country whose Black and Asian communities were producing some of its most original culture while being murdered in its streets for it, as the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 made brutally clear. The "whiteness" of Cool Britannia wasn't a demographic fact. It was a curatorial choice, made by a government and a media machine that found it easier to export a white, working-class aesthetic as "Britishness" than to export the messier, more accurate, multiracial one producing the sound of the country.


This is the real inheritance that shapes today’s nostalgia, engraved in the edits of Blair and Brown. Or, underneath every misty-eyed Britpop anthem, pulsed to a World Cup or Euros Final. Cool Britannia was never a culture rediscovering itself, it was an identity manufactured for export. With aesthetics scraped from working-class England, sounds lifted from Black musical tradition, and the actual multiracial creativity of the moment edited out of the frame entirely. The version of Britain that got sold to the world was “cool” precisely because of what, and who, had been cut out of it. Reissuing that image now, however uniting or loving the re-inception of this identity may be intended to be, also means reissuing the exclusion along with it.


@90s_on_insta

@thecaptainofsuave

@thecaptainofsuave

@music_scene_uk_


When this gets raised online, a familiar defence surfaces: yes, Cool Britannia prioritised white artists, but whiteness was simply what England was at the time. It's a convenient claim, and it isn't true. England in the 1990s was the England of Windrush's children and grandchildren, of post-war South Asian migration, of Notting Hill Carnival and bhangra nights and jungle raves. A multiracial country whose Black and Asian communities were producing some of its most original culture while being murdered in its streets for it, as the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 made brutally clear. The "whiteness" of Cool Britannia wasn't a demographic fact. It was a curatorial choice, made by a government and a media machine that found it easier to export a white, working-class aesthetic as "Britishness" than to export the messier, more accurate, multiracial one producing the sound of the country.


This is the real inheritance that shapes today’s nostalgia, engraved in the edits of Blair and Brown. Or, underneath every misty-eyed Britpop anthem, pulsed to a World Cup or Euros Final. Cool Britannia was never a culture rediscovering itself, it was an identity manufactured for export. With aesthetics scraped from working-class England, sounds lifted from Black musical tradition, and the actual multiracial creativity of the moment edited out of the frame entirely. The version of Britain that got sold to the world was “cool” precisely because of what, and who, had been cut out of it. Reissuing that image now, however uniting or loving the re-inception of this identity may be intended to be, also means reissuing the exclusion along with it.



Cool Britannia was not simply a cultural moment that happened, but it was a brand that was built on the backs of those whose lives and realities were turned into aesthetics.


The phrase Cool Britannia originates most broadly from 1997, when Vanity Fair ran its “London Swings Again” cover story with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit draped across a Union Jack bedsheet. That same year, Tony Blair, who now circulates on the internet within several glamourised edits of his political faults, hosted a party at 10 Downing Street. Inviting 200 musicians in an effort to celebrate the close link between the country’s new cool and New Labour’s arrival. This is a symbolic example of not a grassroots cultural movement, but a government curating a cultural moment for export. Even musicians in the room, like Alan McGee, pointed out a feeling of discomfort in watching a movement turned into a photo op, whilst the industry it was relying on was being slowly hollowed out.


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