No Brit pop

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Grant, May 3, 2002.

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  1. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me! Thread Starter

    What do you guys think of this article concerning the state of Brit music?

    "So it has come to this: next year there will be a British music office in the US dedicated to promoting the interests of your small island kingdom's tunesmiths here in the former colonies. Britain's musicians, who were once thriving competitors to the American rockers they sought to imitate and improve upon, now call for the kind of institutional boost also given to non-entities in the American market such as France, Sweden and Japan. It's a little too tempting to say that you asked for it - but I will.
    There was a time when British rock overcompensated magnificently for its distance from rock's African-American sources. British bands fused, twisted, theatricalised and tampered with the American music they loved. Tossing their own roots into the mix, they invoked the music hall, the concert hall and the pub, and later the riot and the rave, as they engaged American rock in a transatlantic dialogue that spurred innovations on both sides. Image-mongering British rock was well ahead of the game when music video transformed things in the 1980s, and as late as the mope-rock invasion of bands like the Smiths, Depeche Mode and the Cure, British rock could still speak to the troubles and yearnings of American listeners.

    I don't know exactly what went wrong after that. Maybe you Brits started feeling a little too post-imperial, glumly longing for past grandeur. Maybe hip-hop was far too African-American for you to assimilate and bounce back at us. Maybe the hype-and-slam cycle of your music press - which discovers bands early, but then trivialises nearly all of them into some kind of fashion trend - sped up until you were trashing new bands before anyone abroad had heard of them. Maybe people were either taking too much ecstasy or making themselves sodden with misery to prove they weren't.

    From across the Atlantic, it seemed that British rock had lost its willingness to face the present or interact with the outside world. To many American listeners, it came across as a kind of first-world tribalism when your beloved Britpop bands set about recreating past achievements, from the Beatles to Bowie, while making so many local references they nearly built a language barrier. There were likeable songs from Pulp and Blur (especially when Blur decided to ape Pavement), but by the time those songs reached the US, they were speaking mainly to diehard Anglophiles.

    Britpop also had an unhealthy tinge of ethnic cleansing, as it deliberately turned its back on the music of Britain's own minorities, as well as hip-hop. Anything with a jumping beat was relegated to dance music, where your jungle and Asian-underground disc-jockey/ producers did come up with some promising hybrids.

    But too many British DJs attached themselves, quitelucratively, to the simple bouncy-bouncy of trance instead of joining the rhythmic fray in the wake of hip-hop. And outside of music for clubs, the fusion possibilities of bhangra, dance-hall, drum'n'bass and African pop have barely been tapped by tune-loving songwriters.

    When a great English band did emerge in the 1990s, Radiohead, fellow bands drew exactly the wrong conclusion from their worldwide success. They decided to imitate Radiohead's old-fashioned Britpop side, its sullen Beatles/Pink Floyd ballads, rather than try to match Radiohead's restlessness, their urge to make something new and recombinant from rock's debris.

    British rock has always been superb for a good wallow in self-pity, but constant whining eventually loses its charm. Over the past few years, ethereal British whining hasn't made it onto American radio stations because they are busy playing our own kind of whines: tattooed, grunge-chorded self-pity that's equally insufferable, perhaps more so.

    Don't get me wrong. Blockbuster American rock is also in the doldrums, full of undeserved suburban grievances and busily regurgitating grunge cliches or lamely attempting to rap. Yet American listeners can still count on extraordinary creativity in R&B, which filters into even the most mainstream pop. (Britons have been trying to sell our own Timbaland staccato beats back to us as two-step, but it's not working.)

    Since music always slips free of generalisations, there are always a few British bands making worthwhile noise. I'm fond of current bands such as Starsailor and Clinic, despite their air of insularity, and of Welsh oddballs Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

    A bit of bouncy-bouncy from a disc jockey can be fun in the right circumstances, as can big-beat programmers such as the Chemical Brothers or Fatboy Slim. And I still have hopes that drum'n'bass, if not some even more exotic rhythms, will lead to a next wave of British dance-music vertigo.

    On both sides of the Atlantic, the current touting of revved-up rock bands such as the Strokes, the White Stripes and the Hives might be the start of a helpful pendulum swing away from all that whining.

    If British musicians want to make their mark in America again, a British music office is beside the point. Here in the US, marketing is the least of British rock's difficulties. The music coming out of Britain at the moment doesn't simply need some kind of New Britain rebranding, and it won't benefit from some benighted attempt to raise the standards of your supposedly unsophisticated American cousins.

    It's not that America turned away from British rock, it's that British rock turned away from us and everyone else, savouring its own parochial tone. The music needs to take chances again, to confront the world beyond your islands with some of the old British ambition, genre-bending and eccentricity. And, in the meantime, a good beat never hurts."

    ยท Jon Pareles is chief popular music critic of the New York Times.
     
  2. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me! Thread Starter

    I think it is one thing for Brit acts to tailor their music to Americans, but to demand that they custom make their music so Americans can feel comfortable with it is as bad as asking blacks to water-down R&B so lilly-white people will listen to it.

    Maybe British artists got tired of playing to the US for approval. I don't see US artists trying to appeal to any other culture.

    And, I don't know what the big deal is about British acts not being on our charts in 40 years. The Brits have made such an indellible mark on our music that the two cultures can never be seperated.

    There are people who think that the Rolling Stones and the Beatles are Americans.
     
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