This week in the magazine and online, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the difficulty that British acts sometimes have making it big in America. Here, with Ben Greenman, he talks about the article.
BEN GREENMAN: For starters, are there real differences between American pop and British pop? If so, what are they?
SASHA FRERE-JONES: America and Britain have similar striations and varieties of pop but different players. Big, pretty voices rule the charts in both places and battle it out with whichever strains of youth dance music are dominant: hip-hop and reggaetón here, grime and other descendants of rave there. Then, there are certain broad tendencies that guide which products each country will accept from the other. I didn’t include some British and American acts in my unscientific sample simply because it’s no surprise that they don’t translate well. Country music has a reliable tendency to talk about America and its mores, which is of interest to Americans but less so to the British. And England’s native-born style of rapping, grime, has not enjoyed much success here. Dizzee Rascal, the genre’s best-known performer, sold a startlingly low fifty-six thousand copies of his début, “Boy in da Corner,” despite loads of positive press. Dizzee’s hyperactive beats and strangulated delivery make for good art, but his East London accent is tough going for many Americans, and the current state of British slang will confuse anyone who doesn’t have Google close at hand. Grime rhythms are also very much outside American swing, which you can hear even in brand-new hip-hop forms like snap music (Dem Franchize Boyz, Yung Joc, Rashad) and hyphy (the Federation, E-40). In my article, I was focussing on acts that seem like they could work here but don’t, or become, at best, reliable cult favorites. These are pop and rock performers who have met the basic requirements of stardom—being physically attractive and writing catchy songs—but get stuck in transit. A great, rackety young band like Arctic Monkeys would likely never sell as many records in America as a pop singer or a rapper, though there is always a chance that the album will hang on for a while and maybe sell five hundred thousand copies.
Your article looks at this issue historically, starting with the migration of American blues to Britain, where it influenced the bands that then became the leading figures of the British Invasion. How does the narrative go, generally?
In the nineteen-fifties, there were popular British artists, like Lonnie Donegan and Cliff Richard, who never had any real American success. I’m not sure why we couldn’t accommodate that music—it wasn’t dark or weird or downcast. It may simply have been a bit too British, though it doesn’t seem so now. (In the fifties and sixties, America was ready to deal with British comedy, and even more so in the seventies, with Monty Python. We liked the Brits funny and upbeat. The Beatles, for example: they’re the gold standard for acceptable content.) With punk, things changed. The Sex Pistols were welcomed in America, although long after they were first popular in the U.K., and were folded into this American individualistic, teen-age-rebel strain, becoming adopted brothers of hedonists like Guns N’ Roses and metal bands who liked the Pistols’ gumption. The social commentary in the Pistols’ songs got lost in a larger appropriation of wearing safety pins, being rude, and playing three-chord rock, the last of which the Pistols had borrowed from Chuck Berry, anyway.
In the late seventies, the transatlantic passage got blocked with bands like the Jam and the Specials, to name just two. They dressed nattily, in a way that American men, sadly, don’t, and mucked about with ska and other multiracial musical combinations that we don’t see in America. Our racial combinations are different—rock and roll itself, or some current blend, such as rap-metal. The Specials sang “Ghost Town,” which sounded like a bummer, and the Jam, in “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight,” sang about getting mugged, and, in “Going Underground,” about not wanting anything that this society’s got. Both Jam songs were hits in the U.K.
That seems to be a problem: how to talk about specifically British experiences and expect Americans to get on board. If a listener has to do explicit anthropological work, that interferes with the easy digestion of pop.
Yes. The problematic content in these songs is the description of social and political realities or ideas about them. (Also, the Jam and the Specials sounded really English. There’s a line that is being constantly redrawn: we can take some accent, but not a lot.) Americans can handle aesthetic darkness as long as it’s depoliticized and personal. Look at Depeche Mode—we love Goth music, which is essentially a passive pleasure: depression as comfort. The Cure and Depeche Mode ended up with big American fan bases (although the Cure’s happy songs are what really caused them to break out here). We like the moody types, such as Radiohead, but we don’t like it when somebody says, clearly, “This bad thing happened and I have a theory as to why, and also we are from England because you can hear my weird accent and I just talked about takeaway curry and you’ve haven’t the foggiest.”
Are there any big exceptions?
Sure. The Clash, for example, who are as social-minded as it gets. I think they went into the “classic rock and roll” category. And their biggest American hits are party songs: “Train in Vain” is a mildly atypical love song, while “Rock the Casbah” is a dance tune that, like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” was interpreted by some people in ways the songwriter never intended. A raucous punk song about the Clash fighting their record company, “Complete Control,” was not a hit here, although it did chart in the U.K.
What is America missing by not embracing a broader range of British acts?
The best way to answer that is to point to the Web site popjustice.com, run by a young man named Peter Robinson. I met him several months ago, when I was in London chasing after some pop producers. What he’s into is what we’re missing: frothy chart-pop, usually sung by young women and written by teams of professionals. (Two to look for are Richard X and the team Xenomania, led by the producer Brian Higgins. They are both frighteningly consistent.) We had a moment of being open to this kind of music—the Spice Girls, a British import, and Americans such as the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears—but now there’s a backlash against it. This is simply a spinoff of the backlash against feminism and any culture perceived as having a kind of gay sensibility that isn’t campy and schticky, and thus safe. (Robbie Williams’s sexuality is way too complicated for the current American cultural moment.)
So we’re missing out on lots of shiny, funny pop music. The last Girls Aloud album, “Chemistry,” was one of the best things I’ve heard from England in years, but it hasn’t come out here, and neither have their other two records. Rachel Stevens had a great album last year, “Come and Get It,” and—you guessed it—it didn’t come out here. We’re also still missing out on grime. Although it doesn’t seem to be moving forward any more in the U.K., there are still three or four fantastically energetic singles every month. It helps to listen to grime a lot, so the accents and the slang become less impenetrable. One resource for this is the blog of an English journalist named Chantelle Fiddy: chantellefiddy.blogspot.com.
What was the last British band to have a major influence on the American music scene—in terms of not just record sales but setting a style and producing imitators? Coldplay?
There really aren’t many. Coldplay, or Oasis, or whoever manages to get a hit here, ends up having more imitators at home—like Keane, otherwise known as Warmplay. I think the most influential English band here isn’t English—it’s the New York band Interpol, who drew heavily on English post-punk groups such as Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen. Bands like She Wants Revenge seem pretty heavily influenced by Interpol, and I get at least a few CDs a month by bands that sound like bad versions of Interpol. Probably the last serious English influence was Depeche Mode, who seem more and more significant as time passes. The completely unlistenable Linkin Park is basically very loud Depeche Mode with bad rapping added on top. And I quite like Depeche Mode.
Quick judgment: is Coldplay annoying? I vote yes.
They weren’t always annoying. I enjoyed their second album, “A Rush of Blood to the Head.” They have always had that “reaching for the stars” kind of optimism, which could shade into bluster but was leavened with tangible sweetness. I still bust out weeping when I hear “Clocks.” But the “X&Y” album sounds like a bid for Deep Significance, and it doesn’t have the hooks you need when you’re playing secular priest. The album sounds like it’s been filled up with some magical expanding foam that enlarges a vessel beyond its capacity. It’s an odd production—almost impressive in how gaseous it makes them.
Let’s talk for a moment not about the problem but about its effects. Does Robbie Williams, for example, care that he’s not a huge star here? Is it still important for acts of his size to conquer America?
I haven’t asked him. I think Robbie does O.K., although any pop star has to worry about America. But he’s sold forty million albums worldwide, according to his U.K. label. He sleeps well at night. The world market is kind to many acts—like Kylie Minogue—who get only supporting roles in America. And that’s more than enough to live on.
How does it look from the other side of the pond? What kind of American acts are big there? What kind fall to the bottom of the chart with a dull thud?
Right now, the English are very much enjoying the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The Raconteurs, Jack White’s side project with Brendan Benson, are also big. They like our rock. Some high-profile rap does well, but a lot of the middle-list rappers don’t. Country and reggaetón—genres rooted in North American and South American music—don’t do anything there. They like Jack Johnson and Norah Jones—the super-friendly types do well everywhere, although I’m not sure Jimmy Buffet makes the same splash overseas.
There’s also a long tradition of American bands playing out the string here and then going to England (or Europe) and having long, fruitful careers. The Mavericks, for example, were big here during the country revival (Chris Isaak, Dwight Yoakam), and then not so big, but they remain huge in England. Does the British idea of American music accurately reflect what’s going on here?
Those bands are part of a choice that English consumers are making. The Mavericks, for example, are a great live band, very charming, but also cosmopolitan in their dress and presentation. (The jeans-and-white-sneakers routine does not cut it in Europe.) The Mavericks are not so obstreperously American, at least to an outsider; they seem less boot-scootin’ and beer-swillin’, if we’re batting around stereotypes.
Is the British music scene more susceptible to trends and fads because the over-all number of record buyers is smaller? Or is there actually more stability because of the relatively controlled media outlets?
At a certain point, America and England can’t be compared. We contain multitudes, literally. The million people in the States who bought James Blunt’s album may have no overlap at all with the million who buy the new Tool. In England, there’s a smaller population that’s more used to living on top of—and getting used to—one another. The three hundred fifty thousand people who bought the Arctic Monkeys’ album are also, at least some of them, the same folks who buy Norah Jones and Girls Aloud and U2. In America, it’s possible that reggaetón, for instance, has had success not because Anglos are buying it but because the Hispanic block is so big now that it can, without crossover assistance, make a record go platinum. I think many Americans registered Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” as a novelty tune.
Are there other countries with strong pop scenes that have had trouble making it in the United States? What about Sweden, for example? Sweden seems to do fine.
Swedes don’t have accents. They’re all geniuses. They’re blond. They sing in English. The French don’t stand a chance. Even when they’re geniuses, like Keren Ann, they have to sing in English and make sure they don’t sound too French. It will be interesting to see what happens with Camille, a gorgeous, loony singer who is finally getting an American release. She doesn’t sing in English. So take a guess.
What about the Eurovision winner, the Finnish metal group Lordi? Will Lordi be famous here, ever?
Do not speak of Lordi. Lordi rules us all. ♦
