Manic Street Preachers. Super Furry Animals. 60ft Dolls. Gorky’s Zygoic Mynci. These unwieldy monikers counter the slick precision of names like Suede, Blur, Pulp, and Oasis. The superficial differences between the two underscore how the 1990s musical genre dubbed “Cool Cymru” (or “Cool Wales”) was startlingly different from the more internationally known genre of Britpop. The dissimilarities between these movements highlight the complexities of Wales’s status within the United Kingdom in the 1990s as well as Welsh musicians’ rejection of the celebration of English culture embedded in Britpop. As Manic Street Preachers’ bassist Nicky Wire explains, “The attitude we had then – we weren’t singing about ‘Parklife’ and stuff, we were singing about the Holocaust, while the rest of Britain bathed in the glow of euphoria.” In opposition to this euphoria, the Welsh bands included in the Cool Cymru movement applied humor, absurdity, anger, references to Welsh history, and the occasional use of the Welsh language to songs that reflected an estrangement from Britain in the 1990s. This paper will explore the differences between Britpop and Cool Cymru, focusing on the issues that arise when bands become symbols for political change and subsequently (and inadvertently) define contemporary nationhood.
About the presenterSharon Becker
Sharon Becker is a Lecturer II in English at Towson University where she teaches American literature, first year writing, and semiotics. Her current research is best represented in her semiotics class which uses K-pop videos to teach students to analyze visual texts. In addition to writing about masculinity and male identity in K-pop, she is interested in beginning work on Thai and Korean BLs.