Mortgage Rock

Alexis Petridis writes in the Guardian:

What has been the predominant musical sound during Tony Blair's premiership? You might disagree, but I'd plump for what one critic recently dubbed mortgage rock: the portentous, wistful, stadium-filling, ballad-heavy, post-Britpop genre that gets played in the background when an English team gets knocked out of an international sporting tournament, or an unsuccessful X-Factor hopeful collapses weeping into the arms of Kate Thornton. In fairness, it wasn't really around when Blair took office, although the records that influenced it were: Wonderwall, OK Computer, The Drugs Don't Work. For the entirety of this decade it's been, for better or worse, the sine qua non of British rock: you would think the record-buying public would be sick of it by now, seven years after Coldplay's debut, but no. They keep buying it: it was Snow Patrol, not the Arctic Monkeys, who made the best-selling album of last year.

What does its predominance tell you about the Blair years? You could argue that it's rock music as light entertainment, with all the edges sanded off: it's not furiously angry or inconsolably upset or wildly nihilistic in its pursuit of fun. It's the sound of economic prosperity. There's something about it that suggests a vague sense of melancholy, or dissatisfaction, as if things haven't turned out quite the way people expected...