ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the musical links between 1990s Britpop and the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, it reveals the shifting meanings that result when apparently similar messages are articulated at differing historic junctures, and raises questions about Britishness and Englishness in popular music. The view that the Beatles have been shamelessly plagiarized by Oasis, or the Kinks by Blur, is challenged. The issue, in a nutshell, is whether Britpop works by way of simply copying earlier styles, or whether there is an attempt to make creative use of those aspects of songs that might now, in the twenty-first century, be regarded as exemplifying the musical vocabulary of a British pop language. However, it is also necessary to relate those British sounds to a pool of musical and discursive means of constructing and valorizing Britishness that has been in existence since the late nineteenth century.
