OK, so we have had twenty-year anniversaries of Dazed and Confused, The Big Issue, Nirvana's seminal album Nevermind and Frieze this year, which led me to wonder, what the hell was happening in 1991?
Then I began to wonder... was 1991 the year that the alternative went mainstream? The kids of the eighties had grown up with in thriving alternative music and fashion scenes in the UK but no real access to information about it. With no Internet news about gigs, club nights and shops was spread by word of mouth or flyers, or the NME and now sadly defunct Melody Maker. Music and fashion magazines were full of information you could not get anywhere else but there weren't really that many of them and there was only so much information you could actually fit into each issue.
During the 1980's counter culture thrived post punk but no one outside of these scenes would have known about it as there was not great access to information about the scenes. People outside these scenes were informed about them through embarrassing news bulletins or the Criminal Justice Act of 1988. The eighties get a lot of bad press but it is important to remember that this was a time of great political awareness and activism and a great and highly influential music scene. The Smiths, The Cure... And at least Spandau Ballet wrote their own songs.
The cool UK kids of the eighties had been hanging out at Blitz Club or the Hacienda, boozing in Camden and Soho or soaking up the sweat of 4000 other Smiths fans in a venue near you. Now they were onto the inevitable next stage, a job in the media and in the next few years we would most certainly see the results... Acid house music on Top of the Pops, the KLF getting mainstream radio play and Dr Fox of Capital FM Radio interviewing The Shamen to find out if the number one song Ebeneezer Goode was really about drugs and as sales of Nirvana's Nevermind picked up momentum in the states the alternative music and fashion scenes were being consumed on a mass level, Nevermind shifting, for a time, 400,000 units a week. Demand for information on the cultural shift increased and a number of publications were born.
In the UK these included Dazed and Confused, i-D, The Face, The Big Issue and Sleazenation and what made some stick and others fold is a conversation I have had many times over the years but it had never occurred to me before now was that publishing articles for and about these subcultures and trends made them into commodities and while it didn't negate their cultural value it blew that world wide open and introduced it to the mainstream which it
has been ingratiating itself with ever since.
Was this to do with the coming of age of a generation who having grown up in Thatcher's Britain were eager to get out there and shake things up or is it that widespread access to the internet has meant that no publication launched since has been able to compete. Whatever the case the passing of time is revealing 1991 as cultural cusp.