Why does Britain churn out such a disproportionate number of awesome rock bands?

Cafe Society
1

I recall hearing about the “British Invasion” of the 1960s as a kid and figured it was one of those quirky things that just happens now and again. But the domination hasn’t stopped imo and I’m hoping someone can offer an explanation as to why. I can understand why countries such as Afghanistan or Belize (e.g.) may not produce an overwhelming amount of fab rock groups (by US stds)…populations are relatively low, kids may not have access to early music training, or even exposure to American style music, bigger fish to fry and cultural differences could account for a lot as well.

But for fuck’s sake, the good ole US of A has approx 315,000,00 people compared to GB’s measly 63,000,00 and I should think our guitar teachers are just as good as theirs, our pot and lsd just as effective, not to mention that we value our rock n roll so the drive is out there amongst American youth. So why does GB continue to kick our ass in the rock music dept? The British invasion could have been a fluke, but how do your explain Pink Floyd, Genesis, David Bowie, Elton John, Cold Play, Depeche Mode…the list goes on and on and on and on.

Many of you may disagree with the premise of this question (that Britain does indeed produce more talented rock stars per capita than the US), but you of course are wrong. And there simply must be a logical explanation for this. Any theories?
*wasn’t sure where to put this question. Mods can feel free to move as they see fit.

2

Cold Play?

3

Check out this list. Apparently, the biggest selling rock bands worldwide are…

[ol]
[li]The Beatles[/li][li]Led Zeppelin[/li][li]Queen[/li][li]Pink Floyd[/li][li]The Rolling Stones[/li][/ol]

…with a conservative estimate of 1.4 billion record sales between them. And they’re all UK bands.

But in that same tier, you have…

[ol]
[li]Elvis Presley[/li][li]Michael Jackson[/li][li]Madonna[/li][/ol]

And as you go down that list, a trend becomes apparent: the US produces successful solo artists whereas the UK produces bands. People like Bowie and Elton John are outliers.

I think the answer may lie in the prototypes: the Beatles and Elvis, both defining the quintessential artists of the UK and the US respectively. Also, the U.S. seems more personality-driven, which would naturally then focus on solo acts.

4

I believe it has to do with geography. It’s not so much that Great Britain has better bands, it’s that they find the good ones before they give up and get a real job.

Great Britain is much smaller than the US, so someone with regional success can gain more visibility. I believe that England is the size of Kansas. The record companies have smaller area to survey for good bands. State. Fewer people may also mean that you’re competing against a proportionally smaller number of other bands.

When you begin to make a name for yourself in the UK, you go to London to hone your skills. Everyone’s in one place and you feed off that vibe. In the US, you go to Chicago or New York or LA. California likes some types of music better than New York, the South favors something else. It’s harder to build a national consensus. There are a lot of bands that are big in England and never make a dent in the US market.

I think there’s a different fashion sense and of course they also talk funny. That makes them stand out from home-grown US bands.

5

Racism in the US played at least a part. Rock and roll came out of white kids covering black blues and R&B songs. This didn’t play well with their parents’ generation, especially in the American South. Older (white) people thought that allowing the kids to listen to rock music would lead to a breaking down of morals–their kids would start drinking and doing drugs, having sex and associating with blacks and white trash (Well, it *did *happen, but in hindsight it was a *good *thing.)

Older folks in Great Britain didn’t see rock and roll as a threat in the way that parents in the US saw it. British musicians free to cover Little Richard, Howling Wolf and the rest. They could also copy the style and sound like this (Beatles) instead of like this (Pat Boone.) Sure, that’s an exaggeration, but it gets the point across.

6

Moving over to Cafe Society.

7

I’m not sure that the premise is correct. Britain has, over the period in question, had about a quarter the population of the US. So all things being equal, you would expect American acts to outnumber British acts by about four to one. Looking through that list of top-selling acts, it only seems to be at the very top level that British acts are slightly over-represented. In the “75 million to 99 million records” section, for example, there are twelve American acts and two British.

(nitpick: Kansas is not similar in size to England. It is about the same size as Great Britain (the island) )

8

Although it’s a fairly meaningless statistic, as it’s population is only about 1/3 the size of London.

9

Yes, but to be fair the previous poster was using it to illustrate the difference in population density.
-edit- Although, having read the post properly, I’m not so sure about that.

10

Nitpicks are fun. Especially when used to deflect the original point. I didn’t compare the populations of Great Britain and Kansas, I compared the area to be surveyed. The UK has twice the population of California squeezed into a space half the size of that state.

That said, there are five times as many people competing for a spot on America’s Top 40 than for Top of the Pops. Most research papers on the topic found that the smaller area and lesser population made it easier for bands to be “discovered” by the music press in the UK.

11

I started to go down through the list of best-selling artists, eliminating any who weren’t American or British or who weren’t rock and roll artists.

The Beatles
Elvis
Madonna
Michael Jackson
Elton John
Led Zeppelin
Queen
Mariah Carey
Pink Floyd
The Rolling Stones
Billy Joel
Whitney Houston
Phil Collins
Aerosmith
Genesis
Stevie Wonder
The Backstreet Boys
Bon Jovi
Chicago
The Eagles
Bruce Springsteen

At that point I quit, but let me give a few reasons why your generalization is invalid. First, you’re limiting yourself to just rock and roll. There are a lot of groups on the list from other genres, primarily country. There are very few significant country artists in the U.K. There are a lot of them in the U.S. If you start by throwing out half the major artists in the U.S., of course you’re going to reduce the proportion of major artists as compared to the U.K.

The really important British artists almost all come from the 1960’s and 1970’s. I don’t think that British rock and roll has been disproportionately influential since then. It’s just that there were several extremely influential artists during that early period. Also, I’m not really interested in arguing with you about whether the American artists on that list were as good as the British ones. You like the British ones better. Fine, that’s your taste. I might even agree with you. So what? I don’t need to hear the usual snide comments saying that if I don’t happen to agree with your tastes, I must be a worthless piece of garbage.

12

I think history counts for a lot in this. (Of course, I always think history counts for a lot as the answer to every question, so feel free to grab your grain of salt, which I hope you carry around with you for emergencies.)

Start with the 1950s. The U.S. had a mainstream culture of singers of standards. You could find some groups who harmonized while singing standards but both Broadway and the movies reinforced that culture and fed it endless streams of songs.

Groups were found in a variety of niche cultures. Country & western. Race music. Blues. Jazz. Folk. Early rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and rockabilly emerged by blending a few of these niches together. You got Bill Haley and Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and all those other pioneers. The industry was used to promoting individuals, of whichever color, so they were always thought of as a frontman with anonymous backup players. Chess and Motown, the two most influential companies for black musicians, kept this up. Doo-wop groups were somewhat of an exception, but they followed the old path of the harmonizers and didn’t play instruments. When individuals broke out, they stayed individuals, like Dion and Frankie Avalon and Fabian. The industry drove this pattern, and it continued because there wasn’t a good path for any groups to make it otherwise.

That started changing in 1960 when the Ventures and other surf groups made it big as groups. The fact that they only did instrumentals was less of a problem then than now because instrumental records had a long tradition of making the charts. The Beach Boys and the Four Seasons both started in 1962 and both were instant successes. That should have tipped the scales but didn’t. My guess as to why is that there still wasn’t the circuit of small clubs that allowed them to build up their expertise and create a fan base before going national. Look at the brilliant teams of songwriters that are called (wrongly) the Brill Building sound - Goffin-King; Greenwich-Barry; Mann-Weil. They fed their music straight to producers who recorded singers backed by session musicians. The groups existed for radio.

Britain had a completely different history, or at least different in the details. The 1950s started with singers of standards, but without the Broadway/Hollywood homegrown talent stream. It didn’t have the radio culture of dozens of small stations in every city that played niche music. The complete split between blacks and whites in music wasn’t enforced. But it did have a tradition of music halls that led the new generation of entrepreneurs to create a club circuit where being a loud and raucous group was a better draw than an individual crooner.

Natural selection at work. In America, individuals striving for radio play was the better career move. In Britain groups striving for club stardom was.

This world did change after The Beatles. America developed a club circuit; the BBC started playing rock music. You can still find all kinds of places where the two diverged. America’s Sixties ended in huge traumas that the British Sixties avoided, so soothing California Pop and radio pap evolved as a response in one where progressive music emerged in the other. Punk and then New Wave were the response to progressive but the U.S. went into Rap and Disco and Metal because its sets of disaffected youth were black and gay and alienated suburbanites. Grunge wasn’t going to be replicated in Britain, Britpop wasn’t a trend in America.

Huge overlaps occurred, of course. Imitators of all genres abounded on both sides. But I think that looking at the state of music in the 1950s and then the pattern of evolution and response to local variations thereafter explain most of the differences. And there’s a lot of envy on both sides. The British kids bonkers for black bluesmen in the 60s couldn’t understand why we utterly ignored them while American kids who hated Top 40 radio in the 70s wanted the complicated advanced music of the progs and couldn’t get why the punks hated them for being able to play their instruments.

Different environments create different niches filled by different evolution. Happens in music, too.

13

I think you’re making too strong a link between noted political events of the time and the types of music that we associate with those periods. All countries go through crises from time to time. Britain had traumatic episodes too, particularlry in the 1970s. I have heard people say that that is where (British-style) punk came from. So the same cause seems to be getting the credit, if “credit” is the right word, for diametrically opposite styles of music - West coast pop in the US, and the Sex Pistols et al in Britain. Truth is, "soothing pap "was also massively popular in Britain in the 70s (Demis Roussos, anyone?). Soothing pap is always popular, everywhere.

14

I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. Proportionate to population, this list shows a heavy preponderance of British acts, concentrated towards the top. What is invalid?

The OP’s point, and question, was specifically about rock. To point out that American musicians predominate in other musical genres is irrelevant. The very strong, even dominant British presence in rock is particularly remarkable given that (like country) the rock genre genre had its origins and most of its roots in America.

ETA: Incidentally, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston are rock ‘n’ roll acts? :dubious:

15

My point was that the British music scene is mostly rock and roll. The American music scene is more diverse. In particular, a lot of the American music scene is country. If you take 40% of the American music scene and compare it with 80% of the British music scene, the fact that there are five times as many Americans as Britons in the entire population should mean that one can expect the number of important American rock and roll artists to be two and a half times as many as important British rock and roll artists, not five times as many. And if you look through that list I posted, that’s not too far from what you see.

And if you’re going to say that Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston aren’t rock and roll, then you’re going even further in cutting down on the proportion of the American music scene that’s rock and roll. If Carey and Houston are part of some other genre of music entirely, then that genre is also much less common in the U.K. And what about rap? Rap is much more common in the U.S. than in the U.K., and if you eliminate it from rock and roll, you’re cutting down even further on the proportion of the American music scene that can be considered rock and roll. So then you’re talking about 25% of the American music scene as compared to 75% of the British music scene. This means that, given that the U.S. has a population five times as great as the U.K., we would expect the number of important rock and roll artists in the U.S. to be (.25 * 5)/(.75 * 1), which equals approximately 1.67 times as big. So if anything the number of important American rock and rollers is more than you might expect from population and proportion of the music scene. There are a lot of major British rock and roll artists because they have specialized in it, while the American music scene is much more diverse.

16

It’s interesting that you would deny MC or WH’s rock-and-roll credentials. Yes, they are commonly known as R&B artists, but rock and roll is R&B. You do not have to be a cladist to believe this. MC and WH are rock and roll in the same way that Rod Stewart and George Michael are. You can put them in more specific categories (Stewart had that disco phase, MC frequently forays into hip hop, WH’s music is also “adult contemporary”), but the umbrella term that links them is “rock and roll”.

Rock and roll is not the same as rock, which spurred off of “rock and roll” in the same way that hip hop did. Rock and roll has a beat you can dance to and catches you with its hook more than its riff. It also has a tendency for soulful vocals, particularly in ballad form.

The US pwned the world when it comes to rock and roll and continues to do so. It’s just that the British have always been able to make rock and roll cooler than mainstream (white) American performers have, and I attribute this to their reduced inhibition regarding racial crossing-over. There are tons of Americans who believe that rock and roll was invented by the Beatles, even with all that blatant chuckberrying that Paul McCartney does in their early hits.* White American performers that covered “black” songs were not nearly as adventurous, and I think it hurt them (which is why Elvis was so different and good). Also, think about all the white performers who have appeared during the early days of Soul Train. David Bowie. Elton John. Average White Band. White Americans just didn’t have the balls to cross-over like those cats did.

(Looking at my music collection, most of the white artists that I have represented are British or Irish.)

*I’ve encountered two people with this view, and on both occasions I had to lay the smackdown on them.

17

Woah, fighting words :D. I would modify that a bit and say that the British music scene is also very diverse, as are the music scenes in any populous first-world country. But the type of acts that are succesful enough to make it outside their home country may tend to be of a type, like all those British synth-pop groups who suddenly became successful in the US with the advent of MTV. That was largely down to the cultural accident of music videos being slightly ahead of the game in the UK at the time. I guess the question boils down to why does <cultural group x> seem to excel at <music style y>? And the answer is “random cultural factors that no-one can explain or predict.”

18

I stand by my statement that the American music scene is more diverse than the British music scene. This doesn’t mean that you can’t find some non-rock-and-roll music in the U.K. All I’m claiming is that rock and roll is a noticeably larger proportion of the music scene in the U.K. than it is in the U.S. You might not notice this if you take the average music interests of American posters to the SDMB as being typical of the American population. It’s not. Judging by the threads started here, there are a lot fewer country and rap fans among the American posters here than you would expect if the Americans on the SDMB were typical of the American population. Country and rap are quite popular in the U.S., and incidentally I’m not saying that as a fan of them, because I’m not. Rock and roll is more popular than either one of them in the U.S., but it’s not a lot more popular than them, and if you put country and rap together they have more American fans than rock and roll does. In contrast, rock and roll is a larger proportion of the music scene in the U.K.

19

Some interesting theories…

Lobot’s observation that the UK produces more great bands and the US turns out more solo artists brings up another thought. IME bands from the UK sound MUCH better live than do US bands*. By “better” I mean that their live music sounds very similar to their recording studio works. Off the top of my head, the best concert performances I have ever seen are U2, Genesis, Pink FLoyd, & Elton John. I love American rock bands too, but their live music does not have the same quality as their recorded tracks* imo. Could it be because UK bands tend to stay together for decades and thus have more experience/practice as a group, whereas American bands tend to split and the front man goes solo*? No idea how to look into the validity of that theory, but I much prefer live versions of UK rock and recorded versions of American rock*.

Nunzio Tavulari’s geography theory is also interesting and might explain why you don’t see a whole lot of kick ass Canadian rock bands*. Canada has a population of 35,000,000 and a similar economy/culture as the US and GB. So based solely on #s, one would think they’d have at least 1/2 the number of top rock groups as GB. But perhaps their likelihood of getting discovered over such a vast area is significantly lower, so they just go to work as a lumberjack and their talent is never developed or seen by the world.
The history angle is also interesting and could account for a lot. And while this can never be a scientific discussion since there are just too many variables and so much subjectivity to the matter…I continue to be impressed with the quality and quantity of rock music produced by our friends across the pond.

This could be it, but I still think it’s fun and interesting to speculate.

*this is a rash generalization based on my experience and personal taste. If you think Tammy Wynette or Anne Murray smokes the living shit out of Pink Floyd and Genesis, that isn’t relevant (thank you njtt) as I am specifically talking about rock music. Also, this is not a scientifically provable topic, so no, I cannot provide a cite.

20

I think we need to clarify whether you mean “diverse” in relative terms or absolute terms.

If you mean that American musical culture has more diversity than that of less populous countries such as Britain, then fine. It is not too surprising, what with there being more people in the US.
If, on the other hand, you mean that, due to the United States’ larger population, it has a wider variety of musical tastes per capita, then that is quite a claim.

It is not clear to me which of those you mean.