What is it about music from the UK?

Looking back at my teenage record buying days in the 70s growing up in the uk, it surprises me now how loyal I was to British music. Glam, heavy, progr - all uk. The exception was the velvet underground who I can thank Bowie and Mott for.

Something happened around 16 though. I suddenly realized how much "sunnier" American music was. ( can't find a better word) Had had enough of uk gloom. Started getting into byrds, Dylan, Santana. Just in time for punk and all my mates laughing at me!

 

You claim Nirvana and REM aren't rock bands, and then proceed to label them as rock bands. Indy rock and grunge rock are rock. Notice the word "rock" there? It's hard to miss.

It might be helpful if you define what you think is rock instead of claiming what isn't rock (but is).

 

Define ?
Already did that.

Oh dear.

 

Link?

 

The Beatles: The human jukebox a smorgasbord of American rhythm n Blues, rnr, girls groups and show tunes. Helped develop their sound culminating with Sgt Pepper album (add a bit of Indian raga for spice).

 

Read the whole thread and nowhere do you define "rock".

Oh dear.

 

Rock ? Stooges

 

I think most of the genuinely influential US music on British music from the UK has come from black America. The main exception being folk, but the British have always had their own folk traditions going back centuries.

I can't criticise a nations music that gave us jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, girl groups, r'n'b, soul / Stax & Motown, funk, disco and rap / hip hop. The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan and the Stooges as well as the mid 70s CBGBs bands are the main white artists that are influential on British music. Elvis too, but he was famously a white man playing black music.

 

I think he knows who Alice cooper is, he was just being incredulous concerning your statement.

 

Parsing ? You mean you enjoy breaking a sentence into its grammatical components and and identifying its syntactic structure ? But what about its meaning ? Isn't that more interesting?

 

^Nailed it again here - I hadn't considered the art school background that many of my favorite artists from the time shared.

 

This may be an oversimplification but from a British perspective, I think the British were always open to a huge variety of music. The mainstream charts in the UK were always more diverse than the US, certainly through the 60s, 70s & 80s and the choices of the British record buying public could range from the sublime and inspired to the ridiculous and embarrassing. This was probably due in no small part to two major influences.

The first is that for hundreds of years Britain was a seafaring nation and those ships (and the regrettable reach of Empire) brought back cultural influences to these shores from all over the world. This continued at least into the 1950s and 60s whereas the US tended to be much more inward looking during a large part of the 20th century.

The other is the BBC who also had a worldwide reach and played that back to their domestic audience. The diversity of programming available on BBC radio during the mid part of the 20th century I suspect considerably exceeded that of US radio during the same period, though ironically the BBC was slow to pick up on rock n roll and early pop music. All of this made Britain something of a melting pot and prospective musicians had a huge variety of influences on which to draw.

The Beatles, to use the most obvious example, were famously huge fans of early rock n roll but were equally influenced by music hall, absurdist comedy, Lewis Carroll, early Motown, blues and classical and that was just at the start of their career. Many influential British musicians had also been art students so were picking up influences from outside of music or sound.

That "exotic" element of the first wave of British rock acts then went on to influence subsequent generations who were inspired to find their own ways to experiment and we still have the BBC, routinely exposing a national audience to esoteric material that audiences in much of the rest of the world would actively have to seek out in order to hear/see it, all of which feeds the music they then go on to make.

 

What about the ones who went to Comprehensives? If this theory is correct then British Music would have taken a distinct nose-drive in the 1980s. Maybe it did!

 

They became Oasis!

 

It's simply better.

 

I'm right there with you on most of your US artist list - there are some I haven't heard though, which is great. Jeff Buckley in particular, I remember "discovering" a few years ago.

If you can manage it, bringing in some Folk / Roots might give you a few surprises - people like John Hiatt and John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, or The Band. This was unexplored territory for me too, for a very long time - it seemed too close to Country for comfort - but there's good stuff out there.

 

'IMHO the Americans dominated through the '60s but the British have dominated ever since.'



What!!!????
The Swinging Sixties was overwhelmingly British.
The British Invasion was British.
The Poms dominated the 60s.

 

Parsons used to write for the NME.

 

I know people don't like to give music critics any credit around here but, as it hasn't been mentioned so far, I've got to mention the influence of the music press in the UK, in the (late) 60s, 70s and 80s, in helping to introduce a wide and eclectic range of music and artists, often new artists. I don't have the stats, but I imagine the circulation figures of the music press in the UK, during its peak period, was phenomenal, I'm sure there was no equivalent in the US - and remember these were weekly publications.

 

Another thread perhaps.
Be seeing you.

 

Ha, someone mentioned the NME at the precise moment was I was posting that

 

The Americans should have started drinking ☕️ tea

 

You're correct - I was referring specifically to rock / folk, and you have some great observations here. The Beatles do skew things a bit, but not so much for me as they're not a particular favorite.

"It's still amazing to consider the music that the UK has produced, but, put in perspective (especially as we move into the scattered, niche musical future), maybe what it IS about music from the UK is that, since the 60's, it's been narrowly focused, evolving and branching on/in/out from a fairly specific kind of music, so they've been consistently able to climb its peaks throughout the rock era."

This especially^

 

The best US music for me is from black artists from the 60's and 70's like James Brown, Issac Hayes, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Parliament, Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin. Things like Stax Records still blow me away. The U.K just didn't have that, more guitar based "rock" bands, still brilliant but different.

My Jazz collection is probably all US from the 50s-70s, which I find interesting. Not sure what was coming out from the U.K at this time.