Blur
The Great Escape

THE REVIEW

Here is the iconic album of a whole generation of losers in Prada and Ralph Hunger (or whatever the hell it’s called), who got excited during the Brit-Pop era. Because this album is the symbol of that crappy sub-genre that churned out artists the likes of Menswear and Suede, and the shameless and unimaginative way in which English bands in the last 15 years have recycled their most classic pop stylistic elements, presenting them with their usual dose of slyness. Of all this nothingness, Blur were indeed the top.

“The Great Escape” is the album of the “battle of the bands” with Oasis. A challenge that monopolized music headlines across the Channel in 1995, with phrases like “I hope they die of AIDS” and contests on who sold more: this to say how high the cultural contents that such music evokes are. As Nick Cave said, “asking me what I think of Blur and Oasis is like asking me what I think of the Power Rangers”.

It must be said, however, that Blur are much more eclectic than the Gallagher unibrows: where the idiots from Manchester limit themselves to copying the Beatles and adding some guitar riffs à la Stones/T-Rex, Albarn and his mates on this album run through the entire glossary of a good Brit-popper, able to console and reassure the classic English kid and the little London bourgeois cocaine enthusiasts who do not see beyond their nose.
The parade of mimicry on “The Great Escape” is really impressive: it starts with the Kinks (“It Could Be You”), continues with pathetic attempts to emulate the melodic genius of XTC (“Best Days” and “He Thought Of Cars”), then some harmless drops of new wave (“Entertain Me”), late '77 Clash leftovers (“Globe Alone”), obviously tons of Beatles everywhere (“Charmless Man”, “The Universal” and the horrible single “Country House”, with horrible pre-Povia choruses and rhymes like Balzac/Prozac that must have made the supporters of Albion's cultural superiority happy). The funny thing is that this mannerist exercise is done in a rather atrocious way, as the “lads” can barely strum their instruments, and the washed-out blond croaks like a crow.

In conclusion, “The Great Escape” is the British equivalent of “Nord sud ovest est” by 883. An extraordinary, involuntary, sociological snapshot of the brain-dead youth of the country that buys it en masse. Specifically, of certain twenty-something posh middle class and aspiring ones from the suburbs: those who wait for the weekend to drop ecstasy (cf. “Entertain Me”), who are dressed in designer clothes from head to toe, who spend their sad summers between Ibiza, beer, and coke trying to hook up.