Politics & Power Quote by Graham Coxon

Coxon is mourning a kind of musical geography that used to matter. In the classic UK/US rock mythology, you could almost hear the weather and the rent prices: Manchester grit, London gloss, Leeds abrasion, American sprawl. His line lands because it treats those place-names like sonic fingerprints, then admits the prints are smudging. It’s not nostalgia for “better” bands so much as a worry that the ecosystem that produced distinct scenes has been flattened.

The intent is partly observational, partly accusatory, and it’s aimed at the machinery behind taste. When bands “sound pretty similar” across borders, it suggests a shared set of influences arriving through the same pipelines: streaming algorithms nudging everyone toward the same reference points, plug-in presets and bedroom-production templates standardizing textures, social media rewarding instantly legible vibes over slow-burn weirdness. Scenes once formed from proximity and constraint; now they form from circulation and speed.

There’s also a quieter self-reflection in it. Coxon comes from Blur, a band whose identity was bound up with Britishness as a concept and a marketing battlefield (Britpop didn’t just happen; it was narrated). So when he catalogs regions - Manchester, London, Leeds, Wales, Ireland - he’s invoking an older map where rivalry and local pride sharpened aesthetics. The subtext: if everything is everywhere, what’s left to push against? And if there’s no “there” there, is the next great sound even possible, or will it always arrive pre-validated, globally interchangeable?