Bring It On - Gomez (1998)
90s Intermezzo - some 90s albums I loved in the 90s
As I’ve pointed out before, the Mercury Prize winner for best UK album tends to map pretty solidly to my personal preferences. This is another winner that I was really into when it was first out.
I find less in it than I did before. I don’t know if it was a major narrative or just something I’m making up in my head in retrospect §, but the twilight of the 20th century was a restless time for rock music. It had clearly outgrown a lot of the tropes that had been propelling it since the 60s–giant guitar solos, the cult-like charisma of lead singers, the endless news cycles about what the lads are up to this week–and was searching for a way to fit into a world that was increasingly increasingly diversified and a culture that was listening to hip hop and dance and electronica and soul.
Gomez made a pretty great album by any standard: bluesy and affecting while still registering as post-Oasis, post-acid-house British rock. But the next great thing in rock was never going to come out of this line of reasoning. It was just mining the last, deepest edges of what had worked before.
The next time rock n roll would get kicked in the ass was just a few years away, an explosion of dance-oriented bands that oozed punk energy and cared less about guitar-bass-drums puritanism and more about delivering the best overall groove.
Records like this, while fun to listen to sometimes, are a monument to an age that was already mostly past by the time this hit the shelves.
§ - all narratives are things that someone makes up in their head in retrospect. That’s why we call them narratives.
