Patriotic Pop When a disillusioned visitor returns to Canada because
Britain has gone soggy on him, the most difficult thing of all to defend is the sludgy pop music that drove him to despair. Something must be said for pop, all the same, and it's quite an interesting something. In the first place, the pop music such as a man will find back in Canada will be American, pop, which is quite as soggy as any other, being the original sog, in fact. In the second place, we may take some comfort from the astonishing fact that American records have largely lost their historical grip on British teen- agers—and so have American popular singers. Many of the biggest pop stars of today come from Liverpool, for some odd reason, and who would ever have predicted that twenty years ago? Nobody in the pop business, I can assure you. The songs, too, are largely British. They may be rubbish but they're British rubbish. In the cur- rent Top Ten list there is only one American disc, 'Take These Chains From My Heart' by Ray Charles. It's number five. Is this a British cultural renaissance? Ee.
CLIFFORD HANLEY
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