How It Looked from Over Here: Cool Britannia as Seen from American Shores (Part 2)

Def Leppard's Hysteria, one of the rare British albums Americans were tapping their feet to in 1988, featured a song called "Gods of War," also known as "The Song on Hysteria I Usually Skip." This heavy-handed anti-war tune ended with samples of the then-leaders of the English-speaking free world, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, wrapped in the song's unflattering context. I remembered thinking, "That's so cute, how they put dear-old Maggie in there, as if she were an equal in fuck-headedness to our president."*

Thatcher presided over the UK during the entirety of the 1980s. She was a titanic conservative force, but during the last years of her reign a drug-fueled counter-cultural revolution swept the country. Ecstasy and LSD propelled a new dance music scene and a psychedelic rock scene. In 1990, a trippy indie dance group called The Times sang on their rave scene celebration song "Aurore Boréale" "It's the morning after the 1970s," as if purging the memory of the "Iron Lady's" decade in a burst of ecstasy bliss. The song ended with a voice intoning atop a psychedelic roar of sound, "This…is…LONDON."

John Major succeeded Thatcher in late 1990. Britain entered a recession that year from which it would not recover until 1993. As I traveled around Britain in 1992 I met some of the unemployed youth who complained about the Major government's role in their unhappy predicaments. I was also around for Black Wednesday on 16 September, when the British government suffered the embarrassment of having to pull its currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (since I'm no economist, it's better that I link to piece about that here).

Dance, shoegazer, and other British music scenes continued to evolve in relative isolation. Meanwhile, America experienced another internal music revolution that, along with rap and R&B, would guarantee that our attention would remain focused on ourselves for a while longer. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" roared up the charts in late 1991, and in 1992 a year of grunge commenced.

Without the widespread availability of the Internet to join our two nations, America's exposure to UK culture came largely from the nightly news, music, and film. In American cinema, the early 90s saw a parade of crafty villains speaking in sinister British accents (real and fake); titles included Silence of the Lambs, Sneakers, Cliffhanger, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Oh sure, it makes sense that the Sheriff of Nottingham would speak in an English accent, but one must remember that the titular hero of Robin Hood: POT was played by the American Kevin Costner--with an American accent.

This would suggest a certain level of Anglophobia in the U.S. But we also had our Anglophiles. A few U.S. bands even had a sort of English manner about them. In 1991, Chicago's Material Issue sported moddish hair cuts, and the fonts on the album cover to their debut International Pop Overthrow seemed to mimic the druggy imagery associated with Britain's drug scene. That same year, The Ocean Blue, a group long fond of covering British tunes, released Cerulean, which sported the sorts of abstract, dreamy song titles indie UK fans associated with Britain's shoegazer scene (e.g., "Marigold," "Mercury").

But to American audiences, these bands' efforts seemed to emphasize the divide rather than bridge the gap. "Oh, they're trying to sound English," many of us said dismissively. The fact that these groups also drew inspiration from such American cult bands as Big Star was lost on us. We were ignorant and mean. Maybe that goes some way toward explaining why Material Issue's frontman committed suicide in 1996.

In 1992, the election of Bill Clinton was met with rapture in the U.K. The American flag was hoisted over Oxford because our president had not inhaled there. Compared to saxophone-playing Clinton, Major must have looked especially stuffy to his own younger subjects--essentially, he embodied the worst stereotypes of staid, conservative Britishness, the sort that had been mocked for decades in films like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Along with news that Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were splitting in the spring, followed by more bad news of Charles and Diana parting ways in December, recession-era Britain must have felt that, generally speaking, and by all measures, things were going horribly wrong with the old order.

Somehow, from all this mess, came the warning shot of impending Cool Britannia: Blur's 1994 Brit-centric masterpiece Parklife. The album was not a success in the United States, nor was it expected to be (it even featured an uncomfortably bitter anti-American song called "Magic America"), but its explosive impact in the UK was a critical moment in the aligning of elements that would bring Britainization to the United States a few years later.

Parklife was a varied affair musically, a mish-mash of styles and sounds held together by its intensely self-aware Britishness, right down to a tune entitled "Clover Over Dover" and a lyric about the Queen leaping off Land's End (the powerful "This is a Low"). If Suede had been crushed by the disappointment they encountered while touring the U.S., Blur's reaction seemed to be to abandon ideas of American conquest altogether and to seek satisfaction in exploring and celebrating the world that they knew best. It was nationalism, but a peculiar brand of it, at times affectionate, but at others weary and ironic. If there could be such a thing as sad nationalism, Parklife had it.

This examination of Britishness had been anticipated in Blur's previous album, Modern Life is Rubbish, and it also informed the personality of two excellent St. Etienne releases. Parklife felt like the final, triumphant words of a great thesis. But while Britain raved, and students in T-shirts emblazened with RAF bullseyes roared the lyrics to "Girls and Boys," there must have been an awareness that this display of British spirit was not going to break Blur in the U.S.

Parklife was released in April 1994 as Oasis finished up recording their debut album, Definitely Maybe. The Oasis record shot straight to number 1 on the British charts a few months later. Where Parklife had been an eccentric pastiche of musical styles and poetic musings, Definitely Maybe was a rock album, musically unified, confident, and a tad prickish. There was nothing John Major about Oasis. Perhaps, British critics said, Oasis might be the British band to break America.

In fact, right around that time, a British band did break America, but the British media was reluctant to say much about that because most UK music journalists felt that the group's music was crap. The London group Bush had formed during the grunge year of 1992, and they sounded like a perfect clone of the bands in the Seattle scene. Their debut album, Sixteen Stone, sold briskly in the U.S. during 1995. They were, effectively, the Ocean Blue of Britain, and their act of cultural treason earned them a mulitplatinum album and the fetching Gwen Stefani, who married the band's frontman.

With two wildly popular bands (neither of which were Bush) now ruling the UK, one group representing British middle-class values and a certain intellectual cockiness (Blur), the other working-class rock and roll swagger with some appealing meatheadedness (Oasis), a slugfest was inevitable. In 1995, dueling singles from the two groups were released on the same day, with Blur's incredibly irritating "Country House" somehow coming out on top. But it was Oasis's album that triumphed in the album sales competition that followed. And then, in October 1995, came "Wonderwall."

"Wonderwall" did it. The third single from the Oasis album climbed into the top 10 of the United States singles chart. Select, a UK music magazine, breathlessly celebrated. At last, after a multi-year absence, a British rock band had successfully scaled the dizzying heights of the unforgiving, xenophobic U.S. music charts. Oh yes, there had also been Bush. And Jesus Jones--did I forget them? Hey, don't ask me why they don't count; ask a 1990s UK music journalist!

In November, Pierce Brosnan made his first outing as James Bond in GoldenEye. The film opened at number one that weekend, and remained in the top ten for four more weekends, going on to earn over a hundred million dollars at the U.S. box office. Perhaps the villains-with-English-accents trend in American cinema would finally abate.

* In fact, some have argued she was worse.

(To be continued)

How It Looked from Over Here: Cool Britannia as Seen from American Shores (Part 1)

In 1993, my sister, a friend, and I had the pleasure of seeing the UK rock group Suede play at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. It was the band's first U.S. performance. While Suede were not as big in the United States as they were in their native Britain, the crowd's enthusiasm was certainly palpable. I remembered thinking how lucky we were to be Suede fans in the United States, since we could see this much-hyped group in a smaller, more intimate setting than their British fans likely were able to. Everyone in the crowd was stretching their arms out toward pretty-boy singer Brett Anderson, my 21 year-old self's arm included, and Anderson reached back, clutching hands with each and every one of us. We were worshipful. We were blessed. How lucky we were to be seeing the beginning of a new era in British pop here on American shores!

The tour would go on to become a disaster for the group. By its end, guitarist Bernard Butler and Anderson were barely on speaking terms. The second part of their travels through America saw The Cranberries as their opening act; that Irish group had achieved massive U.S. success with "Linger," "Dreams," and "Zombie," whereas Suede remained virtual unknowns. Thus, Suede suffered the humiliation of being upstaged by their opening act; they watched as venues emptied just as they took the stage. Nothing was ever quite so good for Suede again.

This was the era when British music magazines moaned about how the UK had "lost" America. In the early 1980s, we Americans sang along to Dexy's Midnight Runners, Thompson Twins, the Human League, and at least a dozen Duran Duran songs. In the mid-1980s, Britain's 70s rock dinosaurs successfully reinvented themselves: a Roger Water-less Pink Floyd enjoyed enormous U.S. success with A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Genesis's Invisible Touch lobbed five songs into the U.S. top five, and Robert Plant's solo album Now and Zen sold well.

The late 80s became less kind to "outsiders." America's music scene became more insular; we started to focus on rap, R&B, and metal. Although Def Leppard rode the U.S. metal wave with their massive album Hysteria, Britain's chart dominance had begun to fade.

The two countries' paths diverged further when Britain's 1988 acid house dance revolution made little to no impact in the United States (ironic considering that so much of the sound of that scene had been developed by underground dance music producers in the states). While teenagers on ecstasy danced all night in warehouse raves in the UK, the top albums during the summer of 1988 in the United States came by way of Van Halen (OU812), Def Leppard (Hysteria), Guns N' Roses (Appetite for Destruction), and Steve Winwood (Roll With It). Clearly, we had become a rock-obsessed nation. In the UK, by contrast, Now That's What I Call Music 12 spent five weeks roosting at number one, featuring a variety of tunes, including The Timelords' "Doctorin' the Tardis" (which also topped the UK singles charts in June), S-Express's acid house anthem "Theme from S-Express" (a number one UK single in April) and Morrissey's "Everyday is Like Sunday."

As the 1980s became the 1990s, Britain's best rock bands frequently were marketed as "alternative bands" in the United States. With America spending so much time listening to its own music scenes, to listen to any outside voices at all was a rebellious act. (Long gone were the days when Nena's German-language "99 Luftballoons" was a U.S. hit.) Happy Mondays, Charlatans, Blur, Ride; these groups wore the "alternative" label around their necks, which immediately offset them as something "weird" to the American record-buying public. (As for the still burgeoning UK dance scene, nobody in America seemed to know what to do with breakbeat techno groups like The Prodigy; I don't remember seeing the massive UK rave anthem "Charly" charting anywhere at all, though perhaps it sneaked onto a little-publicized U.S. dance chart somewhere.)

I spent a few months in the U.K. in the fall of 1992, and was dazzled by the energy of their pop music scene. Felix's "Don't You Want Me (Hooj Mix)" was blasted in the clubs (my right ear was a little dinged by that experience), the somewhat ridiculous Shamen tune "Ebeneezer Goode" was huge, and the Eurodance anthem "Rhythm is a Dancer" by Snap! ruled the dancefloor. On the other extreme, the indie UK sound was still alive and well, featuring introspective groups like Earwig and Moonshake. Of course, Nirvana was also popular. And the fall of 1992 saw the rebirth of ABBA's "Dancing Queen," which had been re-released as a single in anticipation of the ABBA Gold compilation. A good variety of ideas were battling it out in the U.K., and the U.S. scene seemed depressingly dull by comparison.

Suede were the new darlings of British music while I was over there. They had released two strong EPs ("The Drowners" and "Metal Mickey"). And that was the first time I heard firsthand British people whispering, "Can they break America?"

By 1994, America had broken Suede. An American lounge singer using the same name sued them, and so they reluctantly became "The London Suede" in the U.S. markets. Guitarist Bernard Butler left the group. The band would spend the next several years struggling to re-establish their identity while simultaneously competing with a rising flood of other British rock bands.

(To be continued)