Pop music
The great divide
Marcus Berkmann
The Atlantic ocean grows ever wider. A month or two back a friend of mine who reviews records for a Serious Rock Maga- zine was on his way to a 'playback' of a new album. Most new albums are sent out to reviewers on cassette a month or two before release, but some artists are consid- ered so important, and their output so valuable, that even a few pre-release cas- settes are viewed as a potential breach of security. Reviewers are therefore sum- moned to the record company's headquar- ters where they listen to the new masterpiece on headphones. At the very worst and most embarrassing playbacks, the artist is there in person as you listen. Every tap of a toe and click of a finger is assessed and interpreted, and after it's all over you smile and say how good it was and run screaming to the nearest pub. ■ What are you going to hear? I asked my reviewing chum. The new album by Hootie and the Blowfish, he replied, with a look of infinite weariness. I sympathised. Hootie and the Blowfish are a strikingly drab American band who play that down home brand of chugging rock 'n'roll so beloved of American stadium audiences. Bruce Springsteen without the ambition or the intelligence. Huey Lewis and the News without the tunes. Over here we have bare- ly heard of them. In America they are huge business.
So why a playback? Here is a band who have made no impression over here at all — unusually for successful American bands, who are used to cracking the British mar- ket as a natural consequence of doing well at home. But already they are behaving like prima donnas, denying reviewers early copies of their precious (and, it has to be said, dismal) new recording. Alternatively, perhaps their record company thinks that if we are forced to treat them as stars, then that's what they might eventually become.
This tiny and trivial incident, though, is just another sign of the ever widening chasm between American and British pop music. We're used to the occasional `British invasion', when, by some odd quirk of taste, a few British bands make a small impression on the American charts. And we're certainly used to American bands coining it over here. We have embraced virtually every new American musical development of the past 30 years. Many we have adapted for our own purposes and returned to America in amended form. The two pop cultures have enjoyed a dialogue of considerable mutual benefit.
But things began to go wrong in the late 1980s with the emergence of new country. This was an attempt by British record com- panies to sell country music as some sort of exciting, innovative new form perpetrated by dashing young singers all wearing enor- mous hats. It failed pitifully. Garth Brooks and co mean absolutely nothing over here. But in America these frighteningly dull young throwbacks sell in billions. The spe- cial relationship was beginning to founder.
More recently there has been the grunge problem. Initially Nirvana, Pearl Jam and all the others were greeted with immense enthusiasm in Britain, to the extent that our own bands started to look rather weedy and under-achieving by comparison. But then Kurt Cobain topped himself and Brit- pop emerged and grunge lost its appeal. Now we are enjoying perhaps the most vibrant music scene in years — yet the Americans don't want to know. Oasis sell a few records in the United States, but Blur and Pulp are non-starters. American teens are still in thrall to rap, grunge and, most bizarrely of all, Hootie and the Blowfish.
American musical tastes have always been more conservative than ours; now they are also more insular. This may well reflect cultural changes in our country as a whole, but if Hootie and the Blowfish are the result, then insularity is clearly giving way to moribundity. The ocean grows wider, and it will grow wider yet.
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