For Fans of Blur

In 1994 the critical consensus decided Britpop was a marketing exercise, which made it easy to dismiss Parklife as opportunistic. That reading ages badly. The record is a concept album about English class, pleasure, defeat, and collective life that holds together from Phil Daniels's spoken word on the title track to the Kinks-ish melancholy of 'End of a Century.' The fact that it sold two million copies in the UK does not make it shallow; it makes it rare.

By 2003 Blur had lost Graham Coxon mid-session and everyone assumed the band was finished. Instead they made an album recorded partly in Morocco that sounds like nothing they had done before: spacious, mournful, quietly political. 'Ambulance' and 'Battery in Your Leg' are among the best songs any of them ever wrote. The lesson is that constraint and discomfort can force a band to discover what it actually sounds like underneath the influences.

Damon Albarn could have kept making Blur records. Instead he built a virtual band as a conceptual shield, which paradoxically let him be more personal and more experimental than any guitar-band format would allow. Gorillaz could collaborate with De La Soul, Lou Reed, Bobby Womack, and Mos Def without any of it feeling like a desperate reach. It is a template for how a restless artist stays genuinely interested in what they are doing.

In August 1995, Blur and Oasis released singles on the same day in a manufactured chart race that every British tabloid treated as a national event. Blur's 'Country House' won. Within a year, Blur had pivoted to self-titled art rock and Oasis were releasing Be Here Now. The chart battle now reads as a moment when the music press decided what Britpop meant, and Blur quietly decided to be something else entirely.