Why Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ will still be listened to in 100 years
The kebab seemed to pirouette mid-flight as it hurtled through the air in a crowded takeaway. As it landed on the head of a white-shirted man, his initial worry was his dignity. He fumed over his dignity, in fact, with all the rage of someone who had just stubbed their toe on a Monday morning. However, by the time that the chilli sauce had started running into his eyes, his problems became myriad.
He began to flail in an ambivalent uproar. There were arms flying everywhere, and bottles as well. I don’t know who threw the dancing donner or why a meat missile was ever deployed in the first place, as I said in my police statement afterwards, but I do remember looking at the man, with a fringe of parted kebab draped across his chilli-slicked brow, and thinking: this really reminds me of a scene from Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.
With that record, the Arctic Monkeys really captured the times. It wasn’t the first of its kind in this regard, but it probably will be the last. How do you capture the present zeitgeist? The times are so manic, sprawled, and incessant that there’s no clear throughline. Perhaps that’s why in recent years, Alex Turner’s lyrics have transitioned from exacting vignettes to chorus-less rambles of meandering verse.
That’s probably as close as you can get to summoning the spigot of the present. But 20 years ago, there was something distinct about culture, scenes of tracky bottoms tucked in socks were resonant, and you can still hear them encapsulated on this stunning debut album. For the times to be seen and distilled so clearly in crystallised poetry proved exhilarating.
There’s a generation of folks who feel that way. Even at the time, their producer, Alan Smythe, knew he was “working with something very impressive”. The songs were filled with a youthful spirit, but they had the wry observational eye of the wise Ray Davies, too. Vitally, they were also very good songs. Bloody great songs, in fact. And as Smythe says, “you can’t really go wrong with good songs.”
That much was proved instantly upon release. Thanks to a guerrilla marketing campaign of fans handing out burned CDs of their early demos, the hype surrounding the Sheffield band was abounding before an album was even touted. That anticipation was only furthered when a frenetic lead single led Turner to espouse the fabled line, “Don’t believe the ‘ype”.
The importance of that line feels all the more pivotal 20 years on. A generation remembers hearing it almost all at once. We were all gobsmacked, awed, and wanting to hear more. The lads behind the mystic burned discs, circulating among kids who were at that point 90% fringe, were now on the big screen, and the world seemed to beckon. Cultural watercooler moments like this don’t happen any more, now that they’ve moved it all online.
In all of our eyes, it was the perfect debut rock ‘n’ roll single. When the pop and fizz of its effervescent arrival had settled, the tea leaves seemed to indicate that they, the Arctic Monkeys, were us: drunken scallies, ‘dodging’ the unwanted dregs of cheap cans of lager in the bushes, only they were living the dream. No matter how corny that might sound, it seemed important at the time.
To see a group of working-class lads rolicking away, riding high on nothing more than a refined expression of unfettered youthfulness was invigorating. They were making it. We clamoured to hear more. But we also had the patience to wait. Now, Turner’s comment would likely be taken at face value, and the hype would dissipate and wane. A recent study by the University of Berlin found, the “accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption… resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources.”
The head of steam that surrounded their debut album, allowing it to fetch record-breaking sales of 360,000 copies in its first week and a subsequent total of 2.5million copies worldwide, is irreplicable today in the age of personal feeds and much more fleeting cultural flashpoints. As the study continued, “In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.”
But back then, the Arctic Monkeys had our collective attention, and the songs were built on collectivism within youth culture too – another disappearing element of what made this debut feel so thrilling. As the band’s then-bassist Andy Nicholson recalled, “We got our own practice room in Neepsend. It had a pool table in it and smelled of Joop and Lynx Africa deodorant, Carling and crap weed. And damp.”
He continues, “We’d throw parties in there, play our new songs… the song ‘A Certain Romance’ came about when friends who nobody knew came, and there was a big fight,” he told Mojo, highlighting a paradox of the times: how could they be friends if nobody knew them? Didn’t that used to be part of the fun, once upon a time? “It was all fun, always. The goal was, as long as we were playing together and having a laugh, that’s all that matters,” Nicholson wistfully concludes.
Forget the fun, the fight, and the roaring anthem it produced, now a group of working-class lads having their own practice space sounds like a fantastical fantasy from times of yore. Perhaps even more tragically, a recent Tufts study remarked, “Half of all young people say they rarely or never spend time in person with their community… and only 16% do so often or very often.”
In this regard, Whatever People Say I Am isn’t just a timestamp for shish-based shenanigans on streetlamp-lit city alleyways or skirmishes up near that taxi rank, but a snapshot of a watershed moment in modern times. As the record sales prove, it remains the last time a young band rose from nowhere and truly created a sense of ‘mania’ from the off. Of course, the songs still stand up as timeless classics on their own, too, but they also feel imbued with this distinct sense of visceral ‘I was here’ in this certain time and place, as though they knew how pivotal they would become long before they changed the world for the last time.
If the Velvet Underground’s Loaded is a time capsule of New York in 1970, and LA Woman did the same for the West Coast, then Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not serves the same purpose for Britain in the halycon final days of unified youth culture, a document of its moment that will still speak clearly a century from now.
