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  • Americans Hate Tingle: Along with Britpop in general, why their pre-Blur (the 5th album) material wasn't well-recognized or accepted in the States by anyone who wasn't a music critic. "Song 2" to this day remains their one and only impression on American pop culture.
  • Applicability: "Girls and Boys" is really about nightclubs and the...things that happen there. Many people, specifically bisexual and pansexual people, choose to see it as a bi/pan anthem instead.
  • Awesome Music:
    • "The Universal" live at Hyde Park. Thousands of people singing "it really, really, really could happen" at the climax of the first show the band had done in years- it's utterly uplifting and incredible. Especially at the very climax of the song, where Albarn stops singing entirely and the audience just keeps going, taking the place of the choir in the original recording.
    • "Bustin' and Dronin'", a 6-minute long b-side to Song 2 with some amazing distorted guitars.
    • 13. All of it! Especially Battle and Coffee & TV.
    • The glorious apocalyptic drinking song that is "On Your Own".
    • Live Acoustic "For Tomorrow". La la lalala, la la la la la la lalala...
    • "Girls and Boys". You probably have the chorus stuck in your head now just by thinking about it.
    • Even if it's supposed to be satire, "Song 2" is still a fun listen. Simple yet effective.
    • The funky guitar riff in "Jets", fitting both this and the trope below.
  • Chorus-Only Song: Go on, guess.
  • Ending Fatigue: Modern Life is Rubbish suffers from quite a bit of Album Filler towards the back half. "Turn It Up" in particular is hated by the band, especially Albarn.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite not having the same commercial success or critical acclaim as Parklife, 13 is often considered the band's best album among the fandom.
  • Fandom Rivalry: With Oasis. This rivalry actually holds a lot of sociopolitical significance, as it is strongly rooted in class and regional tensions in British society, with Oasis coming from the grittier working class in northern England and Blur from the more artsy, southern middle class. This led the "Battle of Britpop" chart war between Oasis' "Roll With It" and Blur's "Country House" to become not only a battle of musical preferences, but also of class conflict and British regionalism.
  • Friendly Fandoms: Many fans of Blur are also fans of Damon Albarn's other popular music project Gorillaz.
  • Funny Moments: "Mr. Robinson's Quango".
    He ran into the toilets in the town hall
    He got his biro out and wrote on the wall
    "I'm wearing black French knickers under my suit
    I've got stocking and suspenders on
    I'm feeling rather loose"
    Ooh, I'm a naughty boy
    Ooh, I'm a naughty, naughty boy
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: They were pretty successful in Iceland and Sweden back in the day.
  • Growing the Beard: The band really hit their stride on their second album Modern Life Is Rubbish.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In the 1999 video for "Coffee & TV" - perhaps the band's most famous video - The man missing on the back of Milky the Milk Carton is played by the band's guitarist Graham Coxon. By the time their next album, Think Tank, was released in 2003, he was missing from Blur, having quit the band a few years earlier in acrimony.
  • Ho Yay: The boys have kissed on and off stage.
  • Obvious Beta: A rare music example in Parklife's "Far Out". Compare the song that ended in the album against its demo and a remix that completes the album song. Chances are that you will prefer either the demo or the remix over the final track due to how they basically chopped half the song on its way to the album.
    • "Alex's Song" from the same album's B-sides also suffers from this, due to Alex James Corpsing heavily against the pitch distortion and eventually giving in and dropping out of the mic to laugh. The demo has some extra content compared to the "finished" song. It seems Alex James tends to get the short end of the stick when it comes to his songs...
  • Signature Song: "Song 2", obviously. If it's not that, it's probably either "Parklife" or "Girls and Boys"
  • So Okay, It's Average: Leisure is generally considered a passable enough attempt to blend Shoegazing and Madchester, and has some fan-favourite songs on it, but suffers from half-baked lyrics, copious amounts of Album Filler, and a general sense of it playing Follow the Leader to other acts from the time. Retrospective apprasals of Think Tank also tend to lean in this direction.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Leisure, while containing a handful of great songs, is generally seen as an attempt to cash in on the popularity of baggy, which was prominent due to the popularity of bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. For Modern Life Is Rubbish, they instead took inspiration from bands like The Kinks, The Small Faces, and XTC. While the album wasn't as successful commercially as its predecessor, it received much stronger reviews from critics and marked the beginning of the band's Britpop era.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: Done deliberately with "Song 2", which the band made as a parody of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
    • Both "When the Cows Come Home" and "One Born Every Minute" were written on the same day, and both have a similar oom-pah feel to them that suggests they could have been the same song at one point. The former came out as a b-side to "For Tomorrow" and the latter was recorded in the Parklife sessions but wouldn't see release till the "Country House" single the next year.
  • Sweet Dreams Fuel: "Optigan 1".
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Notably averted; their Genre Shifts were well-received.
  • Values Dissonance: "Colin Zeal" from Modern Life is Rubbish refers to the titular individual as "the modern retard". Take into consideration that in 1993, the word "retard" was not usually seen as a very pejorative and prejudicial one.
  • Vindicated by History: Especially in America, their critical stature increased as years went by. By the end of the 90's, Many of the same American publications who negatively reviewed their earlier work were now putting records like Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife into their Best Albums of the Decade lists.
    • The "Popscene" single received negative reviews at the time and was a commercial flop - enough so that Blur decided not to include it on Modern Life is Rubbish - but grew in esteem over time and is now considered a classic that was the Trope Maker for Britpop.
  • The Woobie:

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