A lot of ink has been spilled in the trenches of nineties revisionism, not least on the Britpop front. Britpop’s status in ‘ninetiesology’ is based on its place alongside Blairism as an example of pop and politics in lockstep, both gaining mainstream approval but losing their residual and potential radicalism in the process.

In this context, RPM’s recent compilation Super Sonics — 40 Junkshop Britpop Greats is both a commemoration and a time capsule. Its format recalls the cassette compilations like C86 offered in conjunction with music magazines, which brought together scattered underground and DIY bands, art, and fanzines. In a time before mass online connection, these functioned as curated distillations of scenes that could often only be experienced from afar.

This compilation is free of Britpop’s big-hitters: neither Blur nor Oasis, or even Pulp. Instead, there’s a welcome emphasis on placing female and queer contributors back in the story as musicians, promoters, and scene lynchpins: both those, like Kenickie, who’ve gained a measure of retrospective cult celebration, and others — Voodoo Queens, Showgirls, Gretchen Hofner — who should have done.

Most of the bands here are notable less for their longevity and more for their ultimate obscurity — but this is significant too. The focus of much of the discourse on Britpop in its imperial phase tends to smother how diverse and inventive its earlier stages were. The scene was characterised by genre defiance and innovation rather than adherence to any clichéd formula, whether in its collision of art pop, Krautrock, electronica, and glam, or its aesthetic blend of eyeliner, feather boas, and vintage sportswear.

These reminders that indie was always more outsider oddness than Cool Britannia catwalk evoke the vindicatory thrill of it going mainstream. But this whirlwind early phase — a scene self-aware enough to be roughly celebrated here on Rialto’s ‘Underdogs’ and parodied in Stephen Duffy’s ‘London Girls’ — quickly lost its experimental ambition in favour of commercialised diminishing returns, tedious ironic chauvinism, and eventually the terminal greywash of ‘landfill indie’.

In several ways, Junkshop Britpop is the sound of a lost world. This isn’t only about streaming and file-sharing displacing Saturday morning chart shows, taping the Top 40 off the radio, and other nineties-kid shibboleths. It’s also about the now-unattainable opportunity and potential of the nineties themselves. The conditions of this music’s production are now the stuff of history: a less overtly insane housing market allowing young creatives to rent or even squat in city centres; pre-gentrification allowing gigs and scene nights to reinvigorate disused Soho nightclubs; free education allowing the mixing of cross-class backgrounds, influences, and ideas in art-school bands.

As the curious nostalgia for the 2012 Olympics conveniently masks austerity and the 2011 riots, so the nineties were great if you ignore PFI, pit closures, rail privatisation, and the Criminal Justice Bill. In both culture and politics, the ongoing battles of the eighties were ignored amid hedonistic complacency and short-termism. Three decades on, attempts to recognise the results of this still centre on symptoms rather than causes: witness the lip service given by ‘levelling up’ to systematic impoverishment through deindustrialisation or the recent (entirely justified) rage at nepo babies, whose predominance in arts and culture is hardly new but more obvious now as institutional changes have reduced and restricted the access of working-class voices.

Nostalgia also partly explains why this period excites such impassioned defence — the conviction that one’s youth was the best of all possible worlds; and that its politics and culture were the best too. Both New Labour and new indie gained their ascendency through successful rebranding — but by accommodating the neoliberal settlement rather than resisting it. This forms part of the ‘long nineties’ critique that the decade’s after-effects of political stasis and cultural stagnation continue to hold us back.

Culturally, the claims that we haven’t moved beyond the nineties are dubious — particularly in arenas beyond white guitar-rock — but politically it’s undeniable. The promise of the decade worked out well for those able to take advantage of its opportunities, rather than for those young enough to see them erased by a series of political choices. It’s been shit ever since, sure, but it didn’t have to be. This is also, arguably, why a section of the battle lines over Corbynism — an attempt to address or at least acknowledge these post-nineties political failures — shaped up as it did: the former music journo to centrist dad on the one hand, and many of their disillusioned former readers on the other. But if nothing else, this collection of anthems for doomed youth is a welcome reminder that it’s still possible to praise Britpop while burying it.