Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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There were also hundreds of interesting anecdotes and opinion pieces from many of the main players of the various 90's scenes such as Noel Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Tony Blair and Tracey Emin and these were my favourite part of the book. It wasn't for me but that's not to say it won't be enjoyed by others, give it a go if you enjoy this kind of book and have an interest in 1990's culture. A surplus of hindsight also gets in the way: Brooke-Smith tracks the consequences of the upheavals of the Nineties more effectively than he conveys how it felt to live through them. Faster Than a Cannonball is a cultural swipe of the decade from loungecore to the rise of New Labour, teasing all the relevant artistic strands through interviews with all the major protagonists and exhaustive re-evaluations of the important records of the year – The Bends by Radiohead, Grand Prix by Teenage Fanclub, Maxinquaye by Tricky, Different Class by Pulp, The Great Escape by Blur, It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah!

This may be a personal gripe as it is something which I have never liked about most of the popular music magazines as I felt they attempt to use language as a barrier to gatekeep listenership/readership by over intellectualising articles and sneering at anything they deem uncool and this book has that general vibe. Every chapter was far longer than it needed to be with people repeating the same thoughts as others within the chapter. He finds room for such phenomena as Kurt Cobain, Jeff Koons, the Gulf War, the Y2K bug, Doom and David Koresh (Britpop gets one paragraph). The year 1995, you could argue, was more about consolidation than innovation, with hungry outsiders becoming the new status quo. As much as the 90s seem like a last hurrah to a certain way of things, it is also a caustic still seeping through society even now, but I'd have to agree that Britpop didn't cause Brexit.But then the chapter would be devoted to a particular topic that focused more on the decade at large than the isolated year. Therefore it would be fairer say this book focuses on the 20 year period surrounding 1995 with an additional heavy focus on the 1960's and the cultural parallels that can be drawn from that decade to the 1990's.

Both interpretations are somewhat true, but you won’t find much ambivalence or (that essential Nineties quality) irony in Faster Than a Cannonball. Before reading I thought the book was primarily focused on the music industry (and the blurb seems to mainly point to this being the case) but instead it is heavily focused on multiple aspects of 90's culture such as politics, art, drugs, journalism and football.Faster Than a Cannonball lacks the polyphonic vitality of the best oral histories, leaning too hard on long quotes from big names, including Noel Gallagher, Damien Hirst and Tony Blair. The Help album of 1995, which united stars in raising funds for children in war-torn places such as Bosnia, might have been a bridge to the world beyond the Groucho Club, but it only registers here because Kate Moss played tambourine on one track.

This oral history of the nineties shows how the period was born and where and how it likely died with arguably remnants remaining to this day. But without the chronological propellant that might dramatise the cultural acceleration, this book feels rather too much like an annotated list of stuff that happened. A brightness of things happening’) but less so when it’s Piers Morgan, who makes this unimprovably Partridgesque claim: ‘Probably the best night of the nineties was the opening of Planet Hollywood in Soho in 1993. No retrospective critique of boosterism is more revealing than this 1997 prediction in Wired magazine: ‘We’re facing twenty-five years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world.

Dylan Jones' books (at least the Bowie and New Romantic ones - as well as this) are over-long and under-edited - but I really enjoyed the nostalgia, which brought back good memories of what was a fun decade. However, should the estimated publication date change for whatever reason, we will notify you within a reasonable period of time. You can address the cocaine issue without having thirty three goddamn pages devoted entirely to people just saying how much cocaine was around. While those who lived through it tend to celebrate its explosive confidence, younger critics on the Left damn it for the complacency it induced and argue that we are now living with the crises – political, economic, technological – that the Nineties seeded.

There was an attempt at a critical evaluation towards the end of the book but it was a case of too little, too late in what was otherwise a one sided view. uk/landing-page/orion/orion-company-information/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Orion Publishing Group Limited. Just like there's no reflection of Kate Moss's rise to supermodel status with one commenter even goes on to say how tired he was of the eighties supermodels and their unattainable physique while in the same breathe praising Kate Moss's waifishness like. Even the best and brightest political leaders appear to be untrustworthy as we see through the potted history of Tony Blair in the book.Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? Jones ostensibly focuses on 1995 – each month is given its own chapter, and a different theme is examined in each of these – but a full third of the book covers the periods either side of that annus mirabilis and a great deal of backstory is crammed into the book too.