One of the first things I noticed about the differences between the UK and US after moving to the latter — after things like, the sun seems like it’s a different color over here and American cash is really weird to the touch — was the lack of a monoculture, at least when it came to pop music. I came from a country where everyone knew what songs were in the top 10 even if they didn’t like them; where Radio 1 really was a national institution, for better or worse. There was something comforting in that, to me. It was a north star of sorts for me, if one that I didn’t recognize at the time.
I think about that a lot now, in an era where monoculture seems simultaneously impossible — pop culture has fragmented into a million pieces as a specific form of tribalism feels as if it’s taken over in every facet of… well, everything, really — and entirely omnipresent, with Marvel movies and Netflix and whichever pop figure of the moment (are we past the Sabrina Carpenter of it all yet?). Yet, it somehow feels very different from the one I grew up with: there’s no Top of the Pops and no communal in-jokes that everyone just seems to share even without it being properly and officially shared anywhere. No wonder we all liked Twitter before everything fell apart. (I guess that all came from the newspapers and radio, back in the day…?)
All of this has been coming up as I read The Nation’s Favorite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, an oral history of the radio station’s mid-90s/Britpop era that came out more or less as it was happening. (I’m re-reading it, technically; I first read it when it came out in 1998, but that’s so long ago, I’m not sure it counts anymore.) There’s something about the certainty of everyone involved that what they were doing with a pop radio station mattered that feels almost quaint, in retrospect, but I remember what it felt like at the time, and how surreally “important” Radio 1 felt during that odd era. It was a great time to be in your late teens/early 20s, speaking from experience, because pop culture felt new and thrilling even as it regurgitated and remixed the past in such a way that felt as if it moved through every part of the country.
Maybe that is what skews everything in my perspective; that I was young at the last time when it felt as if pop culture, politics, and social movements were all mixed up and playing into each other, and felt as if that was the way it should always be. (Or, perhaps, I’m just old and biased.)