In A Hard Day’s Night, the exceptional madcap 1964 film 1964 starring The Beatles, a reporter asks Ringo Starr, “Are you a mod or a rocker?” She’s referring to the long-warring British musical subcultures, also captured with anxious sincerity a decade later in The Who’s Quadrophenia. The Beatles’ drummer replies with the rather deft portmanteau, “Um, no, I’m a mocker.” The joke being: there’s no way you could be both.
But, 30 years later, in the broad-stroked soundscape that was the 90s music industry, such posturing would look preposterous. The beauty of that decade was that you could be mod, rocker, hip-hop explorer, R&B fan and country fan – all at the same time. Because the notion of what popular music was had shifted so radically.
