Happy 25th Anniversary to Blur’s eponymous fifth studio album Blur, originally released February 10, 1997.
When Blur’s self-titled album—or if you want to get fancy, eponymous album—Blur came out in 1997, it had already been a year or two since the “alternative bubble” had burst in the mid-‘90s, and the American indie scene hit a lull. Britpop had, of course, been gaining momentum as a movement—or as a packaged genre, depending on your viewpoint—even while grunge/alternative were still in full swing.
But Britpop really seemed to reach its pinnacle with this particular Blur album, most likely because it featured the utter and total banger “Song 2.” What’s more, having failed in years prior to break through in America (while arch-rivals Oasis enjoyed stateside fame), Blur was a personal triumph for the band.
There wasn’t a dancefloor in Europe (and no doubt America) where sweaty kids weren’t pogoing like maniacs to “Song 2.” I was an American army brat who had grown up in Germany my whole life, graduated high school the year prior in 1996, and was using the year of the eponymous Blur album as a gap year to go out dancing, bum around Europe, and come to terms with the fact that I was going to have to break up with my long-time German boyfriend before taking off for college in the states that summer.
I remember not feeling as excited about Britpop as I had about grunge, but I likened that to being at the end of my teens and not being as excited about things in general. I was 18, and I was world-weary. Still, I developed a Mod style of dress—Oasis had those shaggy Beatle haircuts, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker dressed like a Carnaby Street reincarnation—and my friend Koryn and I took a trip to London, where I chain-smoked Silk Cuts and complained about my boyfriend’s clinginess. In Camden Town, I bought a beautiful butterfly-collar ’60s pea coat, only to have to throw it out after it made my entire luggage smell like fish.
Regardless, everywhere we went, there was “Song 2”—in the shops, in the nightclubs, even over greasy beans and sausage at breakfast. Woo-hoo! There was something about its energy and its catchiness that had gone unmatched since “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and so I bought the whole CD.
Blur is a fun, no-bullshit album in the sense that it’s all about the music—no grand overarching concept, no artsy posturing, just deft musicianship and a pulling from a wide variety of sounds and influences, from the Beatles to glam-rock to Industrial to shoegaze to punk-rock. All in the name of creating an enjoyable, contemplative listen. It’s a headphones-on-your-bed kind of album, except for when you dance around.
I’ve always thought that “Beetlebum,” Blur’s first track as well as its lead single, is aptly titled, mostly because it has those croon-y, singsong-y, slightly whingy (in a good way) vocals and harmonies that everyone associates with The Beatles, and probably most with Paul McCartney. As an opener, “Beetlebum” establishes that, yes, this is an album in the British rock ‘n’ roll tradition and we, Blur, are part of a goddamn legacy.
It’s a pretty, meandering dream-pop song about heroin. Which you would never guess from the video because Blur look like clean-cut lads whose idea of a wild time is watching football over a pint at the pub. But Blur frontman Damon Albarn and then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica (a band I loved so much I had given their 1995 eponymous album a five-star review in my high-school newspaper) had gotten into the drug during a low point in their relationship, prior to breaking up before Blur’s release. “Chasing the beetle” is apparently English slang for freebasing heroin…or something.
Two minutes and two seconds long, and also the album’s second track, “Song 2” was written when the entire band were hungover, and it was intended as a parody of grunge. I remember watching the video on MTV Europe at my boyfriend’s house. He had cable, and so we were mostly always at his place, which was also because we smoked a lot of pot, which his parents largely ignored. I love how in the video the entire room is covered in Oriental carpet and the band randomly get blasted around by a phantom shot of air so that you’re not exactly sure if they land on the floor or the walls or the ceiling. It’s the kind of thing we would have laughed at like stoned idiots—and I think that was the whole point.
My absolute favorite part is the bass in this song—its presence is enhanced by the sparse parts where it’s absent, and then it rolls in deep and rumbling and thrashing and thumping. Bassist Alex James also looks very cool in this video—unflappable. He’s the only band member who looks dignified even with a blast of random whooshing air smashing him against a wall.
Every time I hear “M.O.R.,” which stands for “middle of the road,” I like to imagine I’m decked out in scarves and sequins at a glam-rock concert in the ’70s. I actually used to wear getups like this dancing at my favorite club in Germany, The Schwimmbad, because life is short and it’s fun to look fabulous. Anyway, the reason I get the ’70s rock-opera vibe is no doubt because “M.O.R.” borrows the chord progression from David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging,” which also shares the chord progression of Bowie’s “Fantastic Voyage.” In fact, the song credits for “M.O.R.” are shared equally between Blur and Bowie and Brian Eno because of this intentional “borrowing.”
The video is evocative, too—it seems to steal some of its heist kitsch and screwball action from the Spike Jonze-directed Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. No matter, “M.O.R.” is an uplifting romp that leaves you with that buzzy after-the-arena feeling. And maybe, that, too, is intentional—critic Laura Snapes asserts that the song’s message was a cheeky “Britpop [is] over, and schmaltz is in.”
No two songs on Blur share the same general sound, and that’s my favorite aspect of the album. While a song like “M.O.R.” can so viscerally evoke the glittery, glamorous 70s, “Chinese Bombs” is the sound of stripped-down, basement-show punk in the vein of Minor Threat. Meanwhile, “Death of a Party” starts out goth, grinding and Industrial and then morphs into a Smiths-like lament until the two mash up. And “Look Inside America” is, ironically, the most stereotypically Britpop song, allowing for that neat catalog filing of Blur alongside poster-boys Oasis.
By the time “On Your Own” dropped as a single, I was single—I had broken up with my boyfriend and was soon to be living in a noisy college dorm an ocean away, missing the clubbing (I was under 21), the travel, and him. Which means I don’t think I ever saw the video to “On Your Own” when it came into MTV rotation. Mostly, Albarn wears a fuzzy Kangol hat in front of a wall of graffiti, dancing around in a vaguely hip-hop sort of way. The song itself has the melancholy cheer of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” which also features the repetition of the lyrics “on your own” in a singalong sort of chorus. In both songs, Bob’s and Blur’s, the hard-won freedom—being on one’s own—is simultaneously miserable and exhilarating.
The lyrics to “On Your Own” in their entirety are cryptic and evoke the chaos and existential fuckery of modern existence, but the sound of “On Your Own” is entirely that of a breakup song. I think it’s quite likely I laid on my bed in my dorm room, listening to it a hundred times on repeat, rolling my eyes at my roommate’s loud phone calls, and wishing I had just dry-cleaned that fish-smelling Mod ’60s coat rather than throwing it out.
LISTEN: