What Do US Pop Musicians Have That UK Ones Don't?

I think on a thread like this we have to remember the article about the differences in pop music- pop,popular and classic pop. with manufactured pop the US beats the UK cos the the fact that they had burt bacarach and phil sppector,what have we had?pete waterman and simon fuller(shudders at the names of them). with most other music though,(rock and pop),the uk wins.punk-for every classic punkgroup the us had,the uk had 2. also considering the landmasses and populations of the 2 countries,the UK easily outperforms the US(but then i expect cos of the US' size,an artist can easily do well in the country and not have to bother anywhere else) have the US been able to produce a band as good as screenprints or spearmint(ok so maybe the beach boys are their any modern us groups that come close though). also final note(i dont really know much about urban music but i'll give it a go anyway)Sure the US has had loads of success with eminem and gangster rappers,but where's their creativity and originality in urban music.where are their street's and miss dynamites?

>>> have the US been able to produce a band as good as... spearmint ?

?!?!?!

"In the US, bands can sell, say, the Dirty South sound or the Seattle sound or the East/West coast sound or the Oakland sound or the whatever sound. In England, we have.... NW1. And that's it. "

This is a category mistake. The UK is an outlying region of the US.

Answer to the question: Position at the center, as opposed to the periphery ;)

I think the idea of pop differs on each side of the pond. The other day I heard Fatboy Slim refer to himself as a pop star, and I'm afraid that's not quite how it works in the States.

One thing I find fully about online cross-Atlantic music-fan discussions is that the Americans usually have a deeper knowledge of UK artists than the Brits have of US ones. This is sensible insofar as the geographical and journalist compression of UK music makes it easier to keep up with from afar -- but Myles, above, sounds weirdly like our old friend Calumn Roberts and his whole "the only American rock bands are the Foo Fighters and Weezer" perspective. I imagine UK readers get a bit of the same feeling when Americans talk about UK hip-hop or think "garage" comes from the 60s.

fully = funny, tho not fully funny honey

hmm,american bands, sonics,wilco,flaming lips,sonic youth,pavement,all those little ones on cassingle usa label,butterflies of love,ashley park(ok so they're canadian).the fact that more is known about UK bands than US bands might actually prove the point that many UK bands have more impact than the same amount of US bands.is it my or am i starting to make this sound like an argument?why should having conflict like this?good bands are good bands and it doesnt matter where they come from.We're going off the "pop" road anyway.Most modern pop is shit(the pop produced by companies to sell as a disposable product)(i know a lot of pop in the past has been like this,the stock aitken and waterman type,britney et al is shit though,not one classic in em-hell waterman couldnt even make a eurovision winner!)

myles how can modern pop be shit when it is also SCIENTIFICALLY-PROVEN TO BE FANTASTIC???

(wait are you saying the thread-answer is "worse scientists"?)

No, Myles, I wasn't making a quality argument, more a geographical one: UK (rock) artists get centralized and sort of easily packaged and disseminated across maybe not the general US public, but across a certain type of music fan who keeps an eye on such things. There's no such reverse equivalency: our chart hits certainly extend into the UK far more than the other way around, but a non-charting US rock band already has half a continent to get itself across before starting on the UK, and -- probably thanks to all of those big charting acts already being plenty visible across the Atlantic -- there's no real call for a central collecting source to package them up and send them across. (Whereas in the US there's a bit more of a sense of "so what's going on in the UK, then? -- better check out X Y and Z and see how things are going over there").

1. [for the pinefox] Americans talking about UK hip-hop = UK people talking abut UK hip-hop = UK people talking about US hip-hop = Americans talking about US hip-hop = [etc]

2. No, 'you're not going off the pop road': like I said, REM (a pop group) started this train of thought.

this is like that question about US "indie" versus UK "indie" - the terms mean completely different things depending on which side of the pond your on, like blueski noted above in his reference to Ladytron, St. Etienne, New Order et al. Or the Craig David example - that's pop in the UK, here in San Francisco, maybe 2 out of 10 people would even know who Craig David is, and those that did would be dance music afficionados. Or take Kylie Minogue - she can barely get a hit single over here, her name barely registers on the pop culture consciousness. The fact is, by and large most Americans don't give a shit about British music, and haven't for going on 20 years. Oasis barely made a dent in the US - more people hate them here than bought any of their records, and those that did buy their records (like, say, me way back when) are music nerds. Half the time on this board, I have NO idea who the resident Brits are talking about in regards to their charts - I can't even gauge what British pop *is* because there are no avenues for me to hear it unless I actively and diligently seek it out. American pop, by contrast, is a monolithic shit factory that never stops churning out product, milking every localized phenomenon (grunge, the dirty south, and now electro/80's revisionist crap) until the buying public is sick of it.

Fine - but still, what about my question: what is it that REM (as Yanks) have that can make their collection of dumb covers cool, where a UK band would just be silly?

I can't really back this up except through anecdotal and conversational evidence but I really believe that Americans are simply more interested in music-qua-music. How a guitar sounds. How it feels to execute a crashing drum roll imagining the snare drum is your boss's head. The minute tempo-quickening that makes that modulation just that much more effective. Not just 'rockists', either! Picking just the right compression on that sample, using the best sizzle on the R&B hi-hat sound. And from what I've seen, Brits not only don't care about this (more concerned with how their sound will fit the clothes and accessories they've bought [acc. = records, which are chosen on basis of what subculture artist wishes to belong to]), but don't even let it darken their consciousness. Brits decide what kind of band they want to be in before they even learn to play anything, and of course there are going to be odd mavericks who make a previously unprecedented 'outside' conclusion that "couldn't have come from a trained muso!" as Brits like to say, but their constant use of the exception-that-proves-the-rule (for every Mark E Smith there's 10,000 horrible, boring bands whose amateurishness can't hide their lack of imagination) is just a fallback to that defeatist essentialism that proved to be the cancer at the heart of punk that ate everything.

(I am aware that this is trivial and anecdotal) Two interviews I did last week, one band from NYC - "I would do this even if we never make any money. This is the only thing I like doing. I'll play to 10 people or 10,000, makes no difference. If you find other people who you like playing with and like playing with you, you've fucking made it, man. Don't underestimate it. I HAVE to do this!" UK band - "Pop Idol is so shit. That's why we do this, we hate Pop Idol"

(Extrapolation - perhaps US musicians/producers/programmers etc have a generosity of spirit towards other musicians in different fields that cuts across bogus 'subcultural' lines that leads to greater interface potential>knowledge>craft [i.e. 'craft' as reflected in what the LISTENER actually hears]. Of course, generosity of spirit is quite easy for a hegemonic society, which may be why the UK has recoiled so violently from 'rockism' - 'rock' is a modernist form celebrating the object rather than the subject and the more educated UK commentators perhaps find it increasingly incompatible with their position on other things [maybe Ben Watson likes Frank Zappa so much because FZ knew rock tools enough to demonstrate his contempt for rock to a wider audience than BW ever could], while the less-educated simply find that it says nothing to them about their lives, much as Americans would naturally have no response whatever to Nicky Wire banging on about the miners' strike)

For a start, I don't agree with the premise, but I'll try to throw some ideas around.

"In the US, bands can sell, say, the Dirty South sound or the Seattle sound or the East/West coast sound or the Oakland sound or the whatever sound. In England, we have.... NW1. And that's it. "

For a start, this is so fucking wrong that it's almost offensive, except for the fact that it so UTTERLY typifies everything that is wrong with the UK, ie *LONDON* music scene. The fact that only what happens in London and specifically NW1 (ever try to get someone to got to Brixton to see a gig if it's not at the Academy?) is the only thing that people pay ATTENTION to does not mean that it is the only thing that exists.

I'm in love with the Hull scene at the moment. It's remote, it's isolated, and in that splendid lack of limelight have grown up these wonderful unique, independant, and yet instantly recognisable bands like Fonda 500, Harvey, Edible 5ft Smiths et al.

In the US, it's much easier to achieve the sort of spirit of uniqueness that comes from geographic isolation.

The other thing that gets ignored is the age thing, and the length of apprenticeship that American bands/musicians go through before they achieve any kind of success. The years in a van are critically important in the development of a band as a unit. In the UK, it's not considered odd at all to go from never having played an instrument before to being on the cover of the NME and recording your first album in less than a year.

And the age thing... due to lisencing laws, the age of a musician's first gig is generally (no, I know not always) the same as the minimum drinking age. So the average American band, playing their first proper gigs around 21, already has at least 3 years more experience than the over-18s playing in British pubs.

I don't think American music is necessarily always stronger. Hell, I wouldn't be living and working as a musician in the UK if this were the case. But it is different and it does have different strengths that maybe the British should look at and maybe incorporate if useful.

b-b-but dave q, "rock-as-modernism" and "picking out the right snare sizzle" = pete waterman!!

Waterman was all about the midrange, which is the very definition of 'rock' IMO

exactly!! (i wz using the word "snare" symbolically ahahaha)

Americans have a bigger country.

Why do all those American songs/Sound so big and lonely/While we're just small and alone/They grow up dying on highways/While we just die by the phone.

UK Pop musicians are in no way worse than the americans, they just have to accept americans dont like foreign music and be glad they also speak english and can manage to be sucessful in the rest of the western world

Cookie & Q: I think we're getting somewhere.

(Jefferson: I think we're lost.)

personally im glad UK musicians dont make it.I live in the UK so i get the best of both worlds i guess,plenty of UK music and plenty of US music aswell.September for instance the butterflies of love are gonna be playing in my local town.now whats the chance of a UK band of similar size playing in the US.I feel a bit sorry for those across the pond actually.

Useful Rule: anyone who uses the phrase "the pond" has the rest of their post entirely discounted, however apparently intelligent and/or interesting

so do you mean 'actually' or the preceeding or both? haha

Kate- I didn't mean that's what I believe, but what is sold on. When was the last time in the UK that a scene was got behind that wasn't from London? 1989? I don't write the newspapers/music press, do I?

Dave I think you're letting your social politics get the better of you. In what scene is the sound the crux of the matter -- the texture of the drum sound, the timbre of the weird noise? The dance scene, that's where. While at the end of the day I don't think a whole lot of UK Garage or Drum n Bass stuff, it's incontestable that the people who make that stuff are playing with sound-qua-sound with painstaking, loving attention to detail. Isn't the whole point of American rock (purportedly) "We didn't think about 'production,' we just do what we do"?

Naturally whether such a stance is entirely honest is another matter entirely. But I do think that English/Scottish/Welsh acts spend a commendable amount of time tweaking the finer points of their sound. The fashion aspect...eh, what can you do, it's impossible to make any money over there unless you pay attention to the fashion end of things.

'don't think a whole lot of' would read better as 'don't think too highly of'

tho the whole posting is pretty unreadable, what can you do, I'm tired

But - but - but - why could a US 80s act record a bunch of Velvets covers and sound apt and cool, not silly and tired??

But the UK did this too = Spacemen 3.

Maybe the difference between the US and the UK for the purpose of this thread is that the US has a culture of forgetting and reification - the possibility of US music having a cultural impact is dependant on the collective, not-necessarily-correct assumption that a) it is new, and b) it is distinct. Most obvious example: grunge is seen as a phenomenon quite apart (to the point of being disconnected) from the the hardcore and indie it grew out of as well as the MOR-rock it became, and individual bands (eg. Nirvana) are considered important on their own terms - they are the Definite Article, not just the most popular of a host of bands at a certain vector of a certain subgroup's musical development. Obviously they are considered to be that too, but I think this is strictly secondary, which may not be the case in the UK. In the UK most bands are viewed within a context of remembering and connecting. A band like The Stone Roses is not a group-for-itself, but an intersection for 60's guitar pop en route to acid house, C86 en route to Britpop. They are, as such, the sum total of what they are connected to. It means that it's easier to get some attention - or you have to do is choose a particularly winning vector and play it for all its worth - but it can also be pretty limiting, especially when what you're connected to is primarily in the past. The UK doesn't have the US's talent for producing bands that seem, for better or wose, to exist outside of history (big exception: U2, who may as well be a US band except for '93-'97 when they became a UK band again), whose aura is such that, whether you like them or loathe them, discussing influences and antecedents veers towards pointlessness. But the US isn't very good, conversely, at scenes. Due to its strong self-consciousness and interchangability of parts, hip hop is probably the most vulnerable to the UK way of doing things, and that's probably why it invests so much in aura production, with some success (see The Blueprint - a good example of hip hop that is close to existing outside of history).

Of course I'm making this up as I go along, so it might be absolute nonsense.

haha i think nabisco, dave q and tim finney have things exactly backwards... which just shows how not particularly useful it is to talk in nationalistic terms...

Gosh I thought Tim's post was incredibly insightful & focused, made-up-as-it-went-along or not.

the neptunes.

Slightly off topic, and I haven't yet read more than a few paragraphs, but this morning's NY Times magazine has a long article on how a record label is working on turning some girl into a new Britney: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/magazine/04LATONA. html.
It has a link to hear her song (look in the right column), which sounds like a really poppy but bland Alanis to me.