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Monday, August 15, 2005

++ The Empire Blues

By Mark Mordue

++ It was just a warning shot across the bow — an article by the pop journalist Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph way back in May, which put forward an argument that British groups are the best in the world.

But by the time you read this, the music scene will have played out another round in its own version of the War of Independence as bands like Coldplay, Bloc Party, Electrelane, Franz Ferdinand and British Sea Power herald yet another cultural insurgency across the Atlantic. An even fresher wave of UK acts like Maximo Park, Kaiser Chiefs, The Futureheads, The Rakes and Sons and Daughters are only a drumbeat behind them. Oh yeah, the British are coming, the British are coming…

In his article McCormick used anticipation surrounding the release of Coldplay's X&Y to not only claim a renaissance for the UK music scene today, but to argue that British bands combined commercial impact with artistic quality to beat the pants off those dumb, thundering, stylishly inept Americans across the entire history of rock.

In doing so he skipped through your standard checklist — Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, U2, Oasis and Radiohead (oops, he forgot The Kinks, the Sex Pistols and The Clash) — to back up his view. He generously observed that the Americans have had some OK acts too, like R.E.M. and Nirvana, and that they may even have the edge on the British when it comes to solo artists: frail names like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen versus monumental figures like Rod Stewart, Elton John and Paul McCartney. Though in the end, well, all the Yanks can really offer, says McCormick, is the likes of Aerosmith, Kiss, and Guns N' Roses leftovers like Velvet Revolver.

An argument like this is so full of holes it hardly bears examining as anything more than a jokey provocation. And yet there it was, spread across the page of a national newspaper, treated with credence and then syndicated internationally (I myself read it in Australia, though it wasn't hard to guess from the outset that McCormick was English). The title of his "essay" — and I do use the term loosely — was "Rule Britannia." It was certainly the flavor. Like most British rock journalists, McCormick is hell-bent on carving a role for himself as the underwriter of the next wave, a position invariably associated with Britain's cultural provincialism and its need to rule the world again by proxy through mediated forms like art, fashion, design and music.

++ Rock music in the UK, you see, is actually the sound of Britain's Empire blues. It forms the arrowhead of all its crumbled glories and frustrations. In this vein McCormick's minor diatribe is just another example of the overblown, snarky and PR-oriented style of British music writing today. As my fellow Australian rock journalist Bernard Zuel fatally observed years ago, the phrase "critically hyped British band" is now officially a tautology!

I remember well a hideously wet Glastonbury UK 1998, with Embrace strutting their pathetic wares as the New Musical Express (NME) cover stars and acclaimed band of the moment. As the rain pelted down and the ground turned to glug it was unclear to me whether I was being buried in mud or British bullshit. Embrace, of course, were quickly forgotten, as is the wont of the NME and its influence on British pop-culture writing, which trumpets its heroes in weekly doses, then tosses them aside at the first stumble or change in the fashion. Like drunks gambling at a roulette table, sooner or later someone has to get lucky.

It so happens McCormick has a truly great band in his sights with Coldplay. In their wake the UK music scene appears charged with energy for the first time since the waning of the late 1990s Brit-pop phenomenon that gave us Oasis, Blur, Pulp, The Verve and Massive Attack. One thing that earlier scene reflected through hothouse publications like the NME, The Face and Dazed & Confused — as well as the whole "Cool Britannia" vibe that swept Tony Blair to power on a youthful wave of change — was that the British music scene tends to be a more coherent and articulated commodity than its American counterpart. Despite its undeniably strong regional flavors, the sounds of Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester and so forth, the energy of these regional cities tends to flow into London and find some tight edge. Bob Geldof's observation on Britain's lack of a Hollywood, and how this causes the glamour and pressure of stardom to centralize around the music scene, only adds to this feeling.

American vastness, geographically and demographically, does not lend itself to the same narrowing intensity, whatever may be said of musical focal points over time like Detroit, Seattle, Portland and Toronto (of course Toronto's not in America, but since the English freely claim Irish achievements let's be elastic and include Canada under the U.S. umbrella too). With New York, L.A., Chicago and San Francisco all exerting their pull, it's easy to see why the American scene is more dispersed, its pulse more difficult to locate.

The monstrous corporate blandness and marketed rebellion McCormick is really decrying has been another feature of this dispersed energy — and its countering variety, both above and below the radar. It's perhaps why the American scene has been so fecund and inspiring at an independent level, with most of its recently significant artists using the Internet and touring to push themselves and excite old genres into so-called new forms like alt-country, new folk and post-rock: acts like Will Oldham, Bright Eyes, Smog, M Ward, Tortoise, Low and so on. American aesthetic dominance in the past five years has often been submarine and word-of-mouth, yet nonetheless obvious to the world, while hyped-up English acts have stumbled forth like desperados from an over-styled school eisteddfod. But if you want a big band, an important band, then the American Beatles of the new century are undoubtedly Wilco, who not only triumphed in the crossover from underground to mainstream, but did so all the while they pushed the boundaries of their "roots" music and the political nature of what a great band can do when the corporate odds are stacked against them. And if you just want to talk about exciting, edgy, stylish rock 'n' roll, then you check out The Strokes and Kings of Leon and White Stripes for starters, all of whom are only just beginning to expand their palette.

++ To take McCormick's simple-minded argument head on, though, and deal with it historically, would he really dismiss the Beach Boys' influence on the choral and symphonic possibilities of pop (The Beatles didn't)? Would the impact of The Band in supporting Bob Dylan's tilt at poeticizing rock 'n' roll, and their own roots-oriented recordings and historic influence, not rate a mention? Were The Doors not the first outrageously shamanistic stadium act? Could English punk have ever happened without American groups like the Velvet Underground, The Ramones and The Stooges years earlier — and did the British scene they inspired ever get to the same levels of savage sonic avant-gardism, wittily infected pop decay and primal spastic explosiveness they respectively represent?

McCormick doesn't answer those questions. Or even mention these bands, sounds, scenes. We could go on to discuss how country, blues, jazz, R&B, soul, rock 'n' roll, and rap are all absolutely American in origin. Or talk about Public Enemy and The Neptunes and modern black music, but that's just another catalogue of genius to throw against the stupidity of McCormick's "England's better than America" argument.

Yes, the tension and interplay between the UK and the U.S.A. has helped fuel great music, as periodic British invasions and American re-assertions attest. Yes, Coldplay's latest recording has propelled a shift in energy back across the Atlantic as a host of bands and artists come surging through. But when it comes to the criticism and analysis behind it all, McCormick and the UK music-writing scene he represents have X & Y on their stereos and a great big "Z" on their foreheads.

Mark Mordue is the author of Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip, published in the U.S.A. through Hawthorne Books November, 2004.


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