Burnage isn't an "affluent suburb". I used to live there and it's solidly upper working class. I fucking hate Oasis but don't feel the need to make stuff up about them in order to dislike them.

I didn't mean to blame it all on Destiny' Child, Whitney Houston certainly has a case to answer, but Beyonce and crew took it to where there was no soul at all. Mary J. Blige, and others always seemed to me to be fighting a rearguard action to keep some soul alive. Mind you, what I have said here was also said about the Supremes, and others, all those years ago.

As for Oasis returning to visit their "roots" was it their idea or did their 'Management" persuade them that it was a good idea?

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Can we blame the Athletes and Coldplays on Radiohead? Hmm. I'm not sure. I'm far from being a fan of Radiohead, but it's obvious, even to a tin-eared Radioheadsceptic like me, that they were always pretty multidimensional. There were a number of directions in which their legacy could have been taken. It wasn't written in the stars that the bands of the noughties would draw only on Radiohead's downbeat moaniness, and jettison all the band's musicality and inventiveness.

But that's not the point of the thread, really. We're not saying they're culpable (except perhaps Oasis). Just that their very presence was damaging because of all the cunts that were inspired by/became successful because of them.

Anyway, I'm with Pan Tau on soul, but then I also fit Kulkarni's description of a modern R&B hater, so you can safely ignore my opinion.

The Spice Girls were damaging in a range of ways, musically, obviously. Encouraging pre-teen girls to dress 'sexily', and who knows if Beckham might've been a better player had he not married the publicity hound.

Absolutely. But here too Destiny's Child and Britney Spears et al caused even greater damage.

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Encouraging pre-teen girls to dress 'sexily', and who knows if Beckham might've been a better player had he not married the publicity hound.

What a load of fucking codswallop. They no more 'encouraged' pre-teens to dress like mini-whores than Adam Ant 'encouraged' me to dress like a pirate.

As for the second point; typical OTF sexist crap. Perhaps Bill Clinton wouldn't have stooped to having his nob polished by an intern if he hadn't married Hilary. Typical sparkling logic.

So why do you dress like a pirate?

It's nature not nurture, foo.

I blame dem bitches meself.

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Hah! Easy for a Londoner to get confused on these sartorial matters though (Liquidator = Chelsea, right?) All the cockneys bar Millwall were still wearing donkey jackets and air ware until about summer 1980.

Even Carlisle were on the case by then!

I wasn't born till 1981 grandad, so I'll take your word for it.

OK, I'll take an ex-resident's word re. Burnage. But "upper working class" is still further up the scale (or lower down, in pop-cred terms) than Oasis liked to present themselves as being. I suspect it probably wasn't their idea to be seen revisiting their "roots" that weren't, but it says a lot about them that they played along with it.

The Stone Roses did seem to me to be conveying the impression of being from *inner* Manchester, that whole anti-monarchist, voting Workers' Revolutionary, radical heritage thing. When in fact their two main members (who, as we've seen, had very little musically in common) came from what I think was at one stage under Blair the only constituency in any of the metropolitan counties (as they were before Thatcher abolished their councils at the same time as the GLC) in the North to still be Tory. It doesn't necessarily bother me much, but I think it's worth commenting on - it was key to their image that they were seen as being from a city rather than affluent suburbs (and where they came from really is affluent, even if Burnage isn't).

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What a load of fucking codswallop. They no more 'encouraged' pre-teens to dress like mini-whores than Adam Ant 'encouraged' me to dress like a pirate.

The trend of the sexualisation of pre- and barely pubescent girls coincided with the advent of the Spice Girls and the likes of Britney Spears. I see nothing sexist in being alarmed by that; indeed, I think being alarmed is a very valid feminist position.

The analogy between Spice Girls and Adam Ant doesn't work. I can't think of a really good one, but I don't think there can be a very long debate about the notion that the sartorial ways of pop/rock stars have an influence on popular culture.

The debate as to how far that influence reaches and about the validity of individual cases can be never-ending, however. So I'll give you as much as this: on reflection, I'm not sure that the Spice Girls aggressively overstepped any marks in cultivating a mini-whore look.

I find the Spice Girls more damaging in regard to their rehabilitation of Thatcher (the godmother of Girl Power, evidently).

I find the Spice Girls more damaging in regard to their rehabilitation of Thatcher

I think the damage caused by that was pretty negligible.

Yeah, it was almost universally seen as a harmless gaffe.

The problematic aspects of the sexualisation of childhood can't really be pinned on the Spice Girls. Indeed, part of their initial appeal was that they looked and acted like normal girls next door - very much the opposite of, say, Xtina or girls in Fifty Cent videos and the repackaging of almost Benny Hill levels of sexism in that area,. This is where you might be better off allocating feminist blame.

Re the overall discussion, whatever people think of Oasis, there's always been a trend in pop music for good, inspiring bands to bequeath a legacy of dismal unoriginal copyists. I remember Purves making that point a while back about the Pixies (who had a lot more going for them than Oasis).

Radiohead may have begat Coldplay, but it's Coldplay that successive bands have tried to ape, so I don't hold Radiohead culpable. It's largely thanks to Coldplay, not Radiohead, that the supermarkets, and therefore the album charts, and therefore the radio playlists and label rosters, are full of wistfully vacant melancholy. So, j'accuse Coldplay.