Published in Twin City Sound, March 2024
by Anais Collins
Everything comes back. Amid the chaos of the 2020's, everybody seems to be talking about the '90's and '00s - 20 year olds remixing Backstreet Boys tracks, multiple Woodstock '99 documentaries, Dashboard Confessional is touring again.
There's a new band out of Minneapolis I saw last week at the 331 club in Northeast Minneapolis called USPOP that put this together for me. They showed up - a standard guitar band, four dudes with guitars. Something was off, though. USPOP came on with windbreakers and trainers, wearing sunglasses inside, the lead singer starts - he sounds British:
"Good evening - we're USPOP. We're an American Britpop band. We're all Americans. Our accents our fake but our music is real."
Total nonsense. In a world of telecasters in trucker hats singing serious mature songs about existence, it stands out. British shoe-gazers with melodies about who knows what. It's good fun. The first song sounded like an Oasis song, but I couldn't really place it - I went home afterward and I couldn't find it. The next few songs were a mix of Britpop songs I remember and don't remember from the mid-90's.
Back then it seemed like a second British invasion - Oasis and Blur as the new Stones and Beatles. But it ended fast and we all moved on to Emo bands - the second British invasion got trapped on the beach and retreated.
We were left with just five Britpop songs that every American knows: Wonderwall (Oasis), Champagne Supernova (Oasis again), Don't Look Back in Anger (Oasis cubed), Bittersweet Symphony (The Verve) and Song #2 (Blur). For any British person, this is a comically unserious collection.
It doesn't include Oasis' best songs (Live Forever, Supersonic) or Blur's best songs (Parklife, the Universal, Tomorrow). Bittersweet Symphony is actually credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (a sordid story) and it leaves off the first song on any snobbish Britpop list - Pulp's slow building "Common People".
USPOP doesn't care. It's American Britpop. They started with the five Britpop songs Americans know and moved on. That's all American's ever wanted anyway - more Champagne Supernova. Americans don't know "Sunday, Sunday" anyway so why not just write your own. I could sing, "Keep Calm and Caaaaarrrrry On" and "Wintaahhh builds charactaaaaaah" all day just like people do "And afteraaaaaaaaall." Like any great renewal, USPOP's music remembers Britpop better than it ever was.
Nostalgia is always a contradiction. We go back in time for the things we love and forget the bits we don't - it's a false refinement, a revisionist history - ridiculous and perfect. Like American Britpop.