Y SIN EMBARGO magazine

Back in the late 1990’s, when bands wanted to be the Beatles, and dismissed the Velvet Underground as arty wank for pretentious tossers, there was a lot of talk about a place called America. Like Everest, America was big and hard. The point was to prove that you were ‘harder’ by ‘breaking it’. Behind the sunglasses, monobrows and coke-binges, lay the idea that somehow, if you could sell milky, delicious rock and roll back to the guy with the musical cow, you’d just ascend or something – There’d be a flash of light and an itchy whooshy feeling and you’d be playing multi-language scrabble with John, Elvis, and Jimmy. Speaking ideologically it sounds like a crusade. And like most crusades, lasting success overseas is pretty fucking transitory.

Rock and roll is as American as tooth grills, fried chicken and those slutty lower back tattoos on pornstars. It’s as stinky as the loo in Macdonald’s and as shiny as the neon in Vegas. It’s as far from the monotony of rainy, compartmentalised British life as you can get right? Why then is the most important band in the history of popular music in the second half of the 20^th century the Rolling Stones?

Put simply the Stones sold Rock and Roll to America. While Elvis was doing his bit for his country and singing sacharinne lovesongs to housewives in Vegas, The Rolling Stones, took the sex, sensation and teenage apathy that was the signature of early 50’s R&B hits and made it into a trademark. The Stones were bad, provocative and, best of all, foreign. Their 1972 post Altamont tour had stateside talk-show hosts repeatedly posing the rhetorical question “Would you let them near your daughter?” Which made the daughters kiss daddy goodnight, and climb out of their windows with their knickers in their handbags. American Consumerism is a protestant animal, and the first time round rock and roll was just too much for it to handle. Fast forward a decade and the realization that, Satanism, drug use and violence aside, Baby was still spending daddy’s dollars, made it into too good an earner to ignore.

Where the Stones and the Beatles went, others followed: Led Zepplin (of 8 albums 7 charted at #1 or #2 in the Billboard album charts.) Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden explored different edges of Zepplins hard rock and metal that remains an influence on the currently virulent US Emo and metal scene. And then, at the end of the 70’s, the switch came. The realisation that the spark that the Stones had promised had failed to ignite a fire, prompted poetic nihilist Richard Hell to take the rawness of R&B and make it sound like a scream again. “Richard Hell was a definite, 100 percent inspiration, and, in fact, I remember telling the Sex Pistols, ‘Write a song like Blank Generation, but write your own bloody version,’ and their own version was Pretty Vacant.” Malcom Maclaren’s subsequent marketing of Punk made the Pistols do for the UK what the Stones had done in the US ten years earlier. Despite Never Mind the Bollocks… making the planned million for Maclaren and Virgin, Punk saw the disintegration of the music industry that had grown fat off the backs of The Beatles, The Stones and Slade. Now it was about creating small scenes, self promotion and a DIY ethic that would take ten or so years to filter back across the pond, and create the next movement to unite the youth of the UK and the US.

Grunge went from a small independent community based scene into a megastar making rock and roll circus. A trend that’s been kept alive in the past ten years by bands like Greenday, The Offspring, U2 and the Killers, and that Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore laments. “A lot of those bands cater to the safest aspect of Nirvana the verse/chorus/verse thing, which I always found kind of disappointing.” Disappointing from a progressive view of popular music maybe but something that British bands have been keen to capitalise on of late. Razorlight’s Johnny Borrel (who has admitted to writing ‘America’ with the sole intention of appealing to the US market), was described in a Telegraph article as “An old-fashioned rock star, the sort of boy you’d hesitate to bring home to meet your mum.” Remind you of anyone? Link this with ‘my shades hide circuitry’ Bono’s advice to “Not be afraid of success” and the current media hysteria about which of the young British bands is going to make it big stateside, seems like a bit of a charade. If it’s about posturing, pouting and catering to stereotypes then how is it Rock and Roll?

I guess the answer is ‘It’s not.’ Australian music writer Simon Pollet put it like this. “The only people who give a fuck about breaking America are Al Quaida. I don’t think musicians really care”. And indeed, in an era when people don’t bat an eyelid in stealing from chainstores and supermarkets, and when albums are only a fileshare site away, is it really such a big draw? The Artic Monkeys whose Favourite Worst Nightmare peaked at #7 on the Billboard chart just over a month ago, aren’t overly concerned. “We’re not bothered about not breaking America. We want to come here and enjoy it, not see it as a job”, said Matt Helder before starting their US summer tour. It’s not about sounding ‘British’ either. As Tim Jonze pointed out about Bloc Party in the Guardian; if they have a chance of being successful it’s because their subject matter and aesthetic is the closest thing to Emo that a British band have produced whilst still sounding like themselves. Meanwhile, experimental American artists like Wolf Eyes and Animal Collective pack forums with European 20 somethings who find the spirit and community of Rock and Roll in Merzbow, Whitehouse and Sunn 0))). A place where record sales, postured arrogance and Olympian quests seem irrelevant and vaguely insulting. Besides, with the global possibilities opened up by the internet and cheap air travel, if you’re a band from Hoxton who sell a million copies of your record in Japan without being recognised down the local, are you really going to complain about not being on Letterman?

(Por Paul Geddis para Y SIN EMBARGO)

Paul Geddis lives in Madrid where he works as a Music Editor on the monthly In-Madrid, and contributes articles in Spanish and English for Glamour VICE Espana and GQ Spain. He likes fanzines and pop music

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