Like Nirvana a few years before them, Blur brought indie aesthetics and ideals to the masses, often with uncomfortable and unintended consequences. “A lot of that freedom in the playing comes from art school. Blur's live shows, meanwhile, revealed that Coxon could move from Gilmour-scale grandeur to hardcore punk thuggery and unhinged sound sculpture-sometimes in a single song. His restless sense of experimentalism blossomed and thrived on Blur and 13, as Albarn warmed to Coxon's American indie fascinations and the band embraced shared affections for dub, electronica, African pop, hip-hop, and folk. To fans who stayed on or joined anew for the post-Britpop LPs Blur and 13, or caught the band live, Coxon's skills became profoundly apparent. And his ability to channel those divergent influences via a vivid musical imagination and raw, instinctive virtuosity made Coxon a potent, protean, and artful guitarist in a British scene that could be pathologically regressive. indie, Canterbury prog, free jazz, krautrock, the Kinks, the Fall, and My Bloody Valentine. Like '60s British players who assimilated American blues and international influences to brew their own pot of gumbo, Coxon wed his love for unbridled American iconoclasts like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Yo La Tengo to a foundation built on the Smiths and U.K. Songs from Parklife and The Great Escape-records that virtually defined the cultural earthquake called Britpop-were so overflowing with hooks, brass, bubbling synths, radical song-to-song stylistic shifts, and Damon Albarn's characters writ in boldface that Coxon's fretwork could seem relegated to the sidelines.īut for those who listened deeper and looked beyond the mania surrounding Blur at the time, Coxon's hit-and-run shards of chord deconstruction, Fripp-fired leads, and impeccable sense of rhythm and timing were nuggets of pure musical treasure. At the apex of Blur's mid-'90s superstardom, a casual listener could be forgiven for failing to hear Graham Coxon's guitar brilliance.
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