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.
It was Sam Perkins who said “If I could find a white boy with the black sound, I could make a billion dollars.”
Whereupon he sold the rights to Elvis Presley to Tom Parker for $35k.
Oops!
Don’t worry too much about Sam, though: he was one of the initial investors in Holiday Inn, made a killing on it.
As far as the OP is concerned, I disagree with the premise. Hell, Britain didn’t produce a single “rock group” of note until a decade after the genre became popular here in the US.
And this:
Er… right. Never heard of the Athens, Seattle, Detroit, etc music scenes? REM? Outkast? Nirvana? Ludacris? Motown?
Agreed. Also, getting radio play on Radio 1 has been all that’s needed for many bands to break it in the UK, with no American equivalent.
I smell some anglophobia 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 acknowledge the and deny the charges of anglophilia I can wax rhapsodic about British music if the situation requires, but in this thread I felt a reminder of the negatives was due.
I do, however, feel that British music is not at the top of its game at the moment. There is plenty of interesting black British music worth considering, and I see grime at the forefront of this. However, when I referred to this genre of music as being uncommercial, I meant within the U.K. itself. While popularity isn’t a good means to evaluate the worth of a form of music, I fear that grime has lost the vitality it had in its formative years due to a lack of heights to scale; the scene has got lost in a maze of pirate radio and underground recordings. Earlier forms of dance music such as 2 step, drum n bass and jungle seem to have been somewhat left by the wayside. Nevertheless, the emergence of dubplate is an interesting phenomenon, and one that I am woefully uninformed on.
British rock music seems to be stagnating in spite of its large talent pool, mostly, I feel, because the scene and the public currently idolizes staid and conservative notions as to what a rock band should be. Placing a premium on ordinariness and traditionalism probably dates back to Oasis, but in recent years, this has incarnated itself as an undue fascination in dullards like the Kaiser Chiefs and Razorlight in favor of genuine talents like Bloc Party. Franz Ferdinand got its due, though, so not all is lost. On the other side of this same traditionalist coin, the fetishism of Radiohead’s least interesting aspects begat the terminally dull Coldplay, and its even less interesting brethren Travis, Keane, Snow Patrol and any number of others. Even worse, this sensitive guitar strummer shit has manifested itself in the endlessly irritating output of sensitive crooners like James Blunt, James Morrison or Paolo Nutini.
In pop music, Britain has been interesting, but - and I depart from the views of a lot of critics here - unsuccessful. Acts like Girls Aloud and the Sugababes are messy in the worst way. The best recent British pop has been, not unlike its American counterpart, at the hands of a small number of auteurs, notably Stuart Price and Richard X. Unlike their American counterparts, however, these men have less consistency.
Sorry - just to clear something up - that’s Sam PHILLIPS - the head of Sun records. Carl Perkins of Blues Suede Shoes fame was one of his acts, along with The Killer and The King…
As for the other posts, I think **e-bow ** is doing a great job of describing the current state of affairs, based on my knowledge of the US and UK scenes. Any thoughts, e-bow, on my comments about the 50’s and 60’s? I didn’t add that in early-60’s UK, the country was just emerging from WW2-inflicted recession and there was a new crop of WW2-born, now teens with more money they had before to spend on music and a hunger to express themselves…
Oh - and do you use an e-bow if and when you play guitar?
Rishi Rich was remixing bhangra in the UK from the early '90s. Missy’s song came out in 2001.
I don’t get this. Hip-hop is an American form, but there are UK variants - The Streets, Kano, So Solid Crew, Goldie Lookin’ Chain. I think Mike Skinner did pretty well for himself, and both So Solid Crew and GLC had top 10 hits. There’s no particular reason why regional American styles would necessarily catch on the UK - there are emerging regional styles. Hell, I live in Boston and nobody listens to chopped and screwed up here. It’s not like American regional styles are necessarily appreciated all over America. I should also mention that Malcolm McLaren had a hit in the UK with “Buffalo Gals” in 1983 and the Rock Steady Crew had a Top 10 hit with “Hey You” in 1983. Run-DMC released their first single in 1983.
There were a significant number of UK artists incorporating hip-hop into their music, like New Order working with Arthur Baker, Afrika Bambataa working with John Lyndon, and The Clash.
You’re talking to a half Jamaican here. Early dancehall, such as people like Yellowman had an significant following in the UK from the 1980s. I have some of those records on vinyl here. Shabba Ranks charted in the UK before he was known in the US in the early 1990s. If you want to stretch a little bit you can look at Sly and Robbie from that same period. Toasting itself can be found as far back as the 1980s with Ranking Roger from The Beat. If we want to talk West Indian music, I don’t think it can be denied that the UK was a much more fertile base for ska, dub, and reggae than the US. Reggaeton, with its Latin American stylings, is obviously more popular in the US where there are sizable pockets of Puerto Rican, Panamanian, and other Latin American immigrants.
Timberlake is much more talented than Williams but it’s easy to categorize Timberlake - he’s a R&B/pop artist. Williams is certainly more interesting as far as his eclectic musical tastes. I wager to you that Timberlake wouldn’t be viable if he performed the styles that Williams does. He has to walk a razor-thin line with projects that build him street cred and distance him from his boy band roots… if he did a camp song he’d be sunk. And yes, there is a tolerance for novelty records in the UK that America doesn’t seem to have, thank God.
I’m not talking from the perspective of a UK fanboy. I have lived in both countries and I can tell you segmentation is the US is real. That’s not a “fault,” that’s how it is. In some ways that might be okay. If you really love country music, it’s probably good to delve deep into the genreIn Austin, we had a pop station, a couple of country stations, hard rock, and R&B in the 1980s. So you have to flip the dial to hear all of what’s going on. In the UK, I pretty much listened to just Radio 1 and Radio 2. That’s where I first heard Afrika Bambataa and Adam Ant - on the same station. I don’t think you’d find many stations in America with such a diverse playlist, just because the standard is segmentation - separate stations for separate genres. There is also no national radio that everyone gets. If you live in rural Iowa, you’re just not going to hear the same music that kids hear in NYC or LA. MTV and the internet has done a lot to change that, but I can’t say I’m happy with the results.
This point you make is contradictory. You had artists willing to blend and cross genres, and it was accepted on the value of the music, rather than who created the music. And that didn’t just go away in the 1960s. Remember how Michael Jackson broke the color barrier on MTV in the 1980s? Remember how Vanilla Ice was the first artist to have a rap #1 single in 1991? The idea of mixing and borrowing from other genres is something that has been historically met with resistance in America, though for those artists who do it well are rewarded (Elvis, Ray Charles). And of course that is changing. That’s my personal take. I fail to see how your disagreements with my points equals “rock-crit cliche.”
In the UK, the late 50’s had produced a unique group of male teenagers, all born right around the end of WWII. They grew up in a country that had won the war, but not without a terrific cost. In the major cities, kids came of age in a landscape of bombed-out buildings and shell-shocked parents.
A lot of them didn’t do well in school, or ended up in art schools. It was natural thing for them to form bands; it made a little money, it wasn’t work, and it attracted the birds. That scene was exposed to a lot of American music by way of soldiers and sailors. That’s where the guys in the first couple of British Invasions got their chops, by listening to blues records. They copied the music, made it their own, and went onwards and upwards from there.
> The thing that’s always really puzzled me is that the Brits, being as reserved
> and hidebound as they tend to be, managed to produce the most balls-out rock
> ever.
Somebody who believes that the Brits are, in general, reserved and hidebound compared with Americans has been watching too much Masterpiece Theatre* In certain ways they are more reserved and hidebound than Americans, but in other ways they are definitely less so. It’s more complicated than you might think.
*Masterpiece Theatre was a long-running program on PBS which showed British TV programs of a particularly high-brow character. (It still exists, but it’s slightly different these days.) They loved to do British-made TV movies/miniseries made from famous British novels, for instance. It was a favorite of American Anglophiles and served to convince them that Brits are “reserved and hidebound.”
I guess it depends on what you mean by “rock group”. If we’re going back to rock’n’roll then it was only 3 years between the formations of Buddy Holly and the Crickets [1957] and The Beatles [1960] - only 1 year if you count them playing as The Quarrymen [1958]. Then there were **The Shadows **who released their first records in 1959.
Using **Bill Haley and The Comets **as your starting point [1953] you can get the gap up to 7 years at most.
:smack:
That should read “half of the band are English.”
Which makes them British.
I do think that the current import of music from the UK is pretty unspectacular. How is Keane remotely popular? There are hipsters who glom onto anything from the UK, but nothing strikes me as groundbreakingly great as of late.
Britain is pretty densely populated. Take for example Liverpool, it was a major port in the 60’s. Within 30 miles of Liverpool, you have a load of major urban centres: Manchester, Salford, Chester, Preston, Bolton, Wigan, Blackburn etc. Music coming from the US had a big impact on the surrounding areas. There’s a reason why Northern Soul was popular in the north (it was also popular in London, another port with a similar density of urban centres around it).
There was nothing to do. If you grew up in the north in the 60’s and were working class, your life was pretty much planned out - either work down a pit, work as a dock worker or work in a mill. Hardly an inspiring alternative to the rock and roll lifestyle. This is still pretty much true. Go on any council estate and you’ll find a disproportionate number of bands (IME, anyway).
Britain has crazes which I don’t think America gets, possibly due to the size and density differences. Madchester, Britpop etc. etc. produce dozens of bands over a shorrt period of time, most of whom are instantly forgotten.
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.