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1996 And The End of History
1996 And The End of History examines the year as it panned out in the UK not just in politics but in music, light entertainment and sport. It was the zenith of a decade which will go down as remarkably untroubled bymodern standards; following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, prior to 9/11, in which political conditions of peace and apparent economic prosperity created an overall mood of frivolity, postmodern anti-seriousness and a desire to get back to sunnier times before the grim onset of the strife-ridden 70's and 80's.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
153 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 13, 2016
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About the author
David Stubbs
16 books38 followersDavid Stubbs is a British journalist and author, covering music, film, TV and sport. He is known for his work on the Maker’s "Talk Talk Talk" column, converting it from a two-page gossip spread into a satirical and surreal take on the rock and pop world and those characters who stalked it, both the heroes and the hapless.
Among his creations were Pepe Le Punk, a Belgian music journalist (author of Hi, I’m Mr Grunge – An Unauthorised Autobiography Of Kurt Cobain); Derek Kent, MM staff writer since 1926, wit, raconteur and pervert, and Diary Of A Manic Street Preachers Fan (who admired the group for their “intense intensitude”); The Nod Corner, the fictional journals of the Fields Of The Nephilim drummer whose scheming bandmates continually got him into hot water with lead singer Carl McCoy, who would administer him the punishment of ten press-ups. The likes of Sinead O’ Connor, Morrissey, The Mission, Andrew Eldritch, Bono and Blur were also sent up on a regular basis.
However, his most famous and beloved creation was Mr Agreeable (formerly Mr Abusing), whose weekly column was a terse exercise in unmitigated, asterisk-strafed invective scattered at all and sundry, especially the sundry, in the rock world – the various c***s, streaks of piss, f***wits, arseholes and twotmongers who raised his blood pressure often by their mere existence. Although Stubbs left Melody Maker in 1998 to work for a cross range of titles including NME, Vox and Uncut, Mr Agreeable remains an occasionally active commentator, occasionally dropping in at The Quietus to vent his ire.
- excerpted from his website: http://www.mr-agreeable.net
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
David^^Stubbs
Among his creations were Pepe Le Punk, a Belgian music journalist (author of Hi, I’m Mr Grunge – An Unauthorised Autobiography Of Kurt Cobain); Derek Kent, MM staff writer since 1926, wit, raconteur and pervert, and Diary Of A Manic Street Preachers Fan (who admired the group for their “intense intensitude”); The Nod Corner, the fictional journals of the Fields Of The Nephilim drummer whose scheming bandmates continually got him into hot water with lead singer Carl McCoy, who would administer him the punishment of ten press-ups. The likes of Sinead O’ Connor, Morrissey, The Mission, Andrew Eldritch, Bono and Blur were also sent up on a regular basis.
However, his most famous and beloved creation was Mr Agreeable (formerly Mr Abusing), whose weekly column was a terse exercise in unmitigated, asterisk-strafed invective scattered at all and sundry, especially the sundry, in the rock world – the various c***s, streaks of piss, f***wits, arseholes and twotmongers who raised his blood pressure often by their mere existence. Although Stubbs left Melody Maker in 1998 to work for a cross range of titles including NME, Vox and Uncut, Mr Agreeable remains an occasionally active commentator, occasionally dropping in at The Quietus to vent his ire.
- excerpted from his website: http://www.mr-agreeable.net
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
David^^Stubbs
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
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February 7, 2017Picked up largely because of the piss-take value in seeing a mate's recent publication for two quid in the local charity shop, this proved disappointing as a source of mickey-taking in so far as it's really rather good. It's rare that I read a book about events through which I lived without at best wanting to add major caveats (that godawful John Robb effort on the nineties is the type specimen here), but Stubbs has the feel of the times dead right, catching all the little details which get lost in the broad-brush accounts: the way that Loaded really wasn't as vile or one-dimensional as its progeny; that lots of us were reading imperial phase PJ O'Rourke partly because the times made him feel like the court fool; that it was possible to get caught up in the gently euphoric mood of the time even while knowing you didn't trust the supposed motors of that mood (football, Blair, Oasis). On Oasis, Stubbs is particularly good, as you'd expect from the author of one of the damning press reviews of the second album which would contribute to the backlash of ludicrous praise for their third. Initially, I thought a whole chapter on them was excessive when they'd already been an unavoidable presence in the earlier section on 1996's music. But no, they're emblematic enough of the time (albeit not for quite the reasons anyone thought at the time) that they merit this unpacking, which stands alongside Phonogram: Rue Britannia and Taylor Parkes' Knebworth review as one of the best anatomisations of that particular madness of crowds. I don't know whether this book was deliberately conceived in response to the various recent tomes which zero in on a particular year and declare it The Greatest Year In Pop or similar, but it works as a rejoinder to them either way - an example of the mistakes a society can make once it's too enthralled by the vision of a particular moment in the past (here named 1966). It seems to have been written before Brexit, certainly before Trump, but you can certainly see it as a reversal of the usual line about history repeating - 2016's horrorshow prefigured as a farcical Make Britain Great Again. Certainly, the final lines have gained a whole extra dose of tragic relevance now: "The apathetic, drifting docility of 1996 still lingers, but as the spiteful, ruthless right-wing project to strip away the wood and beams of the postwar welfare state continues, and, thanks to neoliberal deregulation, money still pours unendingly upwards from the many into the pockets of a few, the numbers will surely shift. And then, when the decades have no name, seriousness will return at last. And then the fun will really begin."
The worst of it is, for all that this shows the roots of many of our present discontents in that complacent moment, for all that it reminded me the Lighthouse Family and Mike + the Mechanics dominated the charts far more than Pulp and Menswear, this book really made me miss the End of History, when we knew things were a bit derivative and played out but life did at least seem to be getting gently, boringly better.
The worst of it is, for all that this shows the roots of many of our present discontents in that complacent moment, for all that it reminded me the Lighthouse Family and Mike + the Mechanics dominated the charts far more than Pulp and Menswear, this book really made me miss the End of History, when we knew things were a bit derivative and played out but life did at least seem to be getting gently, boringly better.
May 7, 2018
Viewed from the political and cultural morass of 2018, the mid-1990s can almost appear like a long-lost golden era. As the standard line goes, it was a time when the UK was newly culturally-confident in the wake of Britpop and ‘Trainspotting’ (and before the internet wreaked havoc on the creative sectors), and an age of post-cold war economic prosperity and political optimism as the yet-to-be-utterly-discredited Tony Blair and New Labour prepared to accede into power.
“1996 & The End of History” by David Stubbs is a welcome and bracing corrective to that rose-tinted narrative. Running counter to current consensus opinion – that tends to look back on the mid-1990s with wistful nostalgia – Stubbs takes a scathing look at a year he describes as “a frivolous, frittering hiatus” and a time of “apathetic, drifting docility”. With the iron curtain toppled and neoliberalism seemingly triumphant, any kind of principle or ideological difference appeared to have been hollowed out of British politics, resulting in the stultifying centrism and “brochure-veneered vacuity” of the New Labour project. Meanwhile, much of popular music – whether from Britpop to American Grunge rock and Hip-Hop – had run out of road creatively, content just to exist rather than evolve or innovate (as typified by the dominance of such regressive meat & potatoes acts like Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene).
“1996 …” is quite a short polemic, and I would have liked David Stubbs to flesh out his arguments about Blairism and Britpop. Similarly, I thought Stubbs could have done more to join the dots between the political and cultural trends of 1996 and how they sowed the seeds for our current turbulent era. But, gripping that a book is too short is not a bad complaint to have, and throughout “1996 …” Stubbs ably demonstrates why he is one of the best writers to emerge from the UK music press in the last 30 years, by demolishing received wisdom and lazy myth-making with great elan.
“1996 & The End of History” by David Stubbs is a welcome and bracing corrective to that rose-tinted narrative. Running counter to current consensus opinion – that tends to look back on the mid-1990s with wistful nostalgia – Stubbs takes a scathing look at a year he describes as “a frivolous, frittering hiatus” and a time of “apathetic, drifting docility”. With the iron curtain toppled and neoliberalism seemingly triumphant, any kind of principle or ideological difference appeared to have been hollowed out of British politics, resulting in the stultifying centrism and “brochure-veneered vacuity” of the New Labour project. Meanwhile, much of popular music – whether from Britpop to American Grunge rock and Hip-Hop – had run out of road creatively, content just to exist rather than evolve or innovate (as typified by the dominance of such regressive meat & potatoes acts like Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene).
“1996 …” is quite a short polemic, and I would have liked David Stubbs to flesh out his arguments about Blairism and Britpop. Similarly, I thought Stubbs could have done more to join the dots between the political and cultural trends of 1996 and how they sowed the seeds for our current turbulent era. But, gripping that a book is too short is not a bad complaint to have, and throughout “1996 …” Stubbs ably demonstrates why he is one of the best writers to emerge from the UK music press in the last 30 years, by demolishing received wisdom and lazy myth-making with great elan.
February 23, 2020
Excellent from Stubbs, a genial and entertaining fixture of the essential Chart Music podcast. This captures the time with real balance although perhaps doesn’t quite spell out the truism that most of us take into our assessments of various eras – that those we see as the best are those when we were living it up and having a good time. The 1990s in Britain have been getting an absolute kicking in recent times – not least via one of Stubbs’ fellow Chart Music guests, Taylor Parkes although both would have to admit that the excesses of the time allowed them to reach a prominence that they probably haven’t reached since. I’ll always look back with fondness and while I fully bought into Britpop for sure, I was also listening to Tricky, Orbital and drum and bass while Stubbs’ thesis that the world deserved a breather from the intense culture wars of the 1980s is a convincing one.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the one devoted to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair – technically not yet Prime Minister at that stage although certainly Prime Minister Elect. He doesn’t come out well, depicted as insincere from the off - while Stubbs, writing in 2016, seems to regard Corbynism as a rightful corrective to Blairism. That standpoint is in tatters now but it would be wrong to beat the author around the head about this. Elsewhere, Stubbs is great on Oasis and the music press’s rush to beatify the execrable Be Here Now while providing a slightly self-indulgent but accurate and helpful list of some of the excellent and unfairly neglected also-rans of the era – Stereolab, Boards of Canada and LTJ Bukem among them. The chapter on comedy is also well judged with a great reminder of a True and False question on Shooting Stars . This is a great book that does a beautiful job of summing up an era in British culture – and I say ‘era’ because it really does cover the whole long 1990s – lasting from the toppling of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989 to 9/11.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the one devoted to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair – technically not yet Prime Minister at that stage although certainly Prime Minister Elect. He doesn’t come out well, depicted as insincere from the off - while Stubbs, writing in 2016, seems to regard Corbynism as a rightful corrective to Blairism. That standpoint is in tatters now but it would be wrong to beat the author around the head about this. Elsewhere, Stubbs is great on Oasis and the music press’s rush to beatify the execrable Be Here Now while providing a slightly self-indulgent but accurate and helpful list of some of the excellent and unfairly neglected also-rans of the era – Stereolab, Boards of Canada and LTJ Bukem among them. The chapter on comedy is also well judged with a great reminder of a True and False question on Shooting Stars . This is a great book that does a beautiful job of summing up an era in British culture – and I say ‘era’ because it really does cover the whole long 1990s – lasting from the toppling of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989 to 9/11.
January 18, 2023
Prophetic ending given that history has now restarted. We all miss the ‘drifting docility’ of the 90s and specifically ‘96 whether from our own memory or from the songs, tv, stories we eat up from those who were there.
‘The squander and political neglect characteristic’ of the 90s and the end of history has led us to where we are now. Published in 2016, Stubbs finishes the book saying ‘when the decades have no name, seriousness will return at last. And then the fun will really begin.’
Anyone living in 2023, who has endured the geopolitical changes since 2016, can prove him right. The fun is just beginning…
‘The squander and political neglect characteristic’ of the 90s and the end of history has led us to where we are now. Published in 2016, Stubbs finishes the book saying ‘when the decades have no name, seriousness will return at last. And then the fun will really begin.’
Anyone living in 2023, who has endured the geopolitical changes since 2016, can prove him right. The fun is just beginning…
March 1, 2018
I nearly gave this four stars as I was actually entertained - though couldn't help but feel that I am reading a less-than average Nick Hornby novel (and that is saying a LOT)
I decided on 3 stars because of the Fukuyama quote in the title - I am honestly sick and tired of it. I know it kind of makes sense, I know it is a cool reminder of the eternal optimism of those times, but it is just so overused and cheap. Also, I am probably way too anti-Corbyn to be considered as a serious candidate for this book's target audience.
Overall though, I was indeed having fun reading this book, though I flicked through some of it
I decided on 3 stars because of the Fukuyama quote in the title - I am honestly sick and tired of it. I know it kind of makes sense, I know it is a cool reminder of the eternal optimism of those times, but it is just so overused and cheap. Also, I am probably way too anti-Corbyn to be considered as a serious candidate for this book's target audience.
Overall though, I was indeed having fun reading this book, though I flicked through some of it
January 18, 2020
"We are still living in 1996 ... Listeners to a radio station voted 'Wonderwall" the greatest British song of all time. Bond is back. The Queen isn't dead... [Yet] we're also far, far away from ... a frivolous, frittering hiatus."
November 25, 2019
Another hungry English major finding "the end" of something.
March 5, 2017
Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair a New Labour, Spice Girls, Father Ted, Stereolab a Boards of Canada, Euro 1996, Gazzův gól proti Skotsku a nejlepší kapitola o Oasis, kterou jsem v životě četl. příjemný pití
December 30, 2016
Interesting premise with eclectic evidence but grim perspective.
February 2, 2017
A great dissection of an era, the author does a great job of separating nostalgia from the reality of a period of time that seems so far removed from our current world.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews