Hyden - Your favorite band is killing me : what pop music rivalries reveal about the meaning of life

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Who ya got?

Beatles or Stones? Biggie or Tupac? Prince or Michael Jackson? Pearl Jam or Nirvana? Who ya got and why? More important: What does your choice say about you? Enough about youwhat do these endlessly argued-about pop-music rivalries say about us?

The media has long stood accused of creating conflict where it didnt previously exist purely for the sake of manufacturing melodrama. This is undoubtedly true, and I angrily denounce any soulless moron who says otherwise. (See what I just did there?) But what about the battles that music fans create on their own? Im talking about the arguments that take place every day in bars, at parties, and during endless road trips when the radio is broken and the opinions are turned way up.

Some of these debates never seem to die. Was Lynyrd Skynyrd right to go after Neil Young in Sweet Home Alabama? Was Kanye West justified in crashing Taylor Swifts speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards? Was Jimi Hendrix a better guitar player than Eric Clapton? Is Toby Keith a better American than the Dixie Chicks? Who wouldve won a boxing match between Axl Rose and Vince Neil?

Music is not like sportsartists dont have to defeat each other in order to gain supremacy. And yet over the course of the sixty or so years that constitute the modern pop era, we as audience members have consistently pitted vaguely similar (though also discernibly not similar) artists against each other in order to determine whos best.

Im not interested in settling these argumentsbecause I dont think they can be settled and because that wouldnt be any fun. What I am interested in is exploring why music fans are drawn to these dichotomies, how the dynamics of our most heated musical rivalries stem from larger conversations in the culture (then and now), and what we can learn about ourselves by whom we side with.

Also, I want to understand how in the hell anybody couldve thought that Mtley Cre was better than Guns N Roses. (It cant all be blamed on the blizzard of cocaine blowing through 80s Hollywood.)

Lets be real: musical rivalries are never totally about music. Theyre about sympathizing with a particular worldview represented by an artist over a different worldview represented by an opposing artist. You are what you loveand also what you choose not to love. If you pick Hendrix over Clapton, you probably believe that the burnout option for rock stars is ultimately more honorable than the fade away option. (Or maybe you prefer LSD to Michelob.) If you like Pavement more than the Smashing Pumpkins, you likely find corporate-fueled 90s alternative rock to be highly ridiculous. (Or maybe you prefer California to the Midwest.) If you side with Christina (sorry: Xtina) Aguilera over Britney Spears, you may feel that young girls should emulate a seminaked woman who can sing like Etta James over a seminaked woman who can sing like an oversexed ATM. (Or maybe youre prejudiced against cyborgs.)

This might sound like harmless stuff, but our musical shoot-outs frequently turn into full-on civil wars. (If you dont believe me, see what happens when you play Metallicas Black Album for a room full of borderline psychopaths waiting for Megadeth to come onstage.) Musical rivalries dont matter until they matter to you personally. When that happens, its as vital as protecting your own sense of identity.

Its been said that history is the study of wars and electionsthe geography of human dissension, in other words. I think its time that this paradigm is applied to pop-music history. So pick a side, pump up the volume, and lets dive in.

(Oasis vs. Blur)

Around the time I started writing this book, I conducted a radical musical experiment: I listened to a Damon Albarn album from front to back.

I realize this wont seem radical to most people. But trust me: in personal terms, it was nothing less than glasnost. For more than twenty years, I consciously avoided the group that Albarn is most famous for, Blur. I also abstained from another high-profile Albarn project, the so-called virtual band Gorillaz. I definitely did not give another Albarn side projectthe Good, the Bad & the Queenthe time of day, and I suspected that Albarn launched a fourth group, Rocket Juice & the Moon, with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers just to troll me. Sweet JesusDamon Albarn and Flea on the same record? Was Anthony Kiedis busy waxing his chest that day?

Avoiding all that music wasnt easy. How many bands was this guy going to force me to hate? I had to admire Albarns eclecticism, even as I found all the extra spite it produced exhausting.

My resolve to block Damon Albarn out of my life occasionally weakened but never broke. When Albarn wrote the opera Dr Dee in 2011, or when he collaborated with Malian musicians in 2013 and released those sessions on the Maison des Jeunes LP, I was secretly intrigued but publicly rolled my eyes. Finally, for Everyday Robots Albarns first official solo album, released in 2014I demanded change inside my own heart. I roared self-inflicted self-righteousness into the mirror. Tear down this imaginary Albarn-deflecting wall! I declared.

Now, youre probably wondering why I put so much effort into loathing an artist who is probably one of the most accomplished rock musicians of his generation. The reasoning behind my Albarn boycott is predictable and admittedly sort of dumb: Oasis was my favorite Britpop band in high school. And back then, hating Blur, Oasiss biggest rival, was a requirement for true Oasis fans. This perception was due in large part to Oasiss primary songwriter and guitarist, Noel Gallagher, who once publicly declared his wish that Albarn and his Blur bandmate Alex James catch AIDS and die. (Incredibly, I chose to hate the person who didnt say that.) So Ive loathed Damon Albarn for all this time because Ive stubbornly refused to relinquish an opinion I formed when I was seventeen.

What was interesting about Oasis vs. Blur (if you were an American rock fan in the mid-90s) is that the rivalry absolutely did not translate in the States. Oasis was way more famous in AmericaWonderwall was a genuine stateside alterna-era hit and remains a rock radio standard. If the average American knows Blur at all, its for the sports-stadium anthem Song 2, or, as we Yankees refer to it, the woo-hoo song. In Britain, however, it was different. Over there, Blur was more popular, at least for a while.

The animus between the bands originally started in August of 1995 because Blur decided to bump up the release of its single Country House to coincide with the release of Oasiss single Roll with It. This was a direct challenge by a big shot to an upstart: Blur was the biggest band in England at the time, but Oasis was on the rise. It set up a highly publicized, head-to-head war for the top of the British pop charts, which Blur won in the short term (Country House outsold Roll with It by fifty thousand units) but Oasis crushed in the long run (by the following summer, Oasis had played two consecutive nights at Knebworth for more than three hundred thousand people).