Irresistible Bliss was the second album from the New York hipster band Soul Coughing (proponents of ‘deep slacker jazz’). The opening track ‘Super Bon Bon’ was a relative hit ( and breached the Top 40 in the UK when it was re-released in 2024).
4 out of 5
4 out of 5: the title of one of my favourite songs on this album, and also a state of mind. Not bad. OK. Above average. Which was something to aspire to in 1996, when British music was very average indeed.
This was the age of Britpop, which felt like the results of a public opinion survey on ‘what can you remember about the ‘60s’. And in 1996 we were suffering the worst of it: the media-confected battle between bland indie bands, and the insurmountable cringe of the officially sanctioned Cool Britannia. If the late ‘80s had been one long Boomer cultural mid-life crisis, with every middle manager blasting Brothers in Arms from the stereo as he drove his secretary to a Travelodge in his new convertible, then the ‘90s felt like their second childhood: an attempt to create a theme park version of the ‘60s, without the radical politics and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Here’s Tony Blair in a Harold Wilson costume shaking hands with Noel and Liam, an even more stupid version of The Who (not something that had previously been thought possible). And here’s the Kod Kinks Knees-up Blur, giving us a ‘90s answer to Tommy Steele while missing that that had been a rhetorical question in the first place. Here’s Supergrass, who have somehow come as all of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
At least we had Jarvis Cocker, a modernised and etiolated Jake Thackray; but the British answer to American Grunge had turned out not to be something thrillingly new, but instead a mass market, microwave-ready version of a thrilling newness from thirty years ago. This was a generation trying to recreate, from memory, the records their dads had made them listen to in the ‘70s. Top of the Pops was appropriately reminiscent of those old Top of the Pops LPs, on which a covers band would wearily plod through vaguely recognisable versions of ancient hits.
Against this background, Soul Coughing sounded remarkably fresh despite being essentially a pale retread of the ‘60s New York scene. (Like the Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, they came out of a Manhattan art-music scene, this time centred on the club The Knitting Factory in Alphabet City.) But at least they weren’t trying to sound like the Velvets. They at least were aware that hip hop and electronic music existed, as did jazz and funk and new technologies that had prodded pop beyond two guitars, bass and drums. They at least acknowledged that it was, in fact, the ‘90s.
‘4 out of 5’ is a good illustration of this. It’s a sticky, intoxicating cocktail of influences: Mark degli Antoni’s woozy samples heaving into a sloshing rhythm out of which sudden tunes emerge, Sebastian Steinberg’s growling bass, Yuval Gabay’s intricate little beat, M. Doughty’s sardonic, beat poetry half-rap. Soul Coughing produced not so much songs as sound pieces, experiments and experiences. They were an impression of something that hasn’t quite happened yet. Which pretty much describes my life in the ‘90s.
The chorus of ‘4 out of 5’ is a chant composed of simple maths problems:
Four and five, therefore nine
Nine and nine, therefore eighteen
Eighteen and eighteen, therefore thirty-six
Four and five, therefore nine
This was a decent summary of my working life, which consisted of sitting in a hessian cubicle entering data into a green screen terminal. I plodded back and forth through the grimy London streets, from work to tube to flat to tube to work, surrounded by the screech of trains, the growl of traffic, the clatter of mechanical keyboards in an open plan office. That is what ‘4 out of 5’ sounds like: the bang and roar of the inchoate city, half-heard music seeping out of a pavement grate, coming from some subterranean bar the entrance to which you will never find.
The cover of their 1996 album, Irresistible Bliss, recalls that tenuous world: after computers, but before the Internet. The band’s name is rendered in Microsoft Word Art alongside a collection of junk shop and joke store finds collaged together in Paint. That’s the ‘90s, right there: a half-assed magpie acquisitiveness. Everything is a remix, everything is in flux, everything is interesting. Modern life might be rubbish, but you can make all kinds of things out of the odds and ends other folk leave behind.
In the context of Britpop, a definite 4 out of 5, I’d say. Better than average.
Soft Serve
The title of my absolute favourite song on this album, and also a glorious metaphor for late twentieth-century consumerist capitalism. Soft serve ice cream — which we Brits know as Mr Whippy, or the traditional 99 Flake — is a UHT liquid or even a powder that is flash-frozen at the moment of serving; it was invented because it was convenient to have ice cream that didn’t have to be stored in freezers. It maintains its light, creamy texture because it is full of air, ideally somewhere about 40%. There is even a persistent myth that the young Margaret Thatcher worked on formulating the British version when she was a chemist at Lyons Maid. This seems too good to be true, but let’s print the legend.
So: a mass-produced treat that is barely there at all; that was purposely designed for passing trade; an impulse purchase, made and sold in the moment; an accessory for idle afternoons, for cheap and meaningless leisure. Weightless froth: a perfect symbol for disposable petty luxuries, for planned obsolescence, for vapid marketing and meaningless advertising promises.
There is a sarcastic, disappointed tone in M. Doughty’s lyrical delivery. The ‘90s was full of cynicism about the future, and disgust at the perceived shallowness of this widening, commercialised culture. And there was the further sense that it hadn’t always been thus: that pop culture, thirty years before, had been inventive and vital and revolutionary (at least, so we were assured by endless documentaries and retrospectives). We had grown up with the idea that the ‘60s had been ‘the greatest decade in the history of the world’, as Withnail & I’s dealer Danny puts it; we were mere footnotes, the quotation generation, patching together our Cargo Cult fashions out of the cultural detritus all around us. We were living among the remains of an earlier, great culture, the decaying works of giant (sic. That’s collage culture for you: mashing up the ninth century Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer with Oasis’s idiosyncratically spelled album title).
What’s more, the generation that had apparently changed the old world had built this new one. This consumer paradise was theirs. Commercialisation had swallowed everything; they had sold hippie wigs in Woolworths, and now they were selling us flannel shirts and Union Jack dresses. Dissent had, in the words of The Baffler magazine at the time, been commodified. Every new trend was a fresh marketing option; every rebellion provided a new advertising slogan. As a result Gen X was obsessed with the horror of ‘selling out’, wary of doing anything in case it led to success, the ultimate solecism. And so we did nothing. We hung out, stayed in, got high. And we listened to ‘Soft Serve’, sweet and light like the eponymous ice cream, languid and lolloping. M. Doughty called it ‘slacker jazz’: the sound of lollygagging around on an aimless summer afternoon.
There was a voracious demand for lo-fi beats to smoke dope to, to shoot the breeze over. As well as slacker jazz outfits like Soul Coughing, G Love and Special Sauce, and Odelay-era Beck, there was also trip-hop, chill-out, acid jazz and an easy listening revival (the ‘60s the Boomers tried to hide from us). Uneasy ease was as much the sound of this era as Britpop. This was the space between so many things: the Cold War and 9/11, the City’s Big Bang and the crash of 2008, the censoriousness of the ‘80s and the Internet firehose of the new millennium, centrist governments in power and liberal democracy having apparently won.
That data entry job I had was incredibly dull and poorly paid, but I did have a job, and one that meant I could share a flat in Zone 2. A flat we could furnish with cheap accessories from IKEA because we were all surrounded with cheap consumables, a whole world of soft serve. We thought those intangible, inessential treats were just a distraction. Little did we know that that was the best we were going to get.
Also from 1996, the great classic of slacker pop, Beck’s Odelay:
Beck and the 1990s Angel Dust Bowl
‘Butane – veins – junkie – kill – flaming – insane – shotgun – violation – maggot – Mace – burning – kill – double-barrel – buckshot – kill – evil – nightmare – gas chamber – weasel – cocaine – hung himself – hanging – hate – choking – kill – crazy – kill – drive-by – pierce – kill – kill – kill – kill’