Kevin Shields, the extremely wise and plugged-in founder of fuzz-gods My Bloody Valentine, just dropped a bomb on the British public: Brit-pop—the "Cool Brittania"-era explosion of ghastly, derivative rock'n'roll from the likes of Oasis, Blur, Pulp, and any other number of one-word bands—was in fact a conspiracy foisted on the Western world by British intelligence agencies. I mean, it's so obvious once you think about it.

The musical equivalent of the Hatfields and McCoys burying the hatchet (or Itchy and Scratchy burying the butcher knife) occurred Saturday night when Oasis' Noel Gallagher joined Blur's Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon onstage at London's Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust benefit show. Rock legend Paul Weller (of the Jam, among things) and poet Michael Horovitz also shared the stage. They played Blur's 1999 single "Tender," one of the happiest sad songs ever written.

Earlier this week, Brit-pop's finest Blur released Blur 21, an exhaustive box set featuring expanded versions of all seven of their studio albums, bonus discs of demos and outtakes and a few DVDs. It's over 20 hours of music. Blur has long represented something very particular in my life whatever the time (Damon Albarn is the first guy I ever allowed myself to acknowledge being attracted to) and with this insurmountable deluge of media, now is no exception.

There's been lots of Pulp talk this week, thanks to frontman Jarvis Cocker's show at the Whitney (under his Relaxed Muscle guise), an appearance on Jimmy Fallon and two concerts at Radio City Music Hall. I'm seeing them there tonight to get a hit of the narcotic that is nostalgia.