You're the one judging them off possibly dodgy behaviour. I don't have a recording contract. I don't have a publishing deal. Do you?
Massive is relative. Urban Hymns is RIAA platinum, peaked at number 23. Morning Glory is 4x platinum, peaked at number four.
The UK has always had an influential music press, and young people avidly following music news and gossip - so it's much more plugged in and reactive to trends and 'the next big thing'. And it's a smaller market physically and media-wise - easier and quicker for bands to establish themselves. Get on the BEEB, and no years of punishing cross-country US tours needed.
Actually it is what it is. It's well crafted and if 10 million plus people love it who are you to judge them? As for Shania she has ten times the voice of Liam Gallagher and Anthony Kiedas put together. And she can put a gym sock over her privates for a photo shoot anytime.
Actually Chad Smith is a great drummer and technically Flea is an excellent bassist. He just didn't invent everything that Millennials thought he did. Come to think of it the same can be said for Noel.
Gatekeeping is great. So I can only have an opinion on a band if I have a recording deal? We better shut this place down forever if that's the approach we're taking. This looks bad : Let alone the stuff in the autobiog. No "possibly" about it. Flea has skill, but not taste. Why play 4 notes when you can play 4,172? Who am I to judge Shania Twain or RHCP? Are you suggesting I'm not allowed an opinion whilst everyone else is?
Is JamesR upset, green-eyed and bitter that this forum largely revolves around The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Tull, Genesis, Yes, Zep, Sabbath, and plenty of smaller threads on Hawkwind, Oasis, Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, Dire Straits, Tears for Fears etc. People displaying their Jeff Beck material, New Order pressings, arguing about Iron Maiden masterings, original flyers for Cream, when and where they saw Syd Barrett, how much is this Kate Bush cassette worth............. getting the picture yet partner!!!???
From Roland Orzabal of Tears For Fears in 1995, Orzabal feels the current surge in Britpop bands such as Blur, Supergrass, Pulp and Oasis in England was a necessary reaction to American domination of the British album charts. "Protectionism reared its ugly head," he said. "It's a very nationalistic time right now at home. Music relies so heavily on fashion in Britain, and things just naturally come along." At the same time, Orzabal doesn't think many of today's new, young bands will last out the decade. "If you look at the history of bands like Blur-the Kinks, Madness-they tend to hit a bad patch at some point," he said. "That's because that cheeky Cockney act they all do wears thin after a while. But let's not put them down too much. They're extremely talented musicians."
You can have all the opinions you want. First of all, realize that no one cares what you think, and they're going to care even less when you're being obnoxious about it.
Not "massive", no. By the mid/late-1990s, it was difficult for any non-100% mainstream (think: Shania Twain, Dido, etc.) style from abroad to be "massive" in The United States, thanks to radio formatting having become so specified. Acts like Oasis and The Verve had 8 of 10 toes in the "college rock", "alternative rock", "modern rock" formats, and maybe they were allowed 2 toes on mainstream radio with Celine Dion. As such, Oasis did rather well for about 20 months, with Morning Glory hitting #4 and Be Here Now being #2 for one week before quickly falling down the charts. For their entire career, Oasis charted only two singles on the Billboard Hot-100 (for reasons explained above), which were "Wonderwall " (#8) and "Don't Look Back in Anger" (#55). As for The Verve, Urban Hymns charted at #23, while 'Bittersweet Symphony' was their only charting single at #12. But, again, if you were in certain circles---white people at college/university; downtown in major coastal cities with aficionado music friends---in the mid/late-1990s, then Oasis and The Verve were rather big (not sure about "massive") for short periods of time. But at the mainstream level, their impact was minimal.
The Dead were/are ‘selectively popular’ in Europe and they had no problem selling out large venues on the rare occasions they visited britain. Other bands like Tull and Renaissance achieved massive to good levels of success in America, despite being ‘very british’. It’s hard to establish how popular Oasis were in America, but it would seem fair to say, they didn’t become huge. Ropey live performances and the derivative nature of their music may have had something to do with that. America seems to have passed on other brit -pop acts for sure.
According to Nielsen, there are 50 US radio markets with populations of 1 million or more. There are another 50 with 500,000 or more. A foreign act would have to perform a minimum of 100 concerts just to make a dent in the American market. Who wants to go back to being a warm-up act if you're a headliner at home? Who wants to play clubs and small theaters here when you're selling out arenas and stadiums at home?
I wouldn’t say that The Verve were massive in the US, either. However, while “Bittersweet Symphony” may have been their only charting hit, songs such as “The Drugs Don’t Work” (also covered by Ben Harper), “Lucky Man” and “Sonnet” all received a fair amount of radio airplay, which I why I think they may have been perceived as being bigger than they actually were here. You could say the same about a number of Oasis songs, too.
Bands who want to crack the US market. I saw plenty of them live. One example was Muse, who could sell out large venues at home in the UK, yet I saw opening for Green Day, as most people here hasn’t discovered them yet.
I'm not the one suggesting that the only people who can have opinions on music are people with recording deals. That's not just obnoxious - it's daft.
Yes, if someone responds negatively, to rude and arrogant people with obvious chips on their shoulders about the United States, that means they have a chip on their shoulder. Give me a break. People on this forum just want to be told “British music is better than American music, the British invented rock music, the British invented the only good bands” and get so intemperate whenever you suggest anything that goes against this boring, fantastical Anglophilia. List any number of American bands from the 60s and 70s, and the Teaboos and Brits on here have a conniption fit because “Americans weren’t playing rock music in the 60s and 70s”, or something. Their narrative is threatened.
what “unreasonable agenda” am I pushing? the suggestion is that British music emerged in a vacuum in the 60s and 70s
They're the top bands of the era and they popularized entirely new styles of music, from rap rock and metal to grunge to industrial rock/metal to post-metal and progressive metal - this is an objective rather than subjective value to have. They absolutely are a million times better than any "Britpop" top tier or otherwise - Britpop is an artificial genre based on nostalgia. Off this music forum, all of Britpop is widely reviled, and the bands it consists of were not recognized as Britpop anyways. It's more that people like you have complete tunnel vision, and you just ignore thousands of American bands to enhance your idea of the British music scene. This is why you get posts accusing Americans of "ripping off" a British band from the 70s as if there weren't also thousands of influential American rock bands from the 60s and 70s, popular or otherwise. They did not have a "consistently higher quality overall" - this is an opinionated statement. I believe British music tends to be simply derivative of American stuff. It's not really that interesting. It tends to be boring. It also tends, objectively, to be nowhere near as innovative of new sounds - ergo, it's American music that had "a much consistently higher quality over all", because more objective value can be assigned to the American scene - more genres come out of the US than Britain, and this has remained true going back 130 years. You're making these silly, subjective statements like "British music has much consistently higher quality" because you're desperate to assign objective value to a music scene that is entirely derivative of the American one. Ergo, the American one has more objective value and has more quality - quantity is also predictive of quality, in this case. It doesn't matter whether they were played on the radio or not - Pixies, Pavement, and Fugazi are legendary bands - they were legendary then, and are now. This is immaterial. No one would say Hardcore or Thrash Metal weren't influential, massive scenes that produced influential, massive bands, just because they weren't played on the radio, or just because their albums might not have reached number one on an albums chart... It's not about radio play, and yes, we have our own self-sustaining music scene. The American music scene is way bigger and more diverse, and none of those bands are distinct enough or good enough. And scoffing at the likes of No Doubt and Live, or Rage Against the Machine or Tool while bothering to list kiddie-pop "Supergrass" ("We Are Young! We Are Free!" Wow, such riveting, groundbreaking, amazing stuff!), or the wildly boring "Pulp" (listening to some sleepy, breathy guy sing about "Common People" is not at the top of my list), is hilarious. Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Deftones, Filter, Incubus, Pantera, etc, are standout bands that sell out massive shows, headline festivals, and dominate arenas to this day, you see them on tons of merchandise, they charted at top spots on album charts in the US and the UK, and they kicked off all sorts of popular music scenes in the 90s and 2000s - Pulp? Supergrass? Ride? Who cares about them? None of their stuff is good, it's very basic, often boring Indie carrying on from what was already heard in the 80s. I feel like this forum is a bunch of guys in their 40s and 50s - because no one younger than maybe 45 cares about Supergrass or Blur - the bands from the 90s that the younger generation actually cares about are the big America bands, Nirvana, Deftones, Alice In Chains, The Offspring, Weezer, Tool... The American music scene in the 90s gave us: Alternative metal, Grunge, Punk blues, Noise rock, Lo-fi and Indie, Stoner rock, Groove metal, Post-metal, Progressive-metal, House, Techno, Jam bands, Country, Contemporary R&B, Industrial rock and metal...the UK scene gave us some electronic subgenres and then "Britpop", not an original sound, just a dumb marketing ploy, and then...The Spice Girls. Jamiroquai, lmao. Nope, The Fugees, TLC, Four Non Blondes, No Doubt, Spin Doctors, etc, were better, sorry. Suggesting the US doesn't have a self-sufficient music scene, and wasn't entirely dominant in the 90s to the point that the British scene felt the need to nationalistically lash out against the American one, should open you up to some laughs, because these are facts. This stuff happened. There are so many forum posts on the Internet where Brits whine about how "slept-on" British 90s music is (Why did the world sleep on British 90's music? (home, radio) - Page 4 - City-Data Forum ). I don't see Americans ever making the same posts. I don't see Americans asking baiting questions about why "American music is so much better than British music" or why "British music sucks". It's British people doing this to America and the American scene. You have a xenophilic "grass-is-greener" complex. This is exactly why Beatlemania is such a curse - you wouldn't admit it, but your favoritism for any British band is due to the fact that they're British (and particularly that they're not American) and nothing else. You take the American scene entirely for granted, and no other country produces anything worth while beyond the occasional gem to compete. Because you resent the United States, and anti-Americanism is so popular, you commit historical erasure/revisionism.
