Music: the US and Britpop

Music: Blighted -- Americans’ fitful appetite for British pop -- by SASHA FRERE-JONES

If you have a song in your heart and can’t get onto “American Idol,” think about buying a plane ticket. In the nineteen-fifties, American blues records found their way to England and caused young Britons like John Lennon and Keith Richards to start their own bands and record cover versions of songs by Muddy Waters and the Isley Brothers. (Lennon and Richards reportedly went on to write their own material.) Soon, England became a destination for American pop musicians looking to establish themselves. The U.K. has a state-sponsored radio conglomerate, the BBC, which almost everyone listens to, and a long tradition of music weeklies competing to herald the arrival of the hottest new pop act. In September of 1966, Jimi Hendrix went to London and hired an English rhythm section. When he returned home, nine months later, he had scored three top-ten singles in the U.K. and had landed an American record contract. In 2001, the British weekly New Musical Express , known as NME , anointed a little-known New York band called the Strokes as the Next Big Thing, convincingly enough to make it true, at least for a year.

The musical traffic flows in both directions, and English pop acts are currently faring as well in the States as they have at any time since the early eighties, when Duran Duran, Culture Club, and Wham! dominated MTV with their cheery, decadent songs and ruffled outfits. The anthemic yet cuddly rock band Coldplay, which sounds like a less belligerent version of U2, has sold three million copies of its recent album “X & Y.” James Blunt, a hunky former British Army officer, has achieved omnipresence with his daft ballad “You’re Beautiful,” a pledge to a woman whom the singer glimpsed once. (“I’ve got a plan,” Blunt announces, suggesting that he may intend to stalk his dream girl, but he opts instead for the historically proven approach of braying “You’re beautiful” nine times.) Finally, “Unwritten,” an agile pop album by Natasha Bedingfield, has sold half a million copies on the strength of the title track, a perky compendium of self-help mottoes.

These musicians don’t sound all that similar. Coldplay’s better songs are miniature epics that suggest vast stores of emotion; Bedingfield is a clean-cut pop singer with a knack for R. & B.; and Blunt satisfies an enduring if baffling need for men who mewl without their shirts on. Nevertheless, they have several crucial things in common: their lyrics tend to be uplifting; they lack identifiably English accents, and they avoid British slang unfamiliar to Americans. These attributes are what distinguish their music from another strain of mainstream English pop, which rarely makes it big in the States, even when it should.

An implicit embargo began in the fifties, with Cliff Richard, England’s answer to Elvis Presley, who had to wait almost twenty years for his first American hit, and reached its height with Robbie Williams, a former boy-band singer who is a superstar everywhere but here. The Arctic Monkeys, one of NME ’srecent picks, are the latest British pop sensation to have got stuck at customs. Logistical factors—the comparative ability of independents and majors to promote acts, the tight strictures of radio—are partly to blame, but the bigger problem is one of accents and attitude. 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.

Robbie Williams, originally a member of the band Take That, struck out on his own in the mid-nineties and became a favorite of the British tabloids. He looks like a young Sean Connery gone to seed, and delights in bragging about his dissolute behavior. A duet called “Kids,” which Williams recorded in 2000 with Kylie Minogue—an Australian singer who has also had trouble gaining traction in America—sums up the dark British sophistication that amounts to self-imposed quarantine. The verses unfold over an irresistible, shifting dance beat and segue into a titanic rock chorus that suggests ABBA singing over an AC/DC track. The lyrics, though, don’t encourage the kind of identification that kids like to have with pop stars. Williams and Minogue dismantle the fourth wall in the very first verse—“We’ll paint by numbers till something sticks. We don’t mind doing it for the kids”—and Williams, after trading suggestive lines with Minogue, ends the song with this rap: “Single-handedly raising the economy, ain’t no chance of the record company dropping me. Press be asking ‘Do I care for sodomy?’ I don’t know—yeah, probably.”

The Arctic Monkeys are an independent rock band, a genre in which sunny dispositions are hardly the norm. Even so, Alex Turner, the twenty-year-old lead singer and songwriter, manages to summon the intractable bleakness of someone three times his age and much less successful. The band built its audience by playing live shows—constantly, all over England—and by giving away its songs as MP3s on Myspace.com. When its remarkable album, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not,” was released, in January, it sold more than three hundred and fifty thousand copies in the first week, making it the fastest-selling début in British history. (So much for the idea that giving away your music hurts sales.)

Turner is a prodigy at both character sketches and song form, able to describe the marginal life of a streetwalker (“She don’t do major credit cards, I doubt she does receipts, it’s all not quite legitimate”) and fickle fans ( “ ’Cause all you people are vampires, and all your stories are stale, and though you pretend to stand by us, I know you’re certain we’ll fail”) in deceptively casual lyrics, which he delivers in a thick Yorkshire accent. “Whatever People Say” has sold a hundred and seventy-eight thousand copies in America, a respectable number for an independent release, but it has fallen from a high of No. 24 on the Billboard charts, in March, to No. 139. The Monkeys’ live performances make it clear that, though they play furiously, they aren’t willing to smile or dance in order to sell their songs. At Webster Hall in March, Turner and his three bandmates wore tennis shirts and corduroys, and much of the time they stood stock still, seemingly uninterested in production values like jumping up and down. Turner’s words can’t be twisted into feel-good phrases; he expresses himself with a lapidary precision that shuns poetic cover. When he finishes the long, solo introduction to “When the Sun Goes Down,” a song about a prostitute and her pimp, he spits, “I said he’s a scumbag, don’t you know .”

“I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” which was a single in the U.K., is another combination of robust dance rock and deep disdain. When Turner sings the title phrase, and follows with “I don’t know if you’re looking for romance or, I don’t know what you’re looking for,” it doesn’t sound like he’s musing over the magical possibilities of a night out. In fact, if you’ve heard enough Arctic Monkeys songs, you know that nights routinely end with somebody going home with the wrong person, a fight breaking out, and everyone—except the guy who’s singing—regretting it all in the morning.

Americans are comfortable with certain kinds of moral ambiguity—hard rock and hip-hop are full of harsh conclusions and unpleasant world views—but we prefer our British bands to be picker-uppers. Somewhere, an American record label is trying to figure out whether Lily Allen is our kind of British. Allen, a twenty-one-year-old singer, is earning deserved raves in the London press and on music blogs. The daughter of the British comedian Keith Allen, she was signed in December by Parlophone on the basis of her delightful, ska-inflected songs, which are now available for download on her Myspace page. (She has given just four live performances, all within the past month and at the same London club.)

“LDN,” a lighthearted rap about her home town, has been released as a single, along with a low-budget digital video of Allen bicycling innocently around London. The track is built on a calypso loop, and Allen’s voice tends to lilt and skip, as if she were singing along to some of her favorite songs while walking down the street. In an accent dismissed in one British paper as “mockney” (a middle-class imitation of Cockney), she celebrates London on a sunny day, airily wondering, “Why, oh why, would I want to be anywhere else?” But she cannot avoid her countrymen’s realist tendencies, and, as the first verse closes, you can hear the soft thump of record executives dropping their heads to the table: “Everything seems to look as it should, but I wonder what goes on behind doors. A fella looking dapper, and he’s sitting with a slapper, then I see it’s a pimp and his crack whore.”