‘...Get Your Adidas Sambas and Floppy Fringes in Place!’: Twenty-First-Century Cultural Industries, Heritagisation, Generational Memory, and Britpop

Britpop—the term applied to capture the 1990s’ zeitgeist of guitar pop consciously steeped in a British musical tradition—has had a long afterlife, establishing its own place in that canon, while its proponents and principal champions have retained roles as elder statespersons of British music and associated sectors. This chapter traces the different iterations of this trajectory, before examining the intergenerational and industrial dynamics that have underpinned it. It argues that the changing meanings that have attached to Britpop have arisen through a dialogue between 1960s-to-early-1970s-born musicians and music journalists on the one hand, and late-1970s-to-mid-1980s-born fans on the other.