What went wrong with British music?

[qwerty south]

random points on this discussion:

madonna has always been a disco artist. madonna's 'holiday' is tame n.y electro-pop , produced by dj john "jellybean" benitez.

re: the stones: i remember seeing some live tv footage with the band on the stage and a black session saxophonist 'on the floor' nearby. hmmm...

america is the main musical influence on the music industry. fact. gospel and blues are the foundations of rock and roll and pop. hip hop is the modern blues in many ways.

leadbelly influenced lonnie donnegan who influenced the beatles.

would u2 be so big if they sang in irish accents?

 

[treblekicker]

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.

I would argue against that. In America throughout the nineties there was a progressive spirit that produced new innovative strains of rock - look at lo-fi, post-rock, the Elephant 6 guys, K Records, Kill Rock Stars to name but a few. There were individuals, labels and groups that did do new things. Alright, grunge wasn't part of that but the post-stuff and the many other strains around the same time did do so.

As for the UK, I think this Pitchfork article provides food for thought...

I think one interesting strand is how in the 80s both in the UK and US, the path of rock progression was lost - bands stopped being rock and started being percieved as alternative or indie because they didn't become big - Husker Du, The Minuteman, REM didn't break through as they were expected to for example. We're still seeing the fall out from that now.

 

[hamarplazt]

I would argue against that. In America throughout the nineties there was a progressive spirit that produced new innovative strains of rock - look at lo-fi, post-rock, the Elephant 6 guys, K Records, Kill Rock Stars to name but a few.

In what way was lo-fi innovative?

Post-rock was a bit more interesting, but was also a combination of different strategies from the past - kraut, postpunk, shoegazer, even some prog...

It'll probably allways be possible to find separate names that are so odd and intractable that you'll have to call them innovative... but then, that's not really an innovation for rock as such, because the very idiosyncrasy making them unique is also making it impossible for others to really build on it. Jazz and "classical" have been this way for years. And electronica is heading there too.

 

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

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.

It cant just have been a case of over-saturation. Britain three years ago was saturated with generic mass-produced teen pop, but it didnt result in Comiskey Park-style mass destruction (shame really, I’d have been up for it).

I'm sure it was the same for the vast majority of american consumers in 1979, but the hardcore anti-disco backlash was led by white rockers engaged in a war against this supposedly unamerican music, which mirrored the 50s moral panic about RnB. Disco is obviously music of black origin but, more pertinantly, it was of recent enough black origin in 1979 to spook the true rock patriots, unlike 70s AOR (which was distantly blues-derived, but sounding pretty caucasian by the late 70s).

As american culture moved to the political right during the 80s, this attitude seeped into the mainstream white America (MWA) as a stance against 'fag music' - a term which at first sight is straight up homophobia, but i'd argue is best understood as a combination of homophobia and racism into a general fear and suspicion of musical otherness.

To me this is ultimately a product of racial divisions because disco amplified the elements of black music that MWA is least happy with – a primacy of rhythm, facilitating an ecstatic loss of self in the listener; sensuality, above and beyond the crushing force of heavy rock (the most basic, brutal sensuality, and thus the only one acceptable to MWAers), and a certain sexual ambiguity, which is blatant in disco but can be traced right back to the blues with it’s hard travlin’ men brought low with fear and trouble (an erosion of male identity). Obviously these are the very things that make the music appeal to gay cliques, which only serves to further piss off MWA.

For proof of how far back these strands have been intertwined, look at 50s anti-communist propaganda (…he may associate with negroes…he may walk in an affected manner…) – but as I say, I think this attitude has hardened among MWA since the early 80s and has kyboshed the chances of UK developments in rave/electronica or indie rock (‘haircut bands’) having the impact in America that previous UK pop movements enjoyed.

As for mainstream hip hop, it has only been able to prosper through an extensive purge of the elements listed above: modern rap focuses on the personality, meaning that the artists can be co-opted into the mainstream celebrity culture where the power of the music is nulled. And the personalities themselves are for the most part utterly dominant, masculine, playa figures (andre 3000 being the honourable exception, and how far would he get in a solo career?). No ambiguity here. That’s what it took to make rap acceptable to WMA.

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.

OK, I accept that individuals might follow this path, maybe in significant numbers – I don’t know either way. But I cant see any evidence for this happening on a mass level, like the british invasion in the 60s. Unless there’s an underground army of smiths/jungle/grime influenced bands in the states that I dont know about.

 

[Buick6]

Considerng how some of the biggest and most influential acts EVER have been GAY I find it total and utter bollocks about all this homophobia codsdollop.

1. LITTLE RICHARD
2. CLIFF RICHARD
3. LIBERACE
4. LOU REED
5. BOWIE
6. GEORGE MICHAEL
7. ELTON JOHN
8. MICHALE STIPE
9. HALFORD
10. CULTURE CLUB/BOY GEORGE
11. PET SHOP BOYS

The are all GAY men and are all MASSIVE, MASSIVE commercial acts that even the WMD or MWA or whatever you say they are prolly have a few records of.

I find it more compelling that there's never been any GAY FEMALES that have made it so massive and been so influential, except the odd trendy bullshit yuppie-New Yorker-elitist indie agit-prop bands like Sleater Kinney or Le Tigre or Talia Zedek.

I remember when there was that Canadian country-rock sorta female John Cougar Mellancamp female-songwriter of the late 80s early 90s, I forget the name, but when she came out her career went to the toilet and she becme a sort lesbian joke. (it's its not PHRANC, who I reckon is an unsung 'genius' and terribly influential on all those 'angry' mainstream girl-acts of the mid-90s and even some of the indie troupadour...)

I would devote more mental energy to the theories of why the music industry is dominated to an extent by gay men, but gay women are treated as shit. It sound like jobs for the 'boys' to me..

 

[k-punk]

It'll be news to Lou Reed that he's gay...

But

A few random thoughts

1. Not sure how illuminating the comparison of dance-rock crossover acts is, because it's not as if many of the UK groups had a very sustained career in that genre. I mean the Soup Dragons had one opportunistic crossover hit then returned to well-deserved obscurity... Primal Scream were back to doing embarrassing Stones imitations before you could say 'Jack Robinson' ('Rocks Off' so lazy and derivative that it couldn't even be bothered to come up with its own title)... St Etienne only had a couple of hits... so of the list Simon produced, only the fucking Shamen had any sort of sustained career out of dance-rock...

2. Think there's a wider point to be made about dance acts having sustained success. Sure they were one-hit wonders in the States like Dee-Lite etc... but how many dance acts in the UK did much better when you think about it?

3. Surely the problem is that British pop has CEASED to be 'faggy'. Whatever they might want to think, American audiences have tended to be more attentive to British music when it is gender and sexuality ambivalent and highly image conscious. That goes back as far as the Stones (hardly real men, despite the misogyny of their lyrics) and the Kinks and continues up to the early eighties. After that, there is the absolute nadir of C86 versus mid-atlantic drivel like Dire Straits and Phil Collins... and then rave and Lad culture which both contributed in their own ways to the removal of 'fag' elements from Pop.. it's no accident that hooded tops and trainers etc could equally be worn at a rave or at an Oasis gig...

 

[mms]

more random bits

random points on this discussion:

madonna has always been a disco artist. madonna's 'holiday' is tame n.y electro-pop , produced by dj john "jellybean" benitez.

i always had her down as a crossover latino artist in those days-
jellybean being a latin dance music producer who worked on alot of early hip hop records and has his own latin crossover label -
his riddims are pretty latino too .
but maybe thats the point about disco it allowed alot of artists to break out of molds and synthesise new strains, take the big 3 prince madonna, mj..they are like post disco artists really.


i think british music today the main players like coldplay and dido etc have alot to be greatful from in dance music, they are all post club ambience and navel gazing following that synthetic ambient meme which has been an undercurrent of british rock since the 70's largely thanks to Eno.


Dance acts in the uk only sustained chart power by behaving like rock bands - ie prodigy utah saints, shamen etc, and british electronic got a bit of electronic/rock bands like nin's massive market by remixing and going for shock value, ie come to daddy etc .

lest ye forget the enormous power of rock music thru acts like zepplin, ozzy osborne and judas priest in the 70's and 80's. The big nasty spectacle, who kind of stole bowie etcs thunder a bit.

the european thing is interesting - all those depeche modes, simple minds and euro electrorockers kinda got overtaken by the people who crossed over rock and electronics or rock and hip hop's modernisation, ie nin, marilyn manson to limp biscuit and slipnot - they did it better than jesus jones and the soup dragons etc cos they captured the heavy metal thing again.

i can't see on either side of the atlantic any rock that really stands up to scrutiny at the moment though.
the uk has identikit indie bands and US god knows.

 

[dominic]

the european thing is interesting - all those depeche modes, simple minds and euro electrorockers kinda got overtaken by the people who crossed over rock and electronics or rock and hip hop's modernisation, ie nin, marilyn manson to limp biscuit and slipnot - they did it better than jesus jones and the soup dragons etc cos they captured the heavy metal thing again.

i suppose marilyn manson has got a couple good songs . . . . but limp biscuit??? slipnot???

isn't it really and truly the case that most people in america are into crap music?

except for hip hop, which is a complicated matter, b/c so good in some ways and so bad in others (i.e., this is not the place to embark on yet another debate about current state of hip hop)

in general, i have no love for the heavy metal crossed with hip hop thing -- it's all aggro testosterone music w/ no voodoo or psychedelic dimension

and i also disliked the whole of grunge -- give me the uk shoegazer bands of early 90s over nirvana any day of the week

nothing in rock excites me, though

the whole avant-folk and noise-folk thing????? ugggh

or maybe i'm just a die-hard dance music person and can't really speak objectively -- so i'll be quiet now

 

[Woebot]

actually i think a key force behind this shift is hip hop

Yes. I suppose with Hip-Hop Black America managed to encode it artfully enough that it couldnt be appropriated so easily in the way the Blues, Jazz, Electric Blues were ripped off. Maybe its that vital fact that only 50% of Hip-Hop is music (50% is Graffiti, Clothing, Slang, Geography), thus it cant be supplanted. If you copy it it becomes nothing but a facsimilie. You practically have to re-write it from the ground up, or to use another analogy bake a new cake with totally different ingredients, to get something that matches it without feeling fake.

The jungle parrallel is good, because of course when it happened we all went around high as kites that at last Britain had an indigenous music to match Hip-Hop. Grime is more of a balancing act. It succeeds (99% of the time) when it retains that Acid House element.

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".

I'd not heard that argument (ought to read "Rock and the Pop Narcotic" Is it?) I reckon the music industry destroyed Rock over here, becasue it seems like every band's core aim at the outset is....quite absurdly and pathetically... to get "signed" (cf all that vomitous "Unsigned Bands- Music Industry culture) and after that it appears their aim is to put out lots of records. Whats wrong with just plain music itself?

Thats why you get this (equally pathetic) situation of all these freelance musicians each working in three different bands. What happened to the bunch of losers growing together and sticking together? Carducci's group mind/tight interplay/gang of four thing only happens in social conditions when people stick together and fuse (The Minutemen or The Beatles....)

 

[mms]

i suppose marilyn manson has got a couple good songs . . . . but limp biscuit??? slipnot???

isn't it really and truly the case that most people in america are into crap music?

except for hip hop, which is a complicated matter, b/c so good in some ways and so bad in others (i.e., this is not the place to embark on yet another debate about current state of hip hop)

in general, i have no love for the heavy metal crossed with hip hop thing -- it's all aggro testosterone music w/ no voodoo or psychedelic dimension

and i also disliked the whole of grunge -- give me the uk shoegazer bands of early 90s over nirvana any day of the week

nothing in rock excites me, though

the whole avant-folk and noise-folk thing????? ugggh

or maybe i'm just a die-hard dance music person and can't really speak objectively -- so i'll be quiet now

yeah i wasn#t saying it's good but successful

 

[stelfox]

I'd not heard that argument (ought to read "Rock and the Pop Narcotic" Is it?) I reckon the music industry destroyed Rock over here, becasue it seems like every band's core aim at the outset is....quite absurdly and pathetically... to get "signed" (cf all that vomitous "Unsigned Bands- Music Industry culture) and after that it appears their aim is to put out lots of records. Whats wrong with just plain music itself?

Thats why you get this (equally pathetic) situation of all these freelance musicians each working in three different bands. What happened to the bunch of losers growing together and sticking together? Carducci's group mind/tight interplay/gang of four thing only happens in social conditions when people stick together and fuse (The Minutemen or The Beatles....)

this could all be put down to our declining welfare state. up until the 70s many people said that the DHSS was the biggest patron of the arts ever, but unfortunately that isn't the case. you cannot survive on state benefits any more and people need to make a living.
(obviously this is good in the sense that it means much less shit to deal with and many less juggling workshops than would otherwise exist, but mostly it's not a great thing.)
how britain can be seen as worse than the states in this respect, i don't know.

 

[Chef Napalm]

isn't it really and truly the case that most people in america are into crap music?

I’ve always been of the opinion that no genre is bereft of gold. Just because the music is suspect from an ascetics point of view doesn’t mean it doesn’t attract talented musicians.

and i also disliked the whole of grunge -- give me the uk shoegazer bands of early 90s over nirvana any day of the week

25 years ago people said the same thing about Punk vs …oh, I don’t know…Billy Joel. Both Punk and Grunge were the result of artistically-inclined unemployed misanthropes making angry music in the middle of a national recession.

Yes. I suppose with Hip-Hop Black America managed to encode it artfully enough that it couldn’t be appropriated so easily … You practically have to re-write it from the ground up, or to use another analogy bake a new cake with totally different ingredients, to get something that matches it without feeling fake.

Exactly what I was trying to say. And Grime does that, I think. My kids sure love it, and they're total Much Music (Read: Canadian MTV wannabe) heads.

The jungle parrallel is good, because of course when it happened we all went around high as kites that at last Britain had an indigenous music to match Hip-Hop. Grime is more of a balancing act. It succeeds (99% of the time) when it retains that Acid House element.

I guess I can kinda see that, but Hip Hop started as a black American response to predominantly white popular music. I’m under the impression (a la Generation Ecstasy) that Jungle was more of cosmopolitan result of the end of the Ecstasy Honeymoon than anything. As someone said upthread, the UK is far more racially integrated that the US.

 

[D84]

I think British Music has gone the same way American and Australian Music went: the marketing managers and accountants, as Logan Sama says, took over.

Consider how much music is marketed to children these days (Crazy Frog, Wiggles etc). It's always been a part of the market but not in as great a proportion as the advertising and TV air-time devoted these days. It makes sense because as soon as kids are old enough to use a computer on their own they're downloading tracks for free.

Radio is now almost exclusively the domain of payola so don't expect much culture seeping through there unless it's backed by major label and publisher money. TV is probably worse I guess. This is why the majors hate the internet and filesharing, as some here have also said, because these online services are outside their marketing plans and forecasts - too unpredictable...

Hence also now you are getting more focus on nostalgia music and docos etc, such as the Dylan revival, which I also don't share, k-punk - because the the ageing baby-boomers are probably being targetted as another safe market.

In between you have other safe bets like Radiohead, Coldplay etc and the "new" bands are warmed up 80's fashion bands like Franz Ferdinand etc.

This is also why the spectacle is so important in selling music - and why they had so much trouble getting their heads around Acid House etc. A lot of people can't imagine sounds..

All of which is understandable once you realise that the majors are in business of convincing people to buy plastic. The last time I had this discussion some sent me a quote about 90% of people not actually enjoying listening to music but prefer to say they do (I wish I could remember it) which is probably fair enough too.

I say this because the tenor of this thread seems to be more along the lines of: why isn't there a UK scene like when The Who were around or when Punk started etc. I doubt that that could happen these days because a) bands like say Rolling Stones etc were later canonised as part of a deliberate marketing campaign, and b) because the marketing machine and its guardians are so dominant that there's no way that a band like, Cabaret Voltaire, say, would get any coverage in Smash Hits (as they did then) these days.

People still make music because they love it and people are still making great music - it's just that you'll hear about it last in the mainstream media.

I agree about the race/discrimination being a factor as well. Didn't MTV have a no black music policy when they started out?

 

[dominic]

The jungle parrallel is good, because of course when it happened we all went around high as kites that at last Britain had an indigenous music to match Hip-Hop.

except that hip hop lives, and jungle is by all accounts dead -- though at the moment i enjoy hearing a good jungle set as much as any other kind of music

or is the "hardcore continuum" the uk equivalent of hip hop, such that it too lives?

or maybe the problem with uk music is that is was *too productive* of new sounds and trends -- such that it simply burned itself out

whereas american rock and american hip hop have more staying power b/c they aren't fundamentally about *the new* -- they're more about what??? good hooks? simply doing hip hop music or rock music?

 

[Vietgrove]

Hello everybody! Another ILM semi-refugee...

Anyway, I read the thread (interesting), and the one thing I didn't see anyone mentioning is the differences in visa requirements between the US and the UK. Going from (slightly dodgy) memory, there was a change in the setup for foreign musicians entering the US made back at the tail-end of the Reagan years, where one had to be a "known" band or musician in order to get a visa. A nice little cut-them-off-at-the roots bit of protectionist legislation, which I think was the actual point where it started to go wrong for UK music. It's kind of weird that this is one of those things you never ever seem to read about in the music magazines (kind of like the collapse of uk local radio into 100% "drivetime" throughout the nineties)

I don't think it's the only factor, I kind of suspect that the foregrounding of, I dunno, hype, "the new thing", ability to be an entertaining gobshite and suchlike over basic instrumental technique (in the sense of playing together as a band, playing effectively etc) stagecraft and so on probably didn't help too much - the kind of reductivist ideal of "punk rock values", which seemed to be, you know, the way you were supposed to play and act and stuff from the late eighties onwards. I can remember a lot - probably the majority - of british guitar bands from then being just being kind of slack - sloppy drummer, flat singer and so on. I can also remember seeing Mudhoney supporting Sonic Youth, and they were just so much better in every way imaginable than any UK band at the time. Seeing the hype around the Libertines, or the recent hype over the Arctic Monkeys, that doesn't seem to have changed much.

 

[Blackdown]

i think it's endearing that people have been trying to explain the divide using musical and cultural terms alone, but like D84 suggests it's more about marketing than talent. Compare the 'industry' when The Stones were big to now. There's no comparison.

Huges multinationals make US - and therefore global - hits now: MTV, Clear Channel, cable TV networks, the four major labels, iTunes. The higher the financial stakes - and they are now exceptionally high - the lower the creative risks they're willing to take. Given the UK 'market' is five times smaller than the US's, most British bands simply don't have the finances to make an impact in the US now.

and also, as a consequence of multinationals' hold on people's mass market music consumption, surely this then breeds an even more narrow minded audience? the less people are given, the less they know, the less they want... no?

personally i think i've long since stopped caring about acts breaking the US. it's only UK r&b and rock 'stars' thinking about their pockets that seem to care.

 

[dominic]

the one thing I didn't see anyone mentioning is the differences in visa requirements between the US and the UK. Going from (slightly dodgy) memory, there was a change in the setup for foreign musicians entering the US made back at the tail-end of the Reagan years, where one had to be a "known" band or musician in order to get a visa. A nice little cut-them-off-at-the roots bit of protectionist legislation, which I think was the actual point where it started to go wrong for UK music.

the chilean techno artist dinky left nyc for this reason -- one of the few techno artists that i've rated this decade -- so a real loss, in my opinion

 

[redcrescent]

the chilean techno artist dinky left nyc for this reason -- one of the few techno artists that i've rated this decade -- so a real loss, in my opinion

Black Cabaret was quite good, except I could never figure out if the vinyl was meant to be played at 33 or 45 or something in between.

 

[Chef Napalm]

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’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in the last week or so, and something in what WB wrote sounded a chime in my head that my previous suggestions never really silenced. I asked myself, “What is the difference between independent stuff produced in the 70s and independent stuff produced in the 90s, other than the level of technology?” And then it hit me; the answer is format.

I forget where I read it, but recently someone noted that record companies in the US stopped accepting returned records in the late 80s in an effort to replace the format with the cheaper and (at the time) sexier Compact Disc. While WB pointed out a couple notable electronic albums, I’ll bet the whole scene went unnoticed because house/techno was (and continues to be) a vinyl singles based market. Vinyl is, for all intents and purposes, dead in North America, and the CD Single never took off. Thus, the electronic acts that have been successful are ones that have been marketed to what has become an album-consuming North American public. Basement Jaxx, the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and Fatboy Slim all stuck with the 80s rock formula of releasing an album before or simultaneously with the release of a video for the first single.

 

[brotherjames]

Speaking of and as reader of 80´s Melody Maker and NME I still recall some good rock-oriented british bands.
World Domination Enterprises were great as were MBV and Spacemen 3.
But nowadays I don’t now what to think of Loop, Telescopes, Walking Seeds, Senseless Things, Slab!, Silverfish...
Being from the nineties Long Fin Killie were good though…