What went wrong with British music?

Woebot

Well-known member
Quoting blissblogger from the Dylan thread:

"The mystery, which warrants its own thread, is what went wrong - why did this two decade period when Britain was co-regent with America in terms of the global Anglophone pop-rock hegemony come to an end? Did UK music just turn crap, or did America get isolationist, or what? "

If I'd venture to make a guess it must have had to do with something as abtract as a waning of British confidence, because I do think it can be traced back to British music itself which at some point, maybe Bruce Springsteen's "Born In the USA" took its eyes off the "prize" (if indeed it was actually fixing them on something more worthwhile- vis a vis Acid House).

Perhaps Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms" and U2's "Joshua Tree" conceding defeat to American imagery in such a flaccid manner, perhaps highlighting to the pointlessness of a UK version of US music (when The Stones were never quite that) are signposts.

Also there's something about the UK music industry becoming enfeebled or maybe entrenched just before Acid House. The bottom line is that the majors (or at least the ambitious Independents), who were essentially quite fluid with Hippie Rock and Punk just didnt know how to convert Acid House into proper sales. The Sex Pistols and The Clash both had big deals, but who do we get from Acid House? Er Adamski? I dont think the claims that the music were totally uncommercial holds water, I mean, how much more listenable is "Never Mind The Bollocks" than LFO's "LFO" or The Ragga Twins "Reggae Owes Me Money"?

I'd also heap blame on the major label's "Remix Culture" which deals with the burgeoning underground by inviting it to remix Kylie and Madonne. Sheer cowardice.
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Nothing happened to English music. You still have massive English bands and the rare really orignal or interesting ones (Jesus and Mary Chain, MBV, Spirtualized, Chemical Bros, the Streets - generally bands that don't fit into the 'scenes' perfectly) just like American bands. The media and rock critcs ran out of things to say, and have no fucking interesting ideas - hence the barrage of 'retro' , 'history' magzines like Mojo etc.

Seriously I couldn't name one interesting rock writer to come out of anywhere in the last 10 years, and none have any musical history chops to save themselves. Add to the fact that there sOOOOOooooo many bands releasing stuff, how do you keep up?

Then you've got like these 21 year-old noodnicks who are pissed off with having Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park or Oasis or System of a Clown as 'rock legends' - I mean have you looked at the 'resurrected' version of 'Creem' - what a sad lame excuse for hipness. Why not start a fresh, decent, informed blog (or Fanzine if yr game) than rely on a 'trademark' that 3 people actually had actual copies of?

So don't fear, there's still English bands making worthy contributions to the continuum, even the odd good one. I mean shit, Detroit techno was the first *black* music totally influenced by white-boy English prancers from frucks sake!!!!

The Poms are the most fanatical pop music fans in the universe, and they're always gonna be up for it for a long time to come (even the Judeo/Christian/Islam dogmas!), and there'll alway be soundtracks needed!

I mean thats just a part of living in England, really! ;)
 
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stelfox

Beast of Burden
matt, this that's a pretty convoluted opening post and there's lots that needs re-reading a few times before it gels. maybe an edit might make it easier to formulate a proper reply!
the idea of waning british confidence is an interesting one because i'd actually say that when confidence in "britishness" is at a low ebb, the results can be pretty amazing - look at the whole post-punk period. the whole country was in a rare old state and there were all kinds of conflicts across race/class/gender/intellectual lines. this actually had the effect of fuelling a certain resisitance that, in many cases (scritti, gang of four etc) went on to become pop, a real tangible part of the cultural landscape.
people understood it was possible to do something new and subversive inside the machine and were aiming for penetration, spreading ideas and extending discourse.
this had changed a lot around the time of acid house, not least because it the primacy of the underground had become paramount in terms of establishing music's credibility.
you mention dire straits and U2 as the point it all went wrong and, depending on your viewpoint, it's certainly possible to see this, but i'm not buying it because they weren't bad and they actually made it in terms of popularity. of course they weren't vanguard bands doing anything genuinely revolutionary at that point, but they both had and, in u2's case, continue to have worthwhile moments.
acid house, which you can actually talk about as british music in the incarnation we all know it, did actually become pop relatively early on (it never could in the states - too gay too black post disco backlash, but many of these signifiers didn't translate here so overtly to british ears and were no bar to its acceptance) what with steve silk hurley, farley jackmaster funk etc and had the chance to so so much more, but it was never going to fulfil its potential in the uk solely thanks to its gatekeepers .
the most significant acid house advocates generally came from two distinct backgrounds: soulboy or indie. although they'd like to seem themselves as poles apart they both posses the same ethos of guardianship, the veneration of the obscure (also worth noting that now indie has been absorbed well and truly into the mainstream and this mentality hasd been lost to a large degree - you can't pick up a guitar before you're all over the tv and magazines these days - british music is going through a renaissance in terms of global and especially transatlantic popularity. this, of course, doesn't mean that it's great. entryism is not an especially good standpoint to judge a music's quality from).
the genres that actually broke out of this ghetto and became real alternative mainstreams were some distance from these ideas. hardcore, jungle, d&b and, 2step garage were more rooted in hip-hop and street music, again music with a core ethos that wholeheartedly embraced the concept and possibility of mainstream acceptance. therefore i'd contend that british music is at its shittiest and least effective when it has its head stuck up its arse, wilfully cloisters itself in its own worth, subscribes to the tenets of indie/soulboy obscurantism and makes it hard for people to love it.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
actually i think a key force behind this shift is hip hop

hip hop gradually moved to become the center of pop culture, and Britain has never really come up with a take on it that has been able to wow Americans or be accepted by them as a contribution
-- as proud as "we" (assuming yer british) can feel about jungle, grime etc as UK twists on hip hop, it's pretty easy to see why they haven't made inroads in American beyong that really small zone of anglophile hipsterdom

that isn't the whole story though

it's across the board -- take metal, that's a British invention, all the biggest original metal bands were British, but if you look at metal now, the stuff that American white youth are still primarily into, is there a single major UK metal band among them? this despite the fact that a lot of those nu-metal groups are really popular in Britain with angst suburban white kids

beyond all the obvious British rock greats and people who made advances in the form in the 60s and 70s,--beatles stones kinks cream pink floyd led zep sabbath king crimson etc etc, on and on and on, it's staggering the UK contribution to rock, i'm not patriotic but the old heart does swell a bit -- beyond all that though britain was really high profile in American radio and retail on the more commercial level -- elton john, rod stewart, ELO, supertramp, 3/5ths of fleetwood mac, etc etc.

then compare that with the nineties, or with now where there's coldplay and a few other things

there's a great mystery about the steep decline in Britain's rock dominance that really intrigues me and strangely hasn't really been addressed as far as i know-- the contrast between the 60s/70s and the 90s/00s (with the 80s being sort of transitional -- lot of uk success in america, but little of it being anything to exactly be proud of -- george michael)

the British deal with their declinined eminence with a sort of "america is stuck in the past and we're so forward looking, that's why electronica was only a blip over there, that's why... and so forth" -- the idea being that it's rock that got stuck while Britain, or the progresseve element of its music culture, kept moving onwards

Americans deal with it by with by rewriting history to downplay the UK's massive contribution (so you get Dave Marsh, who wrote a whole fucking book about the Who, by 1983 he's adopting a "them Limeys don't just get it" stance, saying brits can only soak up rock as mannerism and attitude, and he decried the Second British INvasion duranny types as the New Pop Tarts; Greil Marcus with his own highbrow take on it; the anti-Anglo shift within US underground rock during the 80s -- Sonic Youth, former Raincoats and PiL fans, deciding British bands are just incapable of rocking, similar sentiments from forced exposure et al (partly this was a justified response to how wretched uk "rock" got in the mid-80s -- cult, the mission, sisters of m, grebo, indie) with just a few uk bands honored, like spacemen 3 or billy childish. Carducci blames it all on bowie and then punk destroying the tradition of great British drummers -- again it's that narrative of "the brits forgot how to rock".

why and how though? it certainly felt like British bands lost the ability to rock for much of the Eighties, and it definitely seems to be true today when you listen to all those coldplay type bands and there's just no heat being generated by the rhythm section
 

Chef Napalm

Lost in the Supermarket
From my admittedly isolated North American point-of-view, it all comes down to E, hip hop, and the “death” of disco.

The British Invasion(s) was (were) all about putting a uniquely British spin on American sounds. As others (I forget who and I’m too lazy to look) have stated, the last large-ish musical movement to have a palpable effect on the American consciousness was Punk (Assuming, of course, that one ignores the relatively minor contributions of Brit Poppers like Blur, Suede, and Oasis). At the same time Punk was coming to prominence in North America, Disco was dieing an ugly and very public death. The backlash against the major label tripe released solely to cash in on the “disco fad” was, as I’m sure most of us will remember, a pretty horrid thing to behold. [Aside: I remember thinking years later when I came across a crate of mint Disco gold that the 1979 “Disco Detonation Night” fiasco was our generation’s Nuremburg. Ironically, it’s probably the last time pre-9/11 that Americans stood so united on anything.]

This pushed contemporary dance culture underground in the US, leading to the development of [Chicago] House, [Detroit] Techno, and [Paradise] Garage. Hip Hop also started to come into its own in the early 80s with “The Message” and “Rapper’s Delight”, but it wasn’t until Run DMC hit that rap music really came into the popular consciousness of the American public. “Walk This Way” began the eventual domination of hip hop over popular music. Rather than follow the American’s lead and produce hip hop with home-grown British urban experiences, the UK embraced House instead.

At the same time, Acid House was gaining momentum in the UK, edged along by the introduction of MDMA into the niche previously held by alcohol. As we all know, and as documented in blissblogga’s book, this burgeoned into full-on chart-topping, mega-selling, 100,000 people in a field “rave music”.

Why didn’t House and Techno take off in North America the way it did in Europe? Two reasons: the Disco backlash and the lack of MDMA. With the popularity of Cock-Rock and eventually Grunge in the US in the late 80s/early 90s (rave heyday), the hatred of 4-to-the-floor beat was going on strong. Couple that with the Republican’s aggressive mandate for the Drug Enforcement Agency and the classification of Ecstasy as a Class 1 Illegal Substance, and there was no way that MDMA or Rave was going to impact American popular culture in the way that it had in Europe.

Once the kids tired of what was very much white, middle-class music (Warrant and Pearl Jam), they started looking, as they had in the past, for something new, something alien. Whereas previously they had found that escape in the European interpretations of Black American music, this time they went to the source. They found it in the hardcore urban experience of Thug Rap and the smooth RnB stylings of the likes of Babyface.

Now that the UK finally started producing true British urban experience rap music, meaning Grime, American hip hop is so entrenched as the dominant popular music that it remains to be seen whether Grime will make a dent.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
i absolutely agree that hip-hop is a major factor. the funny thing about british hip-hop (i'm not counting grime here) is that it's mired in the soulboy/indie mentality where "keeping it real" is completely and utterly misconstrued with, generally, the most stultifying results imaginable. realness is no longer an abstract state of being (a way of carrying yourself, living etc) as it is in US rap, it instead becomes sound: a whole wave of hackneyed musical tropes - rehashed premier-style beats and that whole backward-looking true-school aesthetic. us rap is totally the opposite, the idea of realness a personal quality means that the rapper states this and makes it hip-hop, and the producer is free to innovate as far as the music is concerned. hell, given the amount of cultural crossover in london alone, we should have come up with a get UR freak on first by several years. we didn't because when it comes to hip-hop, we're followers, not leaders. grime is changing this and it's totally non-soulboy or indie, so i can only put it limited reach down to being a bit odd for most people and pretty disorganised.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
Chef Napalm said:
[Aside: I remember thinking years later when I came across a crate of mint Disco gold that the 1979 “Disco Detonation Night” fiasco was our generation’s Nuremburg. Ironically, it’s probably the last time pre-9/11 that Americans stood so united on anything.]

.

there's much truth in what you say about discophobia in America -- and certainly explains some of the divergence between uk mainstream and us mainstream in the 90s

HOWEVER

it be closer to truth to say that Disco Detonation was a time when Americans were hugely disunited -- after all disco was massive in America, the bee gees had seven number one singles in a row, saturday night fever sold billions of copies, discothques sprang up in every town, donna summer was huge, all the radio stations went disco and they didn't do that w/o their being consumer demand. it was only cos it got so unbalancedly huge that there was a backlash (whereas in britain there never was one cos it never got so utterly hegemonic)

also it's not like americans don't like dance music. i mean look at the success of madonna, she's a post-disco star, she went house with 'vogue' (it's not like Ray of Light was her first dalliance with those kind of sounds), there's always been club musics of various sorts bubbling away

and there was even a period in the early 90s when housey stuff got in the US charts -- c&c music factory, all that technotronic pump up the jam type stuff, mark mark 'good vibrations', crystal waters, deelite -- it just didn't stick. and the culture around it never moved right into the centre of pop culture in America

but yeah with certain kinds of US rock culture -- alt-rock, metal -- there is certainly a loathing of the dance beat -- it seems a bit more entrenched than it was in the UK alt-rock equivalents , such that indie-rockers, with a bit of help from E, plus the general sense of cultural convulsiveness of the whole rave thing in the UK, could be lured into the dancier zone -- look at the career trajectories of saint etienne, shamen, primal scream, the fucking soup dragons even

whereas your indierock equivs in America would not, by and large, have done so
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
The thing that gets me about the period -- 60s and 70s -- when the UK is level-pegging or outstripping America, what makes it seem so remarkable, is that Britain has a population of less than a quarter of America's. And also, it didn't have the longstanding, deeply-rooted proximity to an indigenous black population and its music. So it does seem like quite an astonishing achievement. And the downward incline from that eminence i think creates a kind of effect akin to the post-imperial blues and identity crisis. An oscillation between delusionary arrogance tinged with insularity (Britpop) and adjustment to being just another peripheral country vis-a-vis the US global pop hegemony.
 

Paul Hotflush

techno head
WOEBOT said:
Perhaps Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms" and U2's "Joshua Tree" conceding defeat to American imagery in such a flaccid manner, perhaps highlighting to the pointlessness of a UK version of US music (when The Stones were never quite that) are signposts.

Come on, the Stones were a shamless bunch of rip-off merchants!

The average standard of UK music has never been that high, but when we do get it right we tend to shit on the yanks. That doesn't happen very often though.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
A few points occured while reading this (great!) thread.

Firstly, i think there is a case to be made that rock in the 60s/70s was better, or at least more rewarding to the listener, than that of today because modern rhythm sections dont have the breadth of influences that their 60s counterparts had (stuff like the byrds tribal gathering or the loose-but-aggressive tom rolls on Fun House, no one plays rock like that now). But i dont think british rock is any more anemic than american rock in this regard: american metal stuff might sound heavier but its all in the production, and making Limp Bizkit sound like coldplay would really just be a case of using different plug ins at mixdown.

Secondly, it seems to me that the differences in racial makeup between britain and the US have a far bigger role to play than lack of MDMA in the US's non-take-up of rave (and racial divisions of course being the root cause of the late 70s disco backlash). Britain is far more racially integrated than the US at a working class level (far less so in the middle class) and hardcore, D&B and garage were racially mixed on a level that would be impossible in the states. Mainstream US radio programmers like thier white music to sound white and visa versa, whereas in Britain we dont really care (which makes me feel a tiny bit patriotic, but there we go...). I think theres a case to make that the US has become more racially polarised since the 70s whereas urban britain, as a byproduct of its increasing class polarisation (ie lumping all the have nots in together) has become more racially integrated. If we all agree that the general trend for the last 40 years has been british re-workings of black american music sold back to white america (and that seems to be the consensus here and on the dylan thread), could these changes have made the the UK pop discourse unintelligable to US ears?

Most importantly... does it matter if the americans arent looking over the atlantic for their aesthetic cues? Its a whole other continent, why should we expect their popular culture to have anything in common with ours? Isnt it a bit unnatural when you think about it? I would rather be part of a pop culture that is rooted in my local geographical area, and all my favorite pop movements are (eg london having a different post-garage sound for each point of the compass).

I reckon the 60s were so fascinating because it was a chance hit, a moment in time where two seperate societies found themselves in step culturally, and its not suprising that they are gradually drifting apart again.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
the racial thing is part of it

(although weren't there some stories in Uk newspapers recently about how segregated the uk is in reality?)

another thing i guess is how this relates to the UK's continuing identity crisis about whether it's part of Europe or feeling more part of this Anglophonic thing that includes America as the dominant partner but also Canada, Australia...

like you could maybe see the electronica years as the UK siding with Europe (even if the initial impetus was imported records from chicago and detroit and nyc)

you could be right though that 60s/70s was a two-decade long fluke

but it leaves a shadow i think

did anyone read the taste makers article in the Guardian? i was reading it and thinking A/ ooh all these sound absolutely horrendous and B/ none of them stand a chance in America. like arctic monkeys, the next oasis/libertines apparently.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
blissblogger said:
weren't there some stories in Uk newspapers recently about how segregated the uk is in reality?)

There were. Trevor Phillips (head of the CRE) made a speech on how he thinks the UK is descending into racial ghettoization along american lines.

There was a very good, detailed rebuttal of the speech in the Observer either last sunday or the week before.

From personal observation i dont think there's any way london is becoming more racially divided. Northern mill towns might have more of a problem with it but even if they do, it's still not on a scale thats comparable to the US.
 

redcrescent

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
the racial thing is part of it.
Also anti-gay sentiments or a reaction against disco's sense of hedonist abandon in general.

Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
loose-but-aggressive tom rolls on Fun House
This makes so much sense. Scott Asheton's drumming is phenomenal: pile-driving but at the same time there is a such a strong Motown soul influenced swing to it.
 

atomly

atomiq one
blissblogger said:
then compare that with the nineties, or with now where there's coldplay and a few other things

The importance of Radiohead and their influence on American hipsterdom cannot be overstated.
 

Chef Napalm

Lost in the Supermarket
blissblogger said:
it be closer to truth to say that Disco Detonation was a time when Americans were hugely disunited -- after all disco was massive in America, the bee gees had seven number one singles in a row, saturday night fever sold billions of copies, discothques sprang up in every town, donna summer was huge, all the radio stations went disco and they didn't do that w/o their being consumer demand. it was only cos it got so unbalancedly huge that there was a backlash (whereas in britain there never was one cos it never got so utterly hegemonic)
True, but the stuff you’re talking about was pre-1979. Saturday Night Fever was 1977. Pre-1979 all of Summer’s stuff was Moroder; 1979 and on it was Quincey Jones and was, to my ears at least, more soul less disco and therefore acceptable in the minds of programmers.

blissblogger said:
also it's not like americans don't like dance music. i mean look at the success of madonna, she's a post-disco star, she went house with 'vogue' (it's not like Ray of Light was her first dalliance with those kind of sounds), there's always been club musics of various sorts bubbling away
Agreed, but Madonna was initially marketed as a New Wave vixen, much the same as Debbie Harry and Sheena Easton. Vogue was a one-off until she did Ray of Light. Same with C+C, Technotronic, Marky Mark, “3am Eternal”, “Groove is in the Heart”, and on and on; dance music, arguably house music, but also rap with a touch of the “novelty hit”. American’s seem to love novelty tracks. Actually, thinking of novelty hits makes me think of Morris and the Minor’s “Stutter Rap”; Britain’s contribution to 80s hip hop culture. :p

blissblogger said:
look at the career trajectories of saint etienne, shamen, primal scream, the fucking soup dragons even
whereas your indierock equivs in America would not, by and large, have done so
I’d put that down to missing MDMA in the equation. The “Love Thug” didn’t exist in North America until Tupac “invented” it, albeit for different reasons.

Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
Secondly, it seems to me that the differences in racial makeup between britain and the US have a far bigger role to play than lack of MDMA in the US's non-take-up of rave (and racial divisions of course being the root cause of the late 70s disco backlash).
Where did you get that from? The problem was an over-saturation of the market with generic mass-produced disco that crystallised into nationwide disco-hatred. I’m not sure that race enters into it, unless you’re referring to homophobia.

Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
Mainstream US radio programmers like thier white music to sound white and visa versa, whereas in Britain we dont really care (which makes me feel a tiny bit patriotic, but there we go...).
Most importantly... does it matter if the americans arent looking over the atlantic for their aesthetic cues? Its a whole other continent, why should we expect their popular culture to have anything in common with ours? Isnt it a bit unnatural when you think about it?
Your point about white programmers liking white music is precisely why America’s youth look to Europe in general and the UK specifically for musical inspiration. It’s far enough away to be alien, yet “white” enough to be acceptable.
 

hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
blissblogger said:
like you could maybe see the electronica years as the UK siding with Europe (even if the initial impetus was imported records from chicago and detroit and nyc)
This is the whole heart of the matter. People schooled in rock history still think of it as an "America vs England" kind of thing, that it's about Brits "conquering" America. But in the nineties, Britain and continental Europe developed rave and electronica as a full blown independent alternative to rock, and they simply didn't need to conquer America. America could continue living in it's rock past and it wouldn't matter, because it was obvious to anyone in the european electronic scene that they were doing pretty much all the innovation being done in at least the first half of the nineties.

If the brits have "lost it", then who are the american alternatives that still have it? What essential and innovative developments have happened within rock in the nineties at all? Personally, I can't see grunge being any less pathetic and retroactive than brit-pop.
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Another important thing about the 'American' rock thing, and Engerlisch too is the cocnept of being able to 'entertain' - IE. The whole razzle, dazzle show sorta thing. Techno, shoegazers, most of the esoteric British and MAerican indie bands bands negated all that. Though the techno/rave extravaganza could only go so far.

I mean from soul groups, to the Stones, KISS, stadium rockers, Iggy, the Cramps, James Browen etc.. etc...part of 'cracking it' in the US is not only having big songs, but a big show. The 'grunge' bands did away with that, but it didn't last long, I mean all those post-grunge acts like NiN and Marilyn Manson - who I think took the whole KISS/Alice Cooper shtick, glam, punk and industrial - but coalesced it into a fantastic 'rock show'.

I mean all the biggest tours are 'rock shows' - lookit at Rowling BOnes as we speak - an awesome multi-media rock show. Even Missy Elliot's live show was dazzling to me, even if everyone hated it's 'syntheticnessness' she is like the Rolling Sotnes of electronica culture.
 

jbs

New member
Even Missy Elliot's live show was dazzling to me, even if everyone hated it's 'syntheticnessness'

I just hated it's shitness.

(and I love, love, LOVE her records)

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