Podcast 4: The Booty has been Upturned…

In a recent article for New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones—to my eyes, pop’s finest contemporary critic—describes what he calls “Americans’ fitful appetite for British pop.’

It made for nice timing, as I have long been an ardent enthusiast of the grand tradition of British rock music, as it seems, is much of the collegiate culturati of Anglo-America, and understandably so: the wordy, nervy character that has come to define much recent british guitar pop is often melodramatic in tone and linguistically region-specific, highly endearing qualities to those for whom the names Chaucer and Blake evoke more cheer than fear.

Frere-Jones argues that American audiences will swallow only that which is uplifting and self-helpish in tone, such as saccharine chaps like Coldplay or James Blunt. As he writes: “If your songs are cynical, ironic, or misanthropic, and loaded with references to Tesco or ‘tracky bottoms tucked in socks,’ Americans may simply turn the dial.”

There are several blips in pop history’s eventful turns that stand out in opposition to this argument. U2, they of the humungous, One-life, elevating choruses for those who know that sometimes they can’t make it on their own, falls clearly in Jones’ favor. But how does he explain the continued popularity of Radiohead, miserablist Oxford experimentalists who remain undoubtedly the most important rock band of our epoch, and whose American popularity—though far more extensive outside of the States—is well beyond anything definable as “cult status.”

Moreover, the tone of much post-Smiths State-side rock: the schools of grunge, rap-rock, and emo-pop respectively, owe far more to the melodramatism and alienated existential crises that Robert Smith and Morrissey articulated to such potent effect during the mid-80s, than to the excess and experientially-focused modes of psychedelica and jam, prog-rock or pop-metal which came before them. Indeed, Kurt Cobain, who so memorably covered the then-obscure Scottish band the Meat Puppets during his seminal Unplugged concert, can be seen as a Seattle antihero of distinctly British attribute.

But enough pontification…here’s the music already: Welcome to a world of British music you may or may not have met yet:

ITSLATEAGAIN: Podcast 4 – Britain’s Booty.

Featuring the Manics, Arctics, a countrified Stereophonics gem, Sandanista-era Clash, and a song from perhaps my favorite record of the 90s: “Different Class,” by Pulp.