“The 90s: Art and Fashion”, a new exhibition about the decade, opens next week at the Tate Britain. That it is curated by Edward Enninful may strike one with delight or dismay, depending on one’s opinion of him. There’s no doubt that he knows his onions. He was 18 in 1991, when he became the youngest ever fashion director of i-D magazine. He went on to become the first black, and male, editor of British Vogue, in 2018, and stayed there for six years, during which time he put the preposterous Greta Thunberg on the cover, part of his mission to make the magazine more than a hefty brick composed of photos of expensive frocks and even more expensive advertising.

Yet if Enninful came out with the usual platitudes about how he aimed to bring “diversity” to the institution, it’s a shame that as late as 2018, Vogue didn’t pay its interns, thus seeing to it that only youngsters from wealthy backgrounds and/or with family homes in London could afford to work there. So it is with the awareness of a certain level of virtue-signaling hogwash that one must approach anything “curated” by Edward Enninful.

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When we consider the Nineties, most of us immediately think of Cool Britannia, Young British Artists, Brit Pop and Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack mini. It was an unashamedly patriotic time, with the national flag being treated as cool and harmless in a way it hadn’t been since the Sixties; think Harold Wilson’s “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, but featuring pop stars instead of secretaries. But just as every superhero must now have A Dark Side — which seemed kind of interesting the first few times it was done, but now has the heavy hand of Author’s Message with a side-dish of scolding — so must every decade. The Nineties didn’t feel like a dark decade, certainly compared to decades full of foreboding, like the Thirties, or indeed right here, right now.

Yet Enninful’s choices seem determined not to provide simply a fun day out. In the Tate press release accompanying the exhibition, there’s a lot of earnest talk about how Nineties art tackled “agency, identity and class”, and how its artists drew attention “to those excluded largely excluded” from the Cool Britannia zeitgeist. But I’m not sure an exhibition called “Art and Fashion” is a natural prompt for political pondering, let alone reflections on a decade where, supposedly, “hierarchies were dismantled”. Some things are sacred.

The photograph which accompanies most of the advance publicity for the show is Juergen Teller’s 1998 photo of a young Kate Moss lying in bed with only (only!) her face and pink hair showing — and one can’t help feeling that it’s feel-good artifacts like this which the paying public will be flocking to see, rather than Chris Ofili’s Turner Prize-winning tribute to Stephen and Doreen Lawrence.

This, after all, was an optimistic decade, apart from a bit of silly fussing about the Millennium Bug which would make airplanes crash from the sky, a fear which seemed to sum up the childish aspect of the Nineties. (This was the decade of the PlayStation console, when grown men with decent degrees from good universities were suddenly quite happy to advertise their addiction to the adventures of Japanese cartoon characters.)  There was quite a bit of “joy” about, lots of it chemical — but, despite what the press release claims, there weren’t any “joyful queer club nights”. Back then, “queer” was just an insult which ignorant people threw at gay people, before it became a description which boring people used to make themselves feel interesting.

This was not a self-serious decade, with the ubiquitous “smiley” face gracing the raves where hugging many seemed more pleasant than sex with one. The presence of that consummate performer Tony “Things Can Only Get Better” Blair as prime minister — winning the first of three elections in 1997, bringing an end to 18 years of Tory rule — rubbed this in. This was never clearer than when, at a No. 10 reception for “the talent”, Blair allegedly joked about cocaine with Noel Gallagher. Oasis manager Alan McGee had bunged Labour £50,000, a lot back then, and said, “If I can get a million kids to vote Labour because Noel and Liam have endorsed them then I’ve done my bit”. But things weren’t all lollipops and roses (or cigarettes and booze) for long, with McGee soon grumbling that “if things don’t improve they won’t be getting my money next time”. The fashion designer Wayne Hemingway was equally snarky. “There is a very grave danger,” he said, “that by simply inviting a few (mostly naff) pop stars and comedians to drinkies at No 10, the very people Blair is trying to impress will be turned off.”

It’s never clever, then, to mix the serious with the silly, and that’s what this exhibition seems likely to do. No, the real glory of the Nineties was that there seemed a (now) extraordinary degree of freedom to do and say what one wanted to. State scolding had not become a permanent thing; weather forecasters’ warnings never got more presumptuous than a what-are-you-like snicker of “don’t forget your brolly!” We were not urged to “stay hydrated!” as though the daily commute was a trek across the Sahara, nor taught that a good summer was a harbinger of Armageddon. (The nearest we got to that was Worms Armageddon, a 1999 video game.)

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The magazine I co-founded in 1991, The Modern Review (now available to read, mostly for free, on Substack) reflected this; it’s no accident that its editor Toby Young would go on to found the Free Speech Union. Whenever youngsters today are polled about what decade would have been the best to be young in, the Nineties always score high. That’s often associated with freedom from social media, but I think generally also means freedom from thought-policing, even when they’re doing it themselves.

I suppose that even the most self-celebratory of decades looks back in languor at the past and picks out bits and pieces of it. Think of the ultra-modern Beatles, at the height of their Sixties fame, dressed up in their First World War bandsman costumes, or the old-time icons who make up the Lonely Hearts Club Band. But has a young generation ever looked back so hungrily? Jeremy Vine’s daughter got a Smiths lyric tattooed on her arm to celebrate her 18th birthday, with her dad getting the other half: “For there are brighter sides to life/ And I should know because I’ve seen them, but not very often”. Going on to enjoy an excellent solo career in the Nineties — in 1992, he sold out the Hollywood Bowl in 23 minutes, breaking The Beatles’ record — Morrissey is now one of the bold legions of the shunned and canceled, for saying things that must not be said lest some wet-wipe has the ab-dabs.

I know, of course, that it’s a mistake to say of decades that this was that and that was the other. I remember my fashion friends claiming the Eighties were all about consumerism, while the Nineties were going to be all about thoughtfulness: and that was before the Eighties had even finished. They said this without particular evidence, and for no other reason than that was what they thought should happen when a decade changed. All the same, if I was forced to, I’d say there really was a difference between the Nineties and today. Back then, we were treated as adults yet felt free to behave like children. Now, we are treated like children and feel ground down with the sorrows of adulthood. But there are brighter sides to life — and I should know, because I’ve seen them, and in better places than the walls of an art gallery.

Despite Starmer’s insistence at Labour conference that “the politics of hope is ours”, the pervading mood was one of trepidation. During his speech, he emphasised the hard times ahead, defensively dismissing protest as “mere glitter on a shirt”, in a sly reference to a stage invader who last year lobbed sparkles at him during the same event. But might that glittery shirt represent some of the dash, some of the razzle-dazzle, that Starmer’s government and the nation at large so sorely lack?

Earlier this month, a “trends specialist” for TikTok described “an explosion of British pop culture on the global stage”. Sparked by the success of Charli XCX, the Oasis reunion and the popularity of B&M-frequenting microinfluencers, Britishcore is an improbable international fetish for comfortable mediocrity, an opportunity for the terminally online to cleave to a vanishing sense of community through grunting about the dwindling size of Freddos. And there is an in-built sense of nostalgia, of reassurance in joking about the same bands, biscuits and television shows — Balamory is another New Labour-era revenant — that were around during a time of genuine prosperity and hope.

The critical trigger of Britishcore was Brat, Charli XCX’s year-defining hyperpop album, which did away with the aspirational, romantic affectations of American pop (see Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter) in favour of sulkily Estuary-accented lyrics about “sweat marks on my clothes”. The UK charts have long loved grit — Mike Skinner was on about “sex, drugs and on the dole” 22 years ago — but now American influencers, from the land of gloss and polish, want a slice of the stale Victoria sponge. Unlikely as it seems, Yanks are yearning for the Morrison’s salad bar, the delights of Home Bargains and the opportunity to wear the shirt of an underperforming provincial football team. It should be considered depressing that the cultural thrust of our hobbled kingdom is now relying on exporting ironic “icons” of shitness; if all we can offer is steak bakes and songs about chlamydia, let the tanks roll in.

If Britishcore rests on a principle of charming shitness — the vibe equivalent of a cheese-and-pineapple hedgehog at a children’s birthday party — then our politics at least has one of those qualities down pat. Shunning the cheeriness of freshly minted New Labour, Starmer and his Cabinet have spent their first months in power driving home the message that we are approaching an abyss. We’re told that every pillar of the state — policing, prisons, healthcare, education — is in terrible disrepair. Instead of signalling optimism and soft power, the message of Britishcore and its contingent Labour government is misery; a nation in unstoppable decline.

​​A case in point: this year’s Labour Party conference was infected by a glum keep-cautious-and-carry-on attitude, with both Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves using their speeches to emphasise the “broken” state of the country. Rayner’s opening speech was the clearest indication yet that this was no 1997: rather than centring on a hopeful vision of the future, it bitterly clung to Conservative crimes with dig after dig at “the lies, division, scapegoating, and the unfunded tax cuts”.

But most telling of all were Rayner’s “jokes”, prompting ripples of forced laughter. They included, most memorably, a jab at Kemi Badenoch for falling foul of the actor David Tennant over gender legislation, a gag which I am willing to assume was written by a large-language model trained on insipid BBC-core jokes: “It was bad enough when they wanted to deal with Farage. Now she’s doing side deals with the Daleks.”

Meanwhile, at the Reform UK conference in Birmingham, not even a frisson of fascism was enough to lift the mood: Ann Widdecombe, another Nineties throwback, launched into a diatribe about setting up heavily euphemistic “secure reception centres” for migrants. Elsewhere, Ant Middleton, SAS: Who Dares Wins hardman and convicted policeman-batterer, warned of (threatened?) “civil unrest” if the British identity continues to be “trampled all over”.

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On every side of the spectrum, the message seems to be the same: this is going to hurt. This is probably why the tide is now turning on Britishcore. There was a collective yak last week at the Guardian’s 100 examples of naff “Britishness”, suggesting that the Dave channel vision of “witty banter” has finally been recognised for the cringe onanism it is.

And yet, as a cultural moment, Britishcore deserves more than just ridicule. It should be seen as an attempt to gather around something at a time of unprecedented disunity, following a summer that grumbled along with thwarted footballing glories and finally boiled over with racist riots. The Radio X-ification of pub patter shows that, in an era of division and decline, we yearn for a simple and unthreatening vision of nationhood — one in which mimicking catchphrases from Eastenders or repeating viral X Factor auditions is a sufficient stand-in for wit or identity. At a time when the Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick is trying to start an attention-seeking culture war by claiming that unchecked migration is putting the “very idea of England at risk”, simultaneous online discourses around national identity — at least, British identity — seem to want us to believe that it’s all just about misery and chips.

Of course, we cannot be expected, as a nation, to unite around agreement over the correct strength of tea. But the babble of UK-banter discourse on social media  shows that there is still an impulse to commune over collective identity. The question for the future will be what that identity is going to look like. For now, we must watch spectres of the Nineties return, zombified, to the national conversation — the same jokes, the same bands, even some of the same MPs, but none of that critical sense of hope or humour. Turning this around will be Starmer’s great challenge.

While Blur may be doing better in their home country — they sold out Wembley last year — to most of my generation, they are essentially a sad nostalgia act. Rarely have a band’s glory days been so inseparably tied to such a derided historical moment: the “Britpop” movement and its demographic derivative “Britpopper” now represent an abyss of cringe. 

For Britpop was co-opted by that generation of British late-boomers who parlayed the end of history, their demographic glut and unique economic fortune into a series of foolhardy political conceits. Long before he invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, Tony Blair was having meetings with Damon Albarn in the Palace of Westminster. Soon enough the former lead singer of Ugly Rumours was saying things like: “Rock’n’roll is not just an important part of our culture, it’s an important part of our way of life”. Unfortunately, the heady cultural and intellectual optimism of that period can’t be seen as anything but complacency now.

As we see it, this lot valorised the liberalism that bore fruits for them, and sat on their hands as it rotted away. They fashioned a social-democratic aesthetic, and then forgot to build the social democracy. And they are consequently held responsible for a grab-bag of important and trivial mis-steps: New Labour, the Iraq War, the Olympic opening ceremony, the People’s Vote campaign and The Rest is Politics. This folk history of the Nineties does have a seductive simplicity, useful for young gadflies on Left and Right to caricature the decade, a way of chronologically tethering their competing attacks on Blairism. And it’s helped along by the fact that politics and culture did seem to align in that moment.

And yet, while Britpop certainly was gleeful at the prospect of political change, it also knew full well the problems it was running away from. Blur’s Parklife in particular, which celebrates its 30th birthday today and which was inescapable in that summer of 1994, is striking for how much of the Nineties mood it managed to get right at the time. Rather than a straightforward celebration, it sounds, now, like a melancholic critique of the period to which it also served as soundtrack, a record of the atomisation and anxiety that had already begun to seep into society. 

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Its reputation for care-free Cockney smugness is a product of the popularity of its title track — and Blur did occasionally over-indulge the musical style which Gallagher brothers called “Chas & Dave chimney sweep music”. But the rest of the tracks conjure a completely different mood: “Badhead”, “To the End”, “This is a Low” and “End of a Century”… So much of Albarn’s song-writing was drawing from a well of existential despair, his lonely characters drinking too much and cycling through American TV channels, stuck in apathetic or crumbling relationships. Already he was diagnosing the boredom and stasis we sometimes think particular to 21st-century life. And it is telling that he suffered from crippling panic attacks in the weeks immediately after Parklife’s release, bowled over by the force of getting everything he’d always wanted.

But these tracks are overshadowed by a grander project: Parklife’s nauseous portrait of modern life, a social diagnosis that Albarn and his cheerleaders went as far as to label a “manifesto” for modern England. Interviews from the time reveal his narrative of the recent past to be full of decline and decay. Post-Thatcher, “a whole new culture developed and old England died away… The American shopping malls landed in England, first in Essex. It was just awful to look at, like a spreading cancer…” And his songs are the stories of “​​characters living in this environment” and yearning to escape it — like Tracy Jacks, the civil servant who dreams of streaking on Walton Beach. Albarn called it “music for whistling in the dark”.  

The influence of Martin Amis’s London Fields has often been noted — not least by Albarn himself, who at the time painted himself as something of a Lad-lit troubadour. And he certainly inherits Amis’s scathing condescension, and his propensity for turning flesh and blood into a comedy cartoon. The album’s biggest hit, “Girls & Boys”, was written after a holiday to Magaluf, during which Albarn witnessed the emergence of Houellebecqian sexual scene, which clearly perturbed even if it did not offend. “There’s a very strong sexuality about it. I just love the whole idea of it, to be honest. I love herds. All these blokes and all these girls meeting at the watering hole and then just… copulating. There’s no morality involved, I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen. My mind’s just getting more dirty.”

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Albarn’s exact class relationship to this milieu was fiercely contested, especially by more true-born working-class peers. Initially, he had talked up Parklife as a concept album — “the travels of the mystical lager-eater”, a spin on Amis’s cast of low-life flaneurs. And at various stages the album was to be titled London, Sport or Soft Porn. But, soon after release, Albarn seemed determined to actually become such a figure. He held the album’s launch party at Walthamstow Dog Track (“you get the ooze of life there”, he said). And he was soon saying things like, “I started out reading Nabokov and now I’m into football, dog-racing and Essex girls,” as comfortable in an East End boozer as he was in the student union. The reality was that Albarn was always a lower-middle bohemian, not a working-class hero. He was accompanied on his fact-finding trips to Magaluf by his St Paul’s alumna girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. And his life in Essex was characterised not by dog-racing but by art school and the kind of cultured, post-Sixties homestead where he called his parents by their first names.

These contradictions of Albarn’s perspective — that of the mordant satirist-voyeur and the enthusiastic participant — do work in his favour. They lend his songs a scope that allow him to capture both ends of the Nineties. This reaches a climax on Parklife’s masterpiece, “This is a Low”. Framed through a cycle of lyrics based around Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast, the song is something of a mournful state-of-the-nation ballad. But its background account of a forgotten traveller on some twilit homeward journey (“Hit traffic on the Dogger bank/Up the Thames to find a taxi rank”) lend it a more wretched and introspective mood.

This isn’t triumphant Cool Britannia. It’s about as far from “Things Can Only Get Better”, or indeed Coachella bubble-gum, as you’re going to get, not least because it predates Britpop’s co-option by an expedient Labour Party and greedy A&R. But if we can accept that Albarn was capable of seeing behind the Nineties’ veil, perhaps we can also begin to reinterpret my generation’s received narrative of the decade. 

Rather than a last party busted by Columbine or September 11, for some the Nineties was the decade that parts of popular culture became aware of the sheer flatness of life after the great political battles of the Eighties. Part of this related to globalisation — and the music hall carry-on of Blur’s aesthetic universe was a conscious rebuttal of the creeping Americanisation they observed around them. But it also related to a distinct historical moment in Britain itself. 

Like Blair, Britpop had an ambiguous relationship with the Thatcher era that preceded it. Its subject matter — its commodity — was Thatcherism’s devastation. From their own corner of the wasteland, Blur, Pulp and Suede wrote about what they saw: lonely suburbs, remorseless yuppies and small-town drug abuse. Oasis, the most musically populist of the Britpop elite, admittedly traded in the headless euphoria of escape and renewal. But this only resonated because it was a dream, a dole-queue fantasy, that so many others could recognise. And yet, Britpop was ultimately to be consumed by the very forces that set it in motion. The first truly commercialised indie scene, they pursued popularity and market share without shame, allowing punk-ish taboos about “selling out” slide. “We were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our arses and did it for ourselves,” says Noel Gallagher, sounding every inch the barrow boy who “got on his bike”. 

Perhaps that’s why the Nineties generation is so easy to resent. They bore witness to the arrival of the society that we still live in, but were either powerless to change it, or more than happy to swim with the tide. The music, though, stands as testament to the fact that the contradictions of the decade were being registered on some level. The Britpoppers may have quickly become consumed by illusions of the new millennium, some of them embarrassingly to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that some of them also gave voice to a world that had lost something — something which is still missing now. 

But that was 30 years ago. As a relaunch is prepared, the publicity makes it sound more Women’s Weekly than Fear and Loathing. Apparently the all-new online loaded will “give members an edge, helping them live their best lives, keeping them connected to interesting stuff, fun people and awesome experiences”.

Back in the heady mid-Nineties, no one connected to loaded would have been seen dead trying to live his best life — not unless that life involved hijacking a passing army tank under the influence of class As. In fact, antics at the magazine would have been too ludicrous even for Raoul Duke. One regular correspondent would roll dice to determine what self-destructive act to commit next, and then to write about. Actions of his while on the payroll included buying and consuming five speedballs from a “filthy bloke in a filthy pub in Hastings” and cruising for gay sex, all because the dice told him to.

Another writer related how, in search of a story, he had “streaked at a women’s football match, been blown up in a car, set on fire by stuntmen and starred as a circus knife-thrower’s assistant”. Elsewhere, the same bloke described how a “top-heavy blonde” called Moira once performed a consensual sex act on him as he reported on an orgiastic Scottish Association of Young Farmers disco in Perth Town Hall. (A spokeswoman for the association later pronounced herself happy with the piece, noting  — with no pun presumably intended — that the public image of young farmers “used to be all tractors, wellies and checked shirts”, and that she was “pleased” that the article “has blown this out the water”.)

Perhaps needless to say, feminists absolutely hated loaded at the time. Their still-canonical history of the title says that, once upon a time, there was a backlash against the progressive gains made for women in the Seventies and Eighties. The dashing young blade of the Nineties was fed up with being expected to be a sensitive “new man”, and was looking for an outlet for his aggression, stupidity, misogyny, and lust. Along came loaded to fill the niche, its virulent sexism barely suppressed under a clever veneer of jokes and approachable blokeyness. The lads’ mag was born, along with its concomitant social construction, the “new lad”; and from then on, it was a race to the bottom, both metaphorically and literally.

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In the decade that followed, the market became flooded with improbably pneumatic babes in g-strings talking about how much they did or did not actually enjoy sex on the beach. Rival titles FHM, Maxim, Zoo, and Nuts took a cue from loaded and grabbed their own handfuls of silicon-enhanced flesh. Pithily summarising what was assumed to go on in the brain of the average male reader, industry insiders variously described the emerging business model in the 2000s as “birds not words” and “tits and lists”. Having ushered in this brave new era of woman-hating, loaded eventually threw off its ironic fake moustache and became the visual fleshpit it had secretly longed to be all along, occasionally interspersing images of naked women in patent leather handcuffs with football banter or aspirational stories of Mexican drug cartels.

Eventually third-wave feminists arrived, accusing lads’ mags en masse of fuelling violence against women. In 2013, they managed to get the magazine sold by some retailers in “modesty sleeves” on the top shelf. An incoming editor promised under pressure that there would be no more nipples; and since the copy had only ever been the pretext for soft-porn consumption, already dwindling sales slowed to a trickle. By then, more hardcore stuff online was all the rage anyway. The gateway drug of the lads’ mag had served its sinister purpose.

Or so the well-known story goes. Recently though, there are signs of a thawing in progressive attitudes towards loaded in particular, as commentators look back with something like nostalgia for the title’s comparative moderation, cleverness, and wit in its early years, relative to the humourless internet depravity we see now. This month, the Guardian of all things did a largely affectionate piece on “the legacy of lads’ mags”, with Nineties loaded featuring heavily, and described by former female employees as a “brilliantly supportive environment” and “mind-blowingly fun”.

Much tends to be made of the quality of the writing at that point, before it later went tits up, quite literally. One enthusiastic blogger describes it as “swashbuckling, provocative, exciting writing … aimed at men, but not in a patronising, lowest common denominator way”.  (Inspired by loaded, he also describes himself as having gone on “to create the gonzo school of property journalism during my time at Estates Gazette”.) A defiant Brown, meanwhile, stresses that for the first few years, it was mostly male stars on his covers and not half-naked females: “We could sell a third of a million copies with Harry Hill sitting on a stuffed badger.”

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The main appeal of early loaded, viewed retrospectively, was its construction of masculinity — at least, in comparison with some of the awful options we see now. For a good while, for instance, we have been stuck with the wheyfaced, ponderously self-regarding backlash to the new lad — the new new man — whose current iteration lectures women about what a woman is, organises teetotal vegan supper clubs in Hackney, and possesses a moustache like that of a zookeeper. Faced with this horror, was the Nineties loaded lad so very awful? You wouldn’t catch him waffling on about the importance of intimacy or the prioritisation of self-care — all his anecdotes involved being lost for five days after a bender on the way to Malaga airport.

A different contemporary totem of masculinity is the Andrew Tate type, and again here, in comparison with Tate’s bombast and prickish posturing, the Nineties loaded lad looks preferable. There was an emotional vulnerability about him that was under-appreciated at the time. He admitted when he was frightened, made jokes at his own expense, and presented himself as a sometimes unwitting and confused passenger in his own life. And he also could see the funny side of failure.

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Despite or even because of the smutty winks, references to bashing one out after failing to chat up a bird, and so on, arguably the magazine bestowed a lightness and fun upon sex talk that has gone from the public domain, possibly forever. What pop star these days could say in an interview, as Damon Albarn did in 1994 just after the release of Blur’s Parklife, that his favourite sexual position was “the French Maid” — involving “for the benefit of the uninitiated, a fair bit of bending down and picking up imaginary feather dusters”?

Irreverent jokes and banter are what both pious and macho male types tend to lack. And contrary to the original feminist analysis, the use of humour, irony, and silliness in early loaded was not there in order to cunningly disguise darker violence and misogyny; it was a sign that such forces were mostly absent. Mockery of the opposite sex is not toxic in itself. In fact, it was only after the writing stopped being funny that things got really ugly, and that’s not a coincidence.

In getting rid of the Nineties loaded lad, we did not get anything much better in his place. The arc of masculinity, it turns out, does not always bend towards justice. Instead, the pendulum swings erratically; or if you prefer, what we end up with is determined by a roll of the dice. If the new editors of the revamp have real ambition, they’ll try to load the dice by hiring bright young things fed up of current masculine archetypes, giving them freedom to be outrageously rude and anarchic in creating something new. But — a bit like Moira of Scottish Young Farmers fame, perhaps — I won’t be holding my breath.

In this, she represents an entire generation’s penchant for repudiating the culture that shaped it. Nostalgia is resentment-tinged among millennials, for whom being downtrodden and disenfranchised has become something of a permanent calling card. Five years ago, it was a truth universally acknowledged that we would be the first cohort to do worse economically than our parents. Crushed by unmanageable college debt, unable to buy houses or start families, and burned out by the endless demands of side hustling, millennials were surely the unluckiest generation.

The only problem with this universally-acknowledged truth is that, actually, it’s not true: a fact that’s become inescapable this year. “Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically,” wrote Jean Twenge in The Atlantic in April. “Since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breath-taking financial comeback.” The data backs this up: although the wealth gap between rich and poor persists within the millennial generation, and the housing market makes home ownership slightly more challenging than it used to be, all the catastrophising seems to have been premature. Millennials are doing fine.

And yet, their image as uniquely put-upon has proved persistent — especially among millennials themselves. Once you’ve entrenched a generational narrative, people will continue to identify with it, irrespective of how things may have evolved. For the same reason that the children of the Sixties styled themselves as anti-establishment hippies from the comfort of their corporate offices, millennials have struggled to let go of the sense that there’s something uniquely difficult about their lives — even as they cruise comfortably into middle age, buying homes, having kids, accumulating assets. But if we’re doing well by every available metric, how can we explain the fact that we feel like such losers?

Enter the successor ideology to the debunked myth of the Left-Behind Millennial: the retrospective problematising of the Nineties. This oeuvre of cultural criticism, devoted to uncovering the evil subtext in every entertainment property produced before 2005, makes a certain kind of sense if you understand it as a coping mechanism for a generation that views their adult lives with not just disappointment but a sense of betrayal. The expectations we internalised — that the world was our oyster, that we would have it all — and which reality has so cruelly failed to meet, were the products of a Nineties paradigm in which millennials were not just avid consumers but guilty participants, victims and perpetrators alike.

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Hence why, where other generations dabble in more straightforward nostalgia for their formative years, millennials have developed an antagonistic relationship with them, rewriting and reframing it like a therapy patient searching out the hidden darkness in a seemingly happy childhood. (That this has happened in tandem with the widespread creep of therapy-speak into everyday life is surely not a coincidence.) Actually, your parents’ loving marriage was a sham; actually, your fun-loving father was an alcoholic man-child; and actually, Friends was a cesspit of racist sexist heteronormative bigotry masked as feel-good primetime TV.

The reckoning isn’t solely an American phenomenon: the latest season of The Crown, which opens with Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and doubles as a searing indictment of the tabloid culture of the era, is also a fine example of this sort of meta-commentary. But in the US, exposing the dark underbelly of our youthful obsessions has become a genre unto itself. There’s this year’s memoir boom, in which maligned Nineties icons have spoken their truth in documentaries and bestselling books. Paris Hilton’s memoir of abuse at a boarding school for wayward youth reveals that her “celebutante” antics and baby-voiced bimbo persona were the result of hideous trauma; Britney Spears’s tell-all, The Woman in Me, describes how her apparent career renaissance was actually a puppet show in which she dangled on strings held by a father who managed her life, her finances, her reproductive choices, even the choreography of her Vegas comeback show.

Meanwhile, on HBO, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage discovers a sinister valence to the gleeful raunch culture of the Girls Gone Wild era, featuring interviews with the musicians and media figures who were once its vanguard. Now, middle-aged and chagrined, they shake their heads in lemon-faced disapproval at the provocations of toxic male pop metal icons like Limp Bizkit — but also at themselves, for being complicit. The question hanging in the air is: how did we ever think this was okay?

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And then there’s Monica Lewinsky, who marked the 25th anniversary of the scandal that made her famous with interviews, articles, even a television series — highlighting how her Nineties-era infamy has transformed to become one of the greatest reputational rehabilitations of all time. In 1998, when the story of her affair with then-President Bill Clinton broke, Lewinsky was a Jezebel, a homewrecker, and a punchline to the worst jokes that the slut-shaming culture of the moment could think of. Now, for exactly the same reason, she’s a feminist hero, toast of the Hollywood elite and NYC social pages alike, greeted with a standing ovation when she walks into a room.

But stigma isn’t the only thing Lewinsky has shed: in the old paradigm, a woman in her early twenties who slept with a married man, even a powerful one, was considered an autonomous actor and old enough to know better. In the revised one, she’s not just a victim, but practically a child. Her shame is gone, but so is her agency — and with it, any sense that she may have had a hand in the current shape of her life.

The cultural revisionism that refashions the wanton seductress as a hapless innocent speaks to the interplay of millennial childhood nostalgia with the overwhelming sense that we still aren’t really adults. The same generation that treats grownup responsibilities like bill-paying or doing laundry as a sort of LARP (“adulting”) is also characterised by its insistent and continued interest in childish things. YA fantasy, Funko Pop dolls, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have supplanted the more sophisticated ideas and aesthetics that were once the hallmarks of adult taste. Even the most acclaimed millennial creators tend to be backward-looking, revisiting and reframing childhood favourites rather than writing something new, fresh, complex, grown-up.

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By Mary Harrington

It was the approach to art expressed earlier this year by Greta Gerwig, director of Little Women and Barbie, when she proclaimed that the latter movie was both “doing the thing and subverting the thing” — the thing in question being Barbie’s pink-tinted, stereotypical, sexist tropes. But the bigger thing to accept about Barbie is not just that she’s sexist, but that she’s simple, in the way kids’ stuff tends to be. Where the irony-tinged approach to millennial nostalgia falls short is not in Gerwig’s notion of the thing that is at once done and subverted; it’s in its failure to comprehend that adulthood means putting aside the toys you used to play with, and doing something else.

The fact is, despite all the think pieces, reckoning with the naughtiness of the Nineties ultimately doesn’t change much. Britney Spears, freshly liberated from her conservatorship, may be understood as a victim to be pitied rather than a spectacle to be gawked at — but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re all still gawking. Monica Lewinsky, no matter how sympathetically she is now received in a discourse chagrined by the #MeToo movement, is still only famous for being the owner of a dress covered in Presidential semen. And the videos of women being groped and assaulted at Woodstock ’99, which were aired to such moral indignation in Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage are still… videos of women being groped. All this revisiting and revising does little, except give us an excuse to relive every titillating tabloid scandal, every salacious moment. The former Nineties kids who engage in this mode of cultural critique are like the murderer who gets off on reliving his crime through confession, almost as much as he got off on the killing itself. There’s an almost giddy subtext to the whole thing: we were so bad!

But of course, we’re also better now. We’re obsessed with the same scandals, but for morally superior reasons. This not only absolves us of our complicity in the raunch mischief of yore, but also conveniently align with the sentiments of the upcoming generation, the Zoomers, who are displacing us as society’s youngest adults whether we want to grow up or not. As the meme goes: How do you do, fellow kids? Maybe if we repudiate our own misspent youth enough, the zoomers will let us glom onto theirs? (They’re already wearing all our old clothes anyway.)

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The alternative, wholly unappealing, would be to abandon the protection that permanent adolescence affords — and with it, the central tenet of millennial identity that we have been, and remain, uniquely screwed by circumstance. The self-described “smol bean” who uses “adult” as a verb also maintains a teenager’s belligerent stance toward the world: a conviction that society doesn’t understand you, has left you behind. Millennials may not actually be materially worse off, but our expectations still don’t line up with reality. We still feel disempowered, disenfranchised, and victimised. The problematising of everything Nineties offers a sort of absolution: the expectations-reality gap isn’t our fault, but the fault of a toxic culture.

And as long as we can keep writing bitter think pieces about the heteronormative whiteness of everything we used to love growing up, maybe we don’t actually have to grow up. We don’t have to embrace complexity or develop more sophisticated tastes. We don’t have to confront the uncomfortable limits of victimhood as a safe haven from responsibility — or, for that matter, the uncomfortable truth that Britney’s social media output since winning back her independence raises some serious questions about whether she is in fact equipped to manage her own affairs. Like the therapy patient who returns week after week, year after year, to dwell on the childhood traumas that shaped the man he became, we can linger in this metacritical limbo, virtually forever.

It wasn’t the mercurial, ADHD-fuelled writing style, which somehow still manages to tease a bright narrative line out of the chaos. It wasn’t the harrowing details of the two years the author spent in the notorious Nineties CEDU boarding school system for troubled teens. It’s that the book is trend-buckingly unapologetic. There is no privilege-acknowledging. There is no self-flagellating liberal guilt. There is one trigger warning, but in context it functions more like a titillating anticipatory pause than a chance to avoid upsetting content. After all, what reader of Paris: The Memoir is going to set the book aside just when she’s getting to the juiciest part of her traumatic origin story?

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. It’s got to the point when writers insert privilege disclaimers reflexively, including in contexts where they don’t make sense and aren’t even necessarily true. (“My house burned down and somebody murdered my cat — but as a cis, straight, able-bodied white woman, I’ll never know what it means to really suffer.”) I understand why people do this, of course; if you don’t call out your own privilege, you run the risk of someone far more unhinged and vindictive doing it for you. I just didn’t realise how refreshing it would be for a writer to just… not.

In the few places in the book where the word does appear, it tends to have a very different meaning. In the CEDU facilities where Paris was confined for two years in her teens, it was a “privilege” to contact your family, to wear shoes, to sleep on a bed instead of a bare mattress in the hallway. Said privileges would be revoked for violations of the facility’s rules, which were both so numerous and so intentionally self-contradictory that it was impossible not to break them. In short, the abuse that occurred at these places, which multiple lawsuits have alleged functioned more like private prisons than schools, is nothing short of horrific — residents were forcibly medicated, ritualistically humiliated in group struggle sessions, beaten and sexually assaulted, stripped naked and left in solitary confinement for up to 20 hours at a time. And the teens destined for them were the last to know what was happening: standard intake protocol was for members of the CEDU security team to snatch them out of bed in the middle of the night.

Since 2020, when she first shared this story in the documentary This Is Paris, Hilton has been part of a survivors’ movement that calls for CEDU facilities to be shut down. The sections of her memoir detailing her treatment there read like equal parts exposé and survival thriller. But here, too, the book takes an unexpected turn. Paris Hilton isn’t sorry for her privilege, but she isn’t sorry for herself, either. In a world where so much cultural currency resides in narratives of victimisation and oppression, she chooses again to just… not.

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This is striking, juxtaposed with another recent memoir by a certain individual born into breathtaking wealth and status. Consider Paris’s tone when reflecting on how her time at Provo, Utah’s CEDU facility, left her not only traumatised, but completely lacking the education of a normal person her age:

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialisation, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul.

Now compare it with Prince Harry, bewailing that he’d been cut off financially by his father at the tender age of 34:

Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.

Both passages embody a peculiar type of celebrity: fame was guaranteed long before they did anything attention-worthy in their own right. Both were notoriously troubled teens who responded to the pressures of a privileged upbringing by rebelling, often as publicly and messily as possible, secure in the knowledge that they were too well-protected to be left with nothing. Both, too, experienced genuine trauma in their lives, the pain of which no amount of money could soften.

And yet, if someone had said 10 years ago that only one of these people would ultimately build a multimillion-dollar brand on the foundation of his or her victimhood — and make a spectacle of renouncing his or her famous family while continuing to capitalise on it at every turn — who’d have guessed it would be the Prince?

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Perhaps we might disagree on who has the greater claim to family grievance: the motherless royal who chose to renounce his role in the family, and wound up renounced by them in return; or the heiress whose complicated relationship with the parents who sent her away doesn’t stop her from citing the family name among her list of assets. (It is worth noting here that Harry, though he has made headlines by acknowledging his white male privilege, always somehow seems to avoid mentioning the part where being born royal and astronomically wealthy was surely a greater advantage. He also has the word “PRINCE” emblazoned on its cover in an exceptionally large font.) But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

The difference in their attitudes, meanwhile, is vast. After returning to her parents’ home from the lockdown facility, a 19-year-old Paris stays up at night, unable to sleep in the room from which she was abducted at the age of 16, listing “ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modelling contacts, and experience on the runway — none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard”. Harry, a married father in his thirties, also stays up at night — raging at the injustice of having to navigate the adult world, for which he is woefully unprepared in a way that neither the press nor his family seem to appreciate. He laments having been cruelly robbed, by his royal upbringing, of formative experiences such as carrying cash, riding the subway, or (yes, really) receiving boxes from Amazon: “After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?”

The two approaches make for a study in what each author evidently perceives as his or her most winning public relations strategy. Harry’s brand is a sob story, wrapped in a privilege acknowledgment, stuffed into Oprah’s mailbox. He is undiscerning in the details he shares. Paris’s is a more carefully choreographed airing of dirty laundry, offering front-row seats for the press. Unlike Harry, Paris is under no illusions as to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between herself and the media. They exploit her, but she exploits them, too, often beating them at their own game. As harrowing as the boarding school stories are, the more radical — and revealing — part of this memoir is the frankness with which she describes a lifetime of living in front of the cameras, for better and for worse.

Her humanity, the real person behind the public figure, comes through in unexpected flashes, as when she describes putting her own body between a mini-dress-wearing Britney Spears and the hovering paparazzi as the pop star climbed into a car, shielding her in the vulnerable moment when a photographer might have captured an upskirt shot. But what also comes through is how savvy Hilton has always been about how much she controls the narrative when it comes to her family’s public face — how much she is its public face.

When her parents come to visit her at the Provo boarding school just a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, she hisses a promise in her father’s ear: if he makes her stay at the facility until she’s reached legal adulthood, her first stop after they let her out will be the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where she’ll tell the press exactly what they’ve been doing to her — what her parents paid them to do. After years of refusing to believe their daughter when she said she was being abused at Provo, what does it say about the Hiltons that this was the one utterance they took seriously? (Paris was released shortly thereafter.) And what does it say about Paris that, despite her threat — and despite the obvious cachet of having been so sensationally mistreated — it took decades before she made this story public?

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I came of age at the same time as Paris Hilton — she is almost exactly one year older than me — and it’s tempting, having read this memoir, to indulge in a little self-flagellation of my own. I remember laughing along with everyone else when Sarah Silverman, at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, joked with gleeful malice about Hilton’s upcoming stint in jail. I remember rolling my eyes at The Simple Life, the reality TV show that featured Paris and Nicole Richie struggling their way through menial, low-paying jobs as janitors, farmhands, camp counsellors. Of course, there was no way of knowing at the time how much of The Simple Life was pure performance (apart from the strip searches and struggle sessions, Provo’s preferred method of character-building was to make the residents haul rocks), or that Paris’s widely-mocked breakdown over being sentenced to jail stemmed from genuine PTSD. But the mix of sneering contempt and total incuriosity with which she was treated: that was a choice.

It seems incredible that the media hasn’t jumped at the chance to recontextualise what they did to Paris Hilton in the same way that they’ve done with Britney Spears — which is to say, to shamelessly march out all their most exploitative coverage for a documentary re-airing, under the nearly transparent pretence of repenting for their sins. And yet, the response to Paris’s latest offering has been, at best, only marginally less sneering than usual.

Maybe it’s because there never was a meltdown, or a breakdown, or a tearful sit down with Oprah that made Paris seem like a person it was possible to feel sorry for. Or maybe it’s just the same old cynicism: who is to say that this isn’t just another example of Hilton’s uncanny capacity for controlling the narrative, even as she appears to be making herself vulnerable? If a person is both incredibly calculating and also incredibly honest about it, does that make her more trustworthy, or less? When she forgives her parents for sending her away, is it because she really forgives them? Or has she simply concluded — as Prince Harry must have when he decided to christen his daughter a Princess — that her family is a greater asset to her than renouncing all its privileges could ever be?

Liam Gallagher recently headlined Knebworth twice, with more than half his set devoted to Oasis songs. There are new books about the period, too: Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That, an oral history by former GQ editor Dylan Jones, and Verse, Chorus, Monster, a memoir from Blur’s Graham Coxon. It’s slightly insulting to lump these artists together as Britpop when it was just a three or four-year slice of their careers, but it was the slice that made everything else possible.

Why can’t we let Britpop go? It certainly helps that the generation currently running the media grew up with it, and that, unlike the extraordinarily unfortunate grunge scene, all the key players are still with us. Aside from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann (whose influence is audible in this year’s sardonic indie sensations Wet Leg), they are all still making music. The best songs endure. Beyond the music, it is a great yarn, with a tight-knit cast of characters and a full menu of drama: sex, drugs, money, hubris, vengeance and bitter rivalry.

Britpop is usually remembered as the musical component of a time when British culture was exploding with energy and optimism: in art, fashion, cinema, football, comedy, television, magazines, literature and politics. But the scene itself was full of rancour, gleefully stoked by the music weeklies. Oasis famously set themselves against Blur but so did Pulp and Suede. “It felt like whenever a new English guitar-based band arrived on the scene, the press would pit Blur against them, even when it wasn’t really appropriate,” Coxon glumly recalls in his book. And thanks to the warring Gallaghers, Oasis also hated Oasis. Music became a contact sport.

Britpop is still worth fighting about. When Blur tickets went on sale, one friend tweeted a savage (and simplistic) assessment by Suede’s Brett Anderson: a band “who waved flags and dropped their aitches and painted a social tourist’s cartoon of British life: patronising, jingoistic and crass”. This opinion wasn’t expressed in the NME in the heat of 1994; it appeared in Anderson’s 2019 memoir Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn. Old feuds die hard. People still argue about who was the best band. They argue about whether Britpop was guilty of legitimising flag-waving and misogyny. They even argue about Oasis’s grand folly, Be Here Now, which many fans like rather more than Noel Gallagher does. Most of all, they argue about whether it deserves to loom so large, then and now. Was it really so special?

Britpop was an idea and an attitude rather than a genre, and it was born out of confrontation. The milestone April 1993 issue of Select magazine (“Yanks go home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs and the Battle for Britain”) was a tongue-in-cheek riposte to sullen post-Nirvana rock and American cultural imperialism in general, against which it championed homegrown “glamour, wit and irony”. The Young British Artists had a similar sense of outsider ambition, greeting the post-Thatcher, post-Cold War Nineties with a determination to come roaring out of the sidelines and rewrite mainstream culture.

“Like it or not, we were Thatcher’s children,” Steve McQueen says in Faster Than a Cannonball. “When you realise there’s no safety net… people just tried to get on with it.” For the most part, these were not children of privilege (Blur’s Damon Albarn, the son of a university lecturer from Essex, somehow became the “posh” one) and they were reaching out to take what they had been denied. In Daniel Rachel’s oral history Don’t Look Back in Anger, radio DJ Steve Lamacq recalls his thoughts when playing Pulp’s 1995 hit Common People: “This is our victory; we’ve come from nothing and we’ve won.”

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Right from the start, though, there were sceptics. “One of Suede’s many achievements,” responded Keith Cameron in NME that same month, “has been to inspire some of the most outrageous examples of self-aggrandising tommyrot the British music press has ever seen fit to print… This is a small country, bedevilled with delusions of grandeur — not least of which that we invented pop music.” Suede and Pulp both hated the Union flag on the Select cover. Everybody hated the word Britpop, which didn’t actually appear in Select but soon became ubiquitous. “Nobody liked it,” Frischmann once said. “We knew it was trouble.”

This early definition of Britpop was a spiky, arty affair. “I was thinking of Philip Larkin not Phil Daniels,” Stuart Maconie, who wrote the lead essay in Select, told me a few years ago. “It was bedsits and being on the dole: a sort of pasty-faced underdog strangeness.” But that eccentricity did not survive the million-selling success of Parklife and Definitely Maybe in 1994, two albums which collapsed the wall between indie-rock and mainstream pop. The new generation in charge of Radio 1, Top of the Pops and tabloid showbiz columns was as keen as the weeklies to cheerlead the new breed, and that rolled into a bigger narrative (embarrassing in hindsight) about the branding exercise known as Cool Britannia.

In rejecting the political earnestness and low commercial horizons of alternative culture in the Eighties, Britpop overcorrected. The music industry and media, more than the bands themselves, became obsessed with size and success, to the detriment of many careers. When outsiders become insiders, values change and the initial blast of subversion fades into assimilation. The same story played out simultaneously across British culture. Chris Evans, Loaded and the Spice Girls have become looped into the Britpop story while the Manic Street Preachers, Tricky and Radiohead have not.

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As a synecdoche for Britain in the Nineties, Britpop’s reputation rises and falls with that of the decade in general. When, in 2003, John Harris published The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, a tale gradually swamped by cocaine, heroin, depression and disappointment, he struck an elegiac note: “Britpop is as uncool as could be imagined.” Britpop’s key bands broke up or lost momentum in tandem with the decline of New Labour and the YBAs, and they were all bundled together into a metaphor for squandered promise, arrogance, excess, conformity and apolitical escapism: what were we thinking? Britpop was also blamed for hogging the narrative and occluding other developments in British music, such as trip hop and drum’n’bass, which were more futuristic, more anxious, and less white. Come 2016, when the roots of Right-wing populism were traced back to Nineties Third-Way complacency, some people even blamed Britpop for Brexit — an absurd idea but a briefly popular one.

I sometimes feel like Britpop has to be either the best or worst thing that ever happened. The generation that grew up with simplistic received wisdom about the Sixties and punk rock has lived long enough to see its own youth culture reduced to a cartoon. That’s karma, I suppose. But Britpop had an unfortunate talent for self-caricature, producing images that did it no favours: Noel Gallagher at Number 10; Jarvis Cocker waggling his bum at Michael Jackson; the gruesome video for Blur’s “Country House”, directed by Damien Hirst in the style of Loaded. Such tabloid moments enabled Brett Anderson to dismiss Britpop as a “cheap, beery, graceless cartoon bereft of passion or rage which cravenly hid feeling behind a brittle mask of irony”.

Needless to say, the music was more complicated than that. “Common People”, for example, is neither jaunty social comedy nor a straightforward anthem of working-class pride but a mounting howl of rage and panic from someone who feels himself to be stranded between classes. Parklife’s studies of British life are satirical or elegiac rather than affirming, and the ghastly sitcom oom-pah of “Country House” has that ghostly cry for help in the middle eight. And even Oasis’s give-me-everything confidence was laced with apprehensions of loss: “Slide Away”, “Fade Away”, “Half a World Away”. Perhaps the only example of undiluted youthful vim is “Alright” by Supergrass. But narrative beats close listening every time. “I was singing out my slightly dystopian vision of the future, of the country, and everyone was going, ‘This is brilliant! It’s great!’,” Damon Albarn says in Don’t Look Back in Anger. “It became a nightmare. I suffered profound anxiety for years after as a result.”

These musicians were also more curious than they were given credit for. “Ultimately, Britpop was a reaction against new ideas; it was against rave, hip hop and R&B, wrapped in a Beatles/Stones comfort blanket,” alleges Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. But Noel Gallagher, a former Hacienda clubber, made records with the Chemical Brothers and Goldie, remixes abounded, and it’s hard to find a British musician less parochial than Albarn, from Gorillaz to Africa Express.

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I always feel drawn to these wrinkles in the Britpop story but Faster Than a Cannonball leans into the myth with gusto. Whether the choice of interviewees dictates the story or vice versa, it is a robustly anti-revisionist amen to the mid-Nineties. We get rosy memories from those, such as Noel Gallagher and Blur’s Alex James, who had a spectacularly good time but not people like Graham Coxon, who found much of it unbearable. The “Country House” video, he writes in his memoir, “seemed to confirm what I was afraid of — that Nineties culture had become tacky and cheap. For me, the decade wasn’t as golden and beautiful as my idea of the Sixties were like — which, of course, would have been very different to the reality.”

Ah, the Sixties. At first, Britpop seemed to owe far more to the seedy glamour of the Seventies (“it was a bit off, a bit eccentric, a bit wrong”, explained Jarvis Cocker) but Dylan Jones argues that “the Nineties chimed with the Sixties in being a decade that was almost uniquely British”. Blur vs Oasis harked back to the Beatles vs the Stones and Euro ’96 to England ’66. Swinging London characters such as Michael Caine, Ray Davies and John Barry become icons all over again. “London Swings! Again!” shouted Vanity Fair. Driven too hard, the comparison ended up making all the excitement about British culture feel second-hand: an echo of the real thing. “With Austin Powers the decade was already lampooning itself as a kind of shit Sixties,” the usually upbeat Alex James complains in Jones’s book.

Faster Than a Cannonball is too bullishly celebratory for my taste but perhaps it is well-timed. While the 30-year-olds I know are likely to regard Britpop and the Nineties with disdain, the teenagers are enthralled by the last great music scene before the internet was everything. It speaks to the lost centrality of pop music in British life, when it could pull together art, sport, fashion, cinema and even politics. Britain still has great rock bands, fascinating pop stars and thriving scenes but not that same unignorable convergence of all three. We certainly don’t have that sense, overblown and self-congratulatory though it may have been, of national rejuvenation and positive movement. Britannia doesn’t feel very cool right now, does it?  The music industry feels more sombre, too. Now that we are acutely aware of the psychological and financial strains on musicians, perhaps the misleading notion that it was all non-stop fun in the mid-Nineties is more attractive than the messy reality.

So is it any wonder that the myth of Britpop continues to exert such fascination? Even if the hard-earned optimism of the early Nineties soon gave way to boorish triumphalism, the memory of that enviable optimism still appears to burn bright. Faster Than a Cannonball suggests that you had to be there but I wonder if it is, in fact, easier to see that time as simply “golden and beautiful” if you weren’t.

My daughter, who wasn’t born when it came out, can recite every line, including the time-capsule references to Dick Cheney’s heart condition and a disrespectful Moby video. As Eminem gobbled up the detritus of American culture like Pac-Man, many of his jokes were doomed to age badly, but you don’t need to clock the allusions to get a kick out of his mischievous vitality 20 years later.

Eminem was so central to pop culture in 2002 that he could legitimately launch an album with a song about the importance of his return. Nobody inspired more arguments. Rappers had inflamed politicians and the press before, but none had done so with albums that sold 25 million copies a piece.

The furore over Eminem’s first album was large enough to be the central theme of his second, and the fuss around that one fuelled the third. A bridge-builder of sorts, he managed to unite Christian conservatives with feminists and LGBTQ groups. The Sun accused him of promoting “torture, incest, murder, rape and armed robbery”. (Not just rapping about these subjects, by the way — promoting them.) The editor-in-chief of Billboard condemned him for making “money off the world’s misery”. Culture warrior Lynne Cheney told a Senate hearing: “It is truly astonishing to me that a man whose work is so filled with hate would be so honoured by his peers.” Sadly, the line often attributed to George W Bush (“the most dangerous threat to American children since polio”) was a fabrication, but it was sufficiently credible to appear as the epigraph in Anthony Bozza’s bestselling 2003 biography Whatever You Say I Am. At least Eminem’s notoriety predated social media. If Twitter had existed back then, it might have fried his brain beyond repair.

How can rap’s former enfant terrible be turning 50? It wasn’t guaranteed. In 2001, Joan Smith wrote in the Guardian: “Validating his rage, which is what his fans are doing, is hardly going to help someone whose biography suggests he is already some way down the path to self-destruction.” But here is — alive, well and, as of this year, America’s best-selling singles artist of all time.

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Nobody argues about Eminem anymore, which is good for the person but less so for his music. In 2000’s paranoid, semi-sarcastic “The Way I Am”, he declared “I am whatever you say I am,” but now that nobody’s making grand claims about him for good or ill, he seems unsure what he is. After his 2005 singles collection, Curtain Call, he dropped out of sight for four years to wrestle with writer’s block, his grief over his murdered friend Proof and his addiction to prescription drugs. Since returning to music with Relapse in 2009, he has never quite managed to find a convincing second act. The recent Curtain Call II lays bare an ongoing identity crisis as he bounces between throwback provocations, sentimental soft-rock hooks, goofy jokes, lyrical showboating and collaborations with Ed Sheeran and Pink. Some tracks sound great but none has the life-or-death necessity of his early years. “I’m not the person I was at 28,” he told Vulture in 2017. “The passion is still there but the rage mostly isn’t.”

Eminem’s most enjoyable late album is 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a shameless nostalgia trip on which his tongue-twisting virtuosity is not just the medium but the message. When I saw him headline Wembley Stadium around that time, I felt like I was watching an athlete as much an artist. “Rap God” entered the Guinness Book of Records for featuring the most words (1560) in a hit single and included Eminem’s explanation for his initial success: “Simply rage and youthful exuberance/ Everybody loves to root for a nuisance.”

In the same song, he boasts that he’s been having hits “ever since Bill Clinton was still in office”. I’ve read three new histories of the Nineties this year and none of them addresses Eminem in any depth. This is possibly because he debuted at the very end of the decade; but in many ways Marshall Mathers III was a creature of it. Raised in poverty and chaos on the east side of Detroit, he was a teenager during hip hop’s golden age, when microphone technique was paramount. He slogged his way through the independent hip hop scene before finding both his mentor, Dr Dre, and his voice. The whiteness that had been an obstacle (blame Vanilla Ice) became an asset. It enabled him to read as a rock star as well as a rapper, and licensed him to write explicitly about mental health issues. He was closer to Kurt Cobain than Tupac Shakur in that respect, his problems more internal than external. He didn’t deny it. “If I was black I would’ve sold half,” he rapped in “White America”.

The rap battles recreated in his 2002 quasi-autobiopic, 8 Mile, taught Eminem the importance of getting a reaction with every line, and nothing did the job like a bad-taste joke — the more offensive the better. Hence his shock-comic alter ego (or id) Slim Shady. “I’m only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room,” he explained on “The Real Slim Shady”. “The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y’all.” A frequent comparison when he came out with The Slim Shady LP in 1999 was South Park. “Hi kids, do you like violence?” he leered on his debut single, “My Name Is…”, fully anticipating his role as corrupter of the nation’s youth. Shortly afterwards, the question of lyrics and violence, having steadily escalated through moral panics about heavy metal and hip hop, went nuclear with the Columbine High School massacre, as Eminem’s labelmate Marilyn Manson was accused of inspiring the killers.

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Using a technique pioneered by Public Enemy a decade earlier, Eminem performed lyrical judo, turning the backlash to his own advantage. It’s hard to file a case of cultural appropriation against someone who raps, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/ To do black music so selfishly/ And use it to get myself wealthy.” Tough to accuse him of being a bad influence when he has a song called “Role Model”: “Follow me and do exactly what the song says: Smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people and drink.”

Most important, he had “Stan”, an extraordinary feat of in-character storytelling sweetened by a sample of a pre-fame Dido. Here was a song of such undeniable artistry that even the sceptics had to sit up and listen. Giles Foden, the Guardian’s deputy literary editor, compared “Stan” with the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning; Elton John performed it with Eminem at the Grammys. Years later, it gave us a new word for obsessive fandom. “It’s kind of like a message to the fans to let them know that everything I say is not meant to be taken literally,” Eminem explained at the time, with Columbine on his mind.

Two years later, Eminem’s sensitive performance in 8 Mile, with its motivational anthem “Lose Yourself”, made him almost respectable. Anthony Bozza sums up the rapidly changing media narrative: “(1999) Is he a novelty?; (2000) Does he matter; (2001) Should he be stopped?; (2002) How great is he?” He attracted fans as unlikely as Barbra Streisand and Daniel Day-Lewis, who used Eminem records to hype himself up on the set of Gangs of New York. Sean O’Hagan wrote in the Observer: “It is not overstating the case to say that Eminem is as reflective of his time as Bob Dylan was of his; and, in his own way, just as trenchant a social commentator.” Seamus Heaney praised his “subversive attitude” and “verbal energy”.

No artist can ride the zeitgeist for long, nor should any sane person want to, so there’s no shame in Eminem’s career dropping from a boil to a simmer. Time may not have improved him art but it has clarified it. First, his talent is beyond dispute. Even in the heart of the storm he was committed to hard work and craft. He has not inspired many (any?) great white rappers but his technique and emotional rawness are audible in the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator.

Second, it is obvious that controversy was not his motor after all. Unlike the many celebrities who fall from grace when their secrets are revealed, Eminem’s scandal was frontloaded and, despite some legal troubles, mostly stemmed from his lyrics rather than his behaviour. He’s not quite Snoop Dogg, who went from a first-degree murder charge to hosting a cooking show with Martha Stewart, but compared to Marilyn Manson, who faces multiple allegations of sexual abuse, or the endlessly self-detonating Kanye West, he looks remarkably stable and content. When it comes down to it, he simply loves to rap.

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Finally, we know what he believes. You might reasonably see in his early work a harbinger of the white male rage that now fuels the alt-right, including the trollish humour that leaves it strategically unclear whether provocation is an end in itself or a vehicle for genuine malice. In the original song, Stan writes fan letters with what sounds like a pencil and records his final message on a cassette. Now he might easily be shitposting on 8chan and fuming about his latest Twitter suspension. Similarly, “White America”’s vision of a ”fucking army marching in back of me” sounds more sinister than it once did: “So many lives I touched, so much anger aimed/ In no particular direction, just sprays and sprays.” We have a clearer idea now of where that anger can spray.

Nevertheless, I don’t think you can blame Eminem for that, any more than you can pin Brexit on Britpop. Crucially, his rage never included racial animus, and he has never swung to the Right. Having recorded a song attacking George W Bush in 2004, he released an anti-Trump freestyle in 2017 and donated “Lose Yourself” to a campaign ad for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Anyone who’s followed my music knows I’m against bullies — that’s why I hate that fucking bully Trump,” he told Vulture. Eminem outgrew his anger, along with his homophobia and misogyny, rather than nurturing it, and he didn’t get lost in his own black comedy. The listener might not always have known whether he was joking or not but he did, and the joke was usually on him.

In “Without Me”, Eminem presents himself as an obnoxious necessity; a fly in the ointment of early 2000s celebrity culture. “Now this looks like a job for me/ So everybody, just follow me/ ‘Cause we need a little controversy/ ‘Cause it feels so empty without me.” Twenty years on, he’s smart enough to realise that we have more than enough controversy and that that fire doesn’t need stoking. Maybe he became a role model after all.