“We all say, don’t want to be alone” Albarn sings in “End of A Century.” In “This Is A Low,” he sings of melancholy as something that can bring comfort: “It won’t hurt you/ When you’re alone, it will be there with you.” Even the album’s “comedy” songs show empathy towards their target characters. (A line from critic David Quantick about the Beatles recording Revolver and realizing “we are young and we can do anything” - that combination of talent and the invincibility of youth - comes to mind.) But Parklife is also a kind one, as well. As Oasis’ stock rose, so did the belief amongst listeners that sincerity was synonymous with quality, and Blur’s Albarn found himself under fire from fans and critics for not singing about “himself.” As the larger genre limped towards irrelevance over the next couple of years - arguably culminating in Be Here Now, Oasis’ unexciting third album - the whole thing was declared little more than an exercise in 1960s nostalgia gone wrong by critics embarrassed by their wholesale embrace of it years earlier.įor all that Parklife is the work of a young band - “the mind gets dirty as it gets closer to thirty,” one line goes, with the big three-oh still seeming like a distant destination - it’s a remarkably confident, even cocky album. Consequently, Blur was derided as pretentious, insincere and overly intellectual. Oasis had a proletarian appeal, eschewing the observational, dryly comedic lyrics that made Blur famous for passionate exhortations for listeners to “roll with it.” They reminded the public that they were “free to do whatever like if it’s wrong or right it’s alright,” never mind the lack of clarity on what “it” actually was. By mid-1995, with new albums due from both bands, there was an apparent feud between Blur and Oasis that divided fans. Britpop fractured there was no way that something that big couldn’t.
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