I just got back from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia, PA. No, this post does not have anything to do with film studies, being an academic, or describing the bulk of what and who I saw. Rather, I want to present a sort of roundabout way - a kind of thinking out-loud, or an unpatterned system of associations - which got me to thinking a lot about the Underworld song “Born Slippy/Nuxx.” You see, SCMS has a very large book exhibition where publishers of books in film and related fields bring their latest wares, selections from their back catalog, and items of associative note in hopes of having people buy, see material for courses, or otherwise become familiar with the latest happenings.
I went by the Continuum Books booth in hopes of getting some discounted 33 1/3 series books. For those who do not know, the 33 1/3 series presents small (almost pocket-sized) books each about one particular album. The implicit argument in each book is that the album under consideration is important, that is somehow different from other albums generally taken to be similar, and that it deserves to be considered as such by a reading public. The series has attracted a lot of fans, from people cut in the obsessive mold of the main characters from High Fidelity to folks who just like tunes. That these books were not heavily discounted at the Continuum table this SCMS (as in previous years) was a surprise and I didn’t end up buying any new titles. But, I have been thinking about the single album-single book format.
I think that an interesting departure from this - and please correct me if such a series already exists - would be a series of small books on single songs. While this blog post is obviously not a book (one does not need to be the distant relative of Johannes Gutenberg to notice that), I would like to take a few minutes to discuss a single song and its associative interests. That song, as mentioned before, is “Born Slippy/Nuxx.”
I won’t go into the history of the band (try this) and won’t say too much about my individual response to their music (but I will point you here, as Joe seems to have had a similar interest in them). Rather, I keep thinking about why “Born Slippy/Nuxx” sticks out in my head as the quintessential song of 1990s British techno - in contradistinction to Oasis - “Wonderwall” as the quintessential British-grunge-invasion song - and why this particular Underworld track seems to have lived beyond much of their other music. Note that they are still active and touring, that they could well forge a new anthem of equal distinction.
I realized that they answer lay in the song’s visual (I’ll explain) element and how that element circulated in mid 1990s pop culture. Of all of Underworld’s music, much of which is in accessible in terms of track-length and its use of electronica subgenres not friendly to radio play, “Born Slippy/Nuxx” lived on. “Born Slippy/Nuxx” (technically “Born Slippy .NUXX” was a B-side remix to the single of “Born Slippy.” In typical plunderphonic/techno/electronica fashion, the most worked-over mixes (in some cases several stages removed from original production) are often the most memorable.
Underworld’s song came to be conflated with two grand visual traditions of 1990s British-Visual culture. For example, watch this stellar example of a 1990s electronica music video and think of its associative influences:
The music video links the song (a kind of expresses stream of words and sounds…nothing particularly unified) to the radical, off-kilter visual iconography that the 1990s loved so much. This is the pulsing, oppositional, avant-garde Underworld, a band tested at clubs, raves, and by the, well, underground. Compare to this other visual use, here one of the most globally recognizable series of images of 1990s Britain:
To many, this video (and the film of Trainspotting itself was seen by many as more of a feature-length “music video” and less as an adaptation of an important piece of Scottish literature) is what “Cool Britannia” was all about. In 1996, a Newsweek article declared London the “coolest” city on the planet. Mirroring the similar declaration from Time magazine in 1966 that London was a “swinging” city, the 1990s idea of “Cool Britannia” was a mixture of policy (a kind of friendly climate for arts and culture under Blair and his labour government), people (real: Scary Spice, Noel Gallagher ~ fictive: Bridget Jones, Mark Renton), and place (London, but also the industrial North of 24 Hour Party People). History has shown us that the whole thing was blown a bit out of proportion, but the artifacts still remind us that the period was influential. “Born Slippy/Nuxx” plus the mythology of Trainspotting and the club/drug culture were an absolute zenith of this decade. Street-wise, self-destructive, and excessive, “Cool Britannia” was a late-game attempt at re-asserting British cultural legitimacy.
My general point is that one song, in its various iterations and locations, can have a big impact. There are many others just waiting to be exposed.
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