ABSTRACT
The most important developments in Wales during the 1990s were political. It is difficult to isolate any single factor common to the enormous variety of Welsh pop in the 1990s. The initial fissure between folk and rock emerged in the 1970s. Common to Anglo-American and Welsh popular cultures, it is a distinction which leads through developmental stages to a multiplicity of tangential categories and styles. The idea of Welsh pop here becomes a kind of cultural playground, with a wide array of Anglo-American mainstream influences emerging from the musical textures. With a renewed political optimism in Wales as a nation and the cultural confidence inspired by the success of Welsh bands in Britain, the idea of contemporary Welshness emerged in a variety of contexts. In the Welsh cultural context, the postmodern condition could be seen as finding expression in, amongst other things, the playful de-contextualization of musical signifiers and the fluctuation between the Welsh and English languages.
