OTM #4 - Coffee and TV - blur


1:20 am BREAKING NEWS: BLUR IS COMING TO HONG KONG!!!!!!!!!!! 6th of May!!!

Recently have been so obsessed with the Japanese band which made my friend forget I am also a fan of Brit music, I should shift back to the English music form time to time.

Indeed, the latest lives I had attended were of Japanese acts, it is totally normal for her to think I had forgotten the English music field hahahaha.

Actually I am a great fan of rock made in Britain. For example, this band called BLUR.

My first met with these guys can be rewound to 6 to 7 years ago when I was still doing secondary school -  when the time TV was still the major channel for me to get information about my favorite artists from overseas. Good old days when the Internet was still developing. By that time there was a music programme which would broadcast MVs form overseas on every Wednesday midnight, and I loved to stay up late on every Wed.

One day, I came across this MV of a funny story about how the milk goes on a quest in search for his master's son and it got stuck in my mind ever since. Years later, I was introduced to Brit-Pop and finally I met Blur properly.

A little background information: during the late 80s to 90s, there was a musical movement from the UK which is later referred as the Brit-Pop movement. It was a period when the Brit music went phenomenal  around the world as a mean to fight against the invasion of American Grunge rock. There were at least 3 bands went excessively popular at the peak time of Brit-Pop movement: Suede, Blur and Oasis. Not only the 3 of them interacted with each other quite frequently, they WERE the symbol of Brit Pop music - even till now - together with their fellow colleagues like Pulp and The Verve.

Unlike Oasis and Suede, which are of industrial and psychedelic style respectively, Blur is quite like a bunch of boys burst out from the white-bread world who were too care-free and had too much time to spend on contemplating about meaningless things in life as if there are the greatest thing on earth - however they were indeed as cynical as Oasis was. And due to Damon Albarn's good looking faces, which was curiously an synonym of "bad musicians" for the British, Blur was always underrated musically. But anyway they got popularity, as deserved.

For me, if I have to describe Blur with a certain colour, it would be a rainbow. Indeed there is a certain kind of absurdness and laziness in Blur's sounds and music. Most of their songs are like killing time. However Blur's songs are more "colourful" when compared to Oasis's and Suede's - dream-like, noncontinuous, but undeniably playful and harshly humorous about the real world, like Coffee and TV.

Even Damon and Graham Coxon (bassist of Blur) sounds quite like killing time (hea in Cantonese) in Coffee and TV, which is quite a song of cynicism:

So give me coffee and tv, history
I've seen so much
I'm goin' blind
and I'm brain-dead virtually

What a "I-don't-give-a-damn" attitude but filled with anger about the crazy world.

They may sound blur, but indeed they are as witty you think you are.

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