[QUOTE=Hippy Hollow]
I’ll give a woefully uninformed opinion.
It seems to me that the UK music scene has a couple of things that explains their prominence in popular music. First, the fact that there are large and influential record companies in the country. Decca, EMI, Parlophone, etc. I imagine these companies had the ability to market and distribute music worldwide much better than companies in Germany and France, for instance.
I think there is something about a lot of Brits that makes the absorption of aspects of other cultures acceptable and positive. Movements like Northern Soul and ska/reggae after the Windrush arrived in Britain are examples of this. More recently, bhagra and hip-hop are becoming part of popular music. Over here in the US, I think we’re much less adventurous, and even more so since the emergence of the Sony/BMG/Universal behemoth companies and Clear Channel buying out damn near every station in America. We used to watch Top of the Pops and notice how many bands would never be popular in the States because they couldn’t be easily categorized. An artist like Robbie Williams is huge, but he hasn’t cracked the States, mainly because he doesn’t fit a defined category here.
[/QUOTE]
Whew. I smell some anglophilia.
The U.S. incorporated banghra into its pop music more completely and more extensively than the U.K. did, and earlier too (“Get Ur Freak On,” for instance). The U.K. has a very shallow engagement with U.S. hip hop, with many of the most interesting hit records from regional scenes like the South, Texas and the Bay entirely ignored over there. The U.K. does have grime, but that’s still for the most part an underground scene with no commercial potential. And yet, Lady Sovereign, a British grime MC still managed to get her video to no. 1 on TRL (U.S.).
The U.S. has also embraced dancehall music to a far greater extent than the U.K. (Sean Paul is the only star from this scene to really break out outside the U.S.) and America’s extensive Spanish population has ensured a healthy interest in reggaeton, while that scene is barely a footnote in U.K. pop. Robbie Williams is huge in the U.K. but not in the U.S., firstly because he is shite and the U.S. has a much lower tolerance for novelty (Crazy Frog) and secondly because the U.S. has a much more interesting boy-band-gone-solo star in Justin Timberlake. And from all this, what is the U.K.'s biggest story of 2006? The Arctic Monkeys. The Brits are getting a hard-on over a bunch of boys playing guitars. Terribly original, that.
That’s not to say British music is bad; there is plenty to like about it. But it is entirely foolish to get suckered into believing that another country’s pop music scene is peculiarly fertile simply as a result of its exoticism. The reason a bunch of acts on Top of the Pops wouldn’t get play in the U.S. is not a fault of America. It’s because the U.K. is a different culture, and has different rules for what succeeds. The same applies to the U.S.
The British suceeded in the mid '60s rock stakes because in the '60s they had a bunch of white people who could play the music black people were playing without attracting the racial barriers black people experienced in the U.S. You covered a lot of the key points with the rest of your post, but you buy into a lot of rock-crit cliche on the way.
There’s all sorts of black British music which has no reason or need to break into the American market. A ‘shallow engagement’ with American hip-hop is perhaps because people are happy doing their own thing?
I can wax rhapsodic about British music if the situation requires, but in this thread I felt a reminder of the negatives was due.