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

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.