It’s All A Blur: Notes on the 30th Anniversary of a Legendary Britpop Band’s Signature Release.

While Blur will always be inexorably tied to Oasis due to their early-90s(-and-beyond) UK tabloid blood feud, it’s another rock outfit with oft-sparring brothers that Damon Albarn & Co. resemble more wholly. Blur indubitably rivals the Kinks — yes, first in both being so quintessentially British, but even more so for the foursome’s seemingly endless zest for innovation and re-creation. The Davies brothers could unleash the guitar fury in a manner that would presage heavy metal with hits like “All Day and All Of The Night” and “You Really Got Me” then turn around and hint at a sound which would eventually become twee with “Sunny Afternoon” or “A Well Respected Man.” However, for Blur, the unpredictability didn’t start at the beginning.

While hardly monolithic, Blur’s first two LPs, Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish, fit pretty safely into a sound half Manchester dance, half hook-heavy pop. Their third record starts off in a similar vein with most obvious single “Girls & Boys” with its dance thump and chorus concept that The Killers would shamelessly rip off for its debut single “Somebody Told Me” roughly a decade later. For an album so influential on both sides of the Atlantic, it barely made a dent in (less than “Magic”) America, missing the Top 200 Albums listings entirely. However, “Girls & Boys” did give them their loftiest showing on the Billboard Hot 100, although it stopped short well below Top 40 (it peaked at 59).

Second track “Tracy Jacks” finds Blur in a truly comfy space as over a jangly guitar-and-bass beat, Damon relays the tale of an average Brit celebrating an ordinary day. It’s a classic gentle, yet not-so-secretly caustic Britpop profile from before the term Britpop existed — taking its lineage from The Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man” thru The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life,” and is one of the best and most emphatic shout outs to a full name since The Jam’s brilliant cover of the aforementioned Kinks’ “David Watts.” The band continues the soft familiar on the elegiac “Edge of the Century,” complete with a wandering horn; it’s a song which also stands as a reminder there was a nagging worldwide fear, even post-Cold War/pre-peace-dividend of what would happen when the 20th Century’s clock ran out, as if when we hit two thousand zero zero, the party would be over, oops, out of time. Unlike Prince’s wild celebration, Blur is drinking reflectively. Thankfully, we’re now nearly twenty-five years into this new hundred and everything is…fine…right? Where were we. Oh, right, the title track is up next — “Parklife.”   

That’s where the album veers into a weirder lane and finds its place as a UK classic and U.S. influencer. After three melodic tunes which could have fit comfortably on Leisure or Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife begins to show off its freak flag with the iconic, spoken word title track with its “joggers who go round and round and round…” and the sudden shifts in mood any good day drunk will exhibit — as when Phil Daniels (a journeyman actor and not a member of Blur) abruptly taunts a fictional foil “maybe you should cut down on your publife… get some exercise.” It’s still on the jaunty, catchy side of the ledger, but it is undeniably weird, and wonderfully so. While on the surface, it might not seem that far off the beaten path, when I first heard this track on the album, even as a burgeoning adult beginning my 20s who had lived and breathed music — pop and beyond — since leaving the cradle, I was wholly disarmed and uniquely charmed with the feeling this was something new that music could be.

“Parklife” is followed by a part two of sorts, but “Bank Holiday” tells further stories of the people going hand-in-hand through their “Parklife” but puts a boozier, Buzzcocks-ier spin on the subject. This is followed by the seemingly plain pop of “Badhead,” which breaks into a weird bit of psychadelica as a woodwind sneaks in and out of Love-style somber minor chord breakdowns, which in turn gives way to an intermission of sorts: the calliope bounce of the instrumental “The Debt Collector” and the sub-2 minute minimalist freakout of “Far Out.”

Then we hit the album’s unlikely second single, “To The End,” and if it hasn’t hit us yet, it must by now: ultimately, Parklife is a sad album, if perhaps in a manic-depressive, drinking-his-troubles-away vein. Albarn did tell NME that the record is a “loosely linked concept album” of the “mystical lager-eater,” and as with any “mystical lager-eater,” the stories will start to get more and more downbeat and filled with despondency (but cut with the most hopeless of hope). “To The End” features grand orchestration, a French touch featuring Laetitia Sadler, and the repeated chorus “it feels like we could have made it.”

As with any good depressive drunk, Parklife perks up immediately with the jagged, semi-atonal power burst of “London Loves” as Albarn taps into another favorite theme (and one seemingly unlikely one at that) that will pop up again and again (on the next album, The Great Escape, it would be “He Thought Of Cars”): the adoration of the revved engine, and maybe even the need for speed. His urban protagonist is intro’d as “coughing tar in his Japanese motor” and observing what “London loves” is “the mystery of the speeding car.” And while it’s certainly spoken with more than a whiff of irony, there is always a hint of the genuine underneath.

The manic builds to what may be the most absolute fun (if caustic fun) track on the record, “Magic America.” Next to “Girls & Boys,” this may be the most massive earworm Parklife produced. Like “Tracy Jacks,” it’s a classic character sketch, in this case, Bill Barret who dreams of being the Brit abroad after finding love on Channel 44. Like its central argument, and presumably the hopes and dreams of Barret himself, after dancing about, held aloft on gossamer wings, the melody breaks down into a fit of madness — think end-of-Sgt. Pepper musical mental breakdown… and yes, I know, the second Beatles analogy might counter my initial Kinks-y contention, but I stand by it, Blur are just contradictory like that, and besides what popular act was more shapeshift-y than the Fab Four.

Just like any high — sugar, alcohol, or other — the buzz inevitably wears off, and Parklife hits bottom on “This Is A Low.” The musical underpinning is just as beautifully empty as the mood the title may conjure up. But as with Edgar’s wanderings in nothingness in King Lear, there is some weird joy in the abject. Albarn observes the low “won’t hurt you” as he listlessly wanders on a dark holiday through iconic English locales. On a side note: the song was used to fuel a pivotal chapter of the novel To Be Someone by Louise Voss. It was quickly forgotten, but well worth a read (and it’s a smooth breeze of a read), especially if you are a fan of both Nick Hornby and Blur — and there’s certainly a large center to that Venn diagram.

Parklife is the first album to come out in the same year as an Oasis record, as their debut record Definitely Maybe would hit the stores in September, and, frankly, I’d like to pat myself on the back for going over 1000 words in a Blur write-up without mentioning their famed arch-rival. It is a bit silly to go binary on it as there are so many braches of Britpop, and my intention is not to bash, but there is some logic that Oasis would be bigger hitmakers on both sides of the Atlantic than Blur. It’s not that the Gallagher Bros, et al, never deviated from their John Lennon-heavy base, but there definitely was a distinct thread tying most of their albums together. Blur mastered the art of reinvention, and while “Song 2” may blare in American stadiums daily, they were never going to match Oasis’ level of American ubiquity. Few sports fans point to the blaring speakers and recognize the “woo hoo” song and go “oh, it’s Blur” while “Wonderwall” has become the goto joke song about guys who bring guitars to parties. 

Parklife can be said to be where Blur began that constant evolution. Is it Blur’s most important record? Is it their best record? In one of these anniversary articles, it will always be tempting to inflate the significance, but there is no doubt that there would be a massive segment of the fanbase who would point to this. However, for a band that’s ever rebirthing, seminal LPs abound and strong cases could be made for the American indie-rock paean of their 1997 self-titled record or the venturesome 13. Parklife is not even my personal favorite Blur record as I am in the vocal minority absolutely in love with the quirky The Great Escape. Whatever, this sad, snarky half-concept of a collection was a revelation at the time, full of unpredictability and wonder, and a hint of what Blur would become. Yet at the same time, it gives no clue as to what would follow — and therein lies its beauty. 

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