USA/UK success

[bovril]

The mention of Bush in another thread has brought to mind the number of acts that are huge in the USA or the UK but have had little or no mass appeal in the other country.

Some examples:

Hootie & The Blowfish

Jimmy Buffet

Robbie Williams

Is the lack of duo-atlantic* success down to lazyness? poor-management, crap name? musical style (many Country acts can fill stadiums in the US but are relatively unheard of in the UK)?

Could it just be that they are all shit?

Although bands such as the Manics Steeet Preachers don't fit in to that bracket.

* made up wankerism

[danielmak]

USA/UK success

I don't know if Suede was ever big in the UK, the NME and Melody Maker wrote as if they were the most amazing band ever, but beyond the fact that they were horrible they did nothing in the US.

[G-Man]

USA/UK success

On Facebook I wasted a few minutes clicking the albums I have from NME's top 100 albums of all time. The list was, as one would expect, full of stunningly ignorant inclusions, omitted some of the most important albums (and most of soul music's rich legancy), and above all was sickeningly parochial.

If we needed a comprehensive list of successful UK acts that made no impact in the US, the NME list is as good a guide as we'd ever get.

[Wyatt Earp]

USA/UK success

danielmak wrote:

I don't know if Suede was ever big in the UK, the NME and Melody Maker wrote as if they were the most amazing band ever, but beyond the fact that they were horrible they did nothing in the US.

Suede (a) made Number 1 with three out of their first four albums; (b) were bloody brilliant, what are you talking about?

[bovril]

USA/UK success

The Smiths were playing venues such as the Hollywood Bowl in 86/87 just befor splitting. But for all their huge cult success - they were never that commercially successful in the UK or USA.

You can't just turn up on the doorstep and say, 'Love me, America!'.

Which is pretty much what Robbie Williams did. Inconveniently neglecting to realise that the US hasn't got the UK's same love of self-depreciation!

[Wyatt Earp]

USA/UK success

There are also, as you note with your reference to Mod, real differences in taste and culture between the two countries. We have different vocabularies (verbal, musical, visual) for talking about things like class and sexuality, and I think also different ideas about authenticity and artifice.

Then there's the fact that FCC licensing regs make US radio very niche-driven, and acts that come from outside the country sometimes simply don't fit, and thus struggle to get any airplay anywhere. At its worst, this gets kind of racial. Rubbish band, so bad example, but Skunk Anansie, as a guitarsy rock band with a black frontwoman, always claimed they fell between two stools in America, with people not quite knowing what to make of them.

[bovril]

USA/UK success

one of my favourite stories of a band trying to crack the US was of Ireland's Boom Town Rats. Bob Geldof had the seemingly brilliant idea to send a dead rats in plastic bags to radio stations....They didn't ever recover from that one

[MsD]

USA/UK success

There are definite cultural differences, and most of the bands I know/work for would only ever crack a niche market in the US. One lot have got a US producer mixing their latest album specifically to try to appeal more to the US - it sounds much blander and AOR to my ears than their other work which did well in the UK.

It's interesting (to me, anyway) that Muse have found it hard to crack the US - it's only since they got on the soundtrack of Twilight that they've a bit of a hold there. (Relatively .. they had a gold album over time, which most bands would kill for I suppose, but they weren't playing the huge stadiums and didn't have the status they have elsewhere).

Kate Bush was another act that failed in the US (comparatively; she has a cult following but wasn't a chart success), seen as too weird, although her watered down influence is everywhere.

[bovril]

USA/UK success

Muse's music is just too over blown for the US don't you think?

I think that they need a dull as dishwater pop/single to get the attention of the masses then hit them with the SupermassiveBlackHoleStockholmSyndrome tomfoolery.

I always thought that prince had listened to quite a bit of Kate Bush...

[rick derris]

USA/UK success

what about bands from UK/US who are massive in other country but can't get car parking space at home

US big in UK (at some point)
The Killers
Scissor Sisters
fun lovin' criminals (they were for a while)

UK in US
Bush
the lost prophets

when i lived in the us in the 80's i was always amazed at how big UK bands were, especially depeche mode, and weirdly the gun club

[Guest]

USA/UK success

danielmak wrote:

I don't know if Suede was ever big in the UK, the NME and Melody Maker wrote as if they were the most amazing band ever, but beyond the fact that they were horrible they did nothing in the US.

Depends how you define "big." They would sell a lot of albums in the first week of release because they had a fanatical following but they didn't crossover to mass appeal. The vast majority of people certainly couldn't name a Suede song.

And, yes, they were embarrassingly bad.

[MsD]

USA/UK success

bovril wrote:

Muse's music is just too over blown for the US don't you think?

I think that they need a dull as dishwater pop/single to get the attention of the masses then hit them with the SupermassiveBlackHoleStockholmSyndrome tomfoolery.

I always thought that prince had listened to quite a bit of Kate Bush...

I think Muse's music is too over blown for anybody .. except for Plug In Baby which has a killer riff. Maaan.

[Wyatt Earp]

USA/UK success

Back in the 80s, when I skinned up and toked on some badass weed, as we hip persons like to say, in a Camden back garden with some nice chaps collectively known as The Fixx, I'd never bloody heard of them. I've still basically never bloody heard of them. They never even had an album in the Top 50 over here.

[Wyatt Earp]

USA/UK success

Melbourne Arab wrote:

And, yes, they were embarrassingly bad.

The fuck is going on here? Spearmint Rhino to thread.

[MsD]

USA/UK success

FWIW I rate Suede very highly indeed.

I'd imagine they'd be seen as a bunch of faggots in the US, though.

[bovril]

USA/UK success

I guess that UK "indie" is US "college" market?

The US college market is pretty big.

[Ginger Yellow]

USA/UK success

The Dave Matthews Band is the one that springs to mind for me. I don't think I'd even heard of them before my mid to late 20s.

[Wyatt Earp]

USA/UK success

MsD wrote:

FWIW I rate Suede very highly indeed.

And rightly so.

[Incandenza]

USA/UK success

MsD wrote:

FWIW I rate Suede very highly indeed.

I'd imagine they'd be seen as a bunch of faggots in the US, though.

Yes, because we're all homophobes.

I've only heard of Robbie Williams from this messageboard. I've still never heard a song of his or seen him. I think you're all trying to play a big joke on us.

Tom Petty may not be for everyone's tastes, but for the genre he fills he does it well, and I think he's great. That's a good American act that I know never made it over there.

rick derris wrote:

when i lived in the us in the 80's i was always amazed at how big UK bands were, especially depeche mode, and weirdly the gun club

Yes, British bands were relatively big over here in the 80s. KROQ became really influential, not just in LA, and Rodney Bigenheimer and Richard Blade were helping to make a lot of those bands "big" in certain circles. As it was pointed out earlier, bands can be huge on the coasts, but not have much impact in middle America. Less so today, but back then all there was really was radio play. But a lot of them got exposure through--and I know he isn't as beloved in the UK as he is here--John Waters' films and other 80s teen comedies.

[MsD]

USA/UK success

Incandenza wrote:

MsD wrote:

FWIW I rate Suede very highly indeed.

I'd imagine they'd be seen as a bunch of faggots in the US, though.

Yes, because we're all homophobes.

Yes, I was definitely implying that.

[ursus arctos]

USA/UK success

The US "college" market is far from monolithic, which shouldn't be a surprise in a country where roughly half of the 18-25 population attend a "college" for at least a year.

So you have bands with mass appeal (like Dave Matthews, or, in my day, the Eagles), well known "indie" bands (like Arcade Fire) and more out there bands that few people will have heard. To the extent that the US ever "did" punk, it was largely on college stations like KUSF.

[Incandenza]

USA/UK success

MsD wrote:

Incandenza wrote:

MsD wrote:

FWIW I rate Suede very highly indeed.

I'd imagine they'd be seen as a bunch of faggots in the US, though.

Yes, because we're all homophobes.

Yes, I was definitely implying that.

Okay, what was your meaning then?

CV--but he never made it big, right? I was trying to go for an act from America who is known in the UK, but not as popular.

A reverse situation is the Arctic Monkeys. WTF got in to you all over there?

[ursus arctos]

USA/UK success

To pick up on Rick and Inca's point, there was also a fairly notable influx of Brits into the coastal US radio market in the 80s, who brought their tastes with them. KMEL in San Francisco is another example. For a while, it was fashionable for "progressive" stations to have a DJ with a British accent, just as it was fashionable for ad execs or investment bankers to have a British administrative assistant.

[MsD]

USA/UK success

Incandenza wrote:

Okay, what was your meaning then?

v busy but - The US mainstream are not that keen on sexual ambiguity. Or ambiguity in general. Or arch/camp/ironic. Sexually ambig. acts find it difficult to break over there as do political bands. And mixed race bands or artists. Fey and androgenous as Suede were, they were going to meet with suspicion.

[Taylor]

USA/UK success

Too exhausted to post at length, I thought "hang on, we've done this before" - and sure enough, we did. So here's my post from about 2 or 3 years ago, which I don't really need to change:

People harp on the way American popular taste has little time for anything weird or overly arty - well, that's true to an extent, but it's an argument that's often used to cover up wholly British sins. The reason Americans generally don't tolerate British indie bands is not that they're too "arty", or that they're too "idiosyncratic", or that they're "limey haircut music" or anything like that - it's because, to the American ear, those bands sound like shit. They could hear better rhythm sections playing in their local bar, hear more punch in their grandma yawning. Americans (as a generalised mass) value gut-level appeal: they tend to like their bands to sound like bands, musicians bonded together, instruments churning like cogs in a machine, something which excites on a primal level, a musical Harley-Davidson.

British audiences generally seem to enjoy the cerebral, which doesn't have to mean "clever" music - the thrill of a band being "the next big thing", or even the "now" thing, or the whole concept of image and whether or not something's cool could all be classed as cerebral pleasures, as could stylistic phantasmagoria, sweetness, camp, etc (whether it's charming you, playing with your emotions, whatever, it's still a response that comes from the head rather than the gut / feet / groin). This is simply not what most Americans look for in music.

In other words, Americans have a particular sense of "quality" in music which is subtly different to that of a British audience. In Britain, post-punk attitudes still have some currency - that the ideas and imagination contained in the music are what's really important, and technical flaws are almost irrelevant. It's easy to consider this sophisticated, European approach naturally superior when you see Americans missing the appeal of Pulp, or Saint Etienne, or The Manic Street Preachers, or Suede, or whatever decent Britpop groups you may have liked, and buying Hootie & The Blowfish records instead. But it's important to remember there's a very good reason why the USA had zero interest in most of the Britpop bands, and that if those bands had formed in Memphis or Detroit or Boston or Seattle or Austin or Cleveland - basically anywhere other than New York or the hipstery parts of the West Coast - they would have been laughed out of town. This isn't the Americans being hoary old rockmonsters too backwards to appreciate Menswear or Elastica, it's the fact that Menswear and Elastica just weren't good enough. They might have been more "interesting" than Stone Temple Pilots or whatever the hell was big in those towns at the time, but they weren't interesting enough to obscure the fact that, as bands, they were fucking hopeless. It's the Yanks who come off better here, in some ways.

The Wedding Present would be the classic example of music that can only sound good if you want it to, and could only possibly appeal to Anglophiles. There's absolutely nothing in that music to grab anyone who didn't already have a taste for grey, scurvy English pop-rock. On an objective level, the chords and rhythms are predictable, the vocals are weak and tuneless, the musicians are barely competent, and most importantly there's no rhythmic motor in there at all. It's entirely funkless. It doesn't rock (an important point - The Stooges fit the above description to some extent, but they rocked, and that's what makes the difference). That's doesn't necessarily mean that music like The Wedding Present is worthless shit - lots of people like that sort of thing and can find much to enjoy in there, and I've enjoyed plenty of other records that fit that description perfectly, though defintely not those made by The Wedding Present - it just means it has nothing that most Americans look for in music. They simply can't feel it. It doesn't even have the charm to appeal to that many sworn Anglophiles, as far as I can tell. To 999 out of 1000 Americans (at least), it's a pointless, tinny racket.

[And yes I know Steve Albini produced them for a while, but while I don't know the precise circumstances of their collaboration, I suspect it had more to do with the band wanting to lively up their sound than Albini having always loved George Best.]

Part of it is just that Americans are better at playing musical instruments than British people. British bands, historically, are better at sounding wild, chaotic, rumbustious, out of control, which is all cool and does it for me - but Americans are almost always better players. Not just in a guitar-shop, wanking-off kind of way, but in terms of forming bands that really rock. This may not always have been true, but it's been undeniable since the 80s, when musicianship became an irrelevance to most British bands (who were missing the point of punk and post-punk: the thing about not having to play well is that it encourages people with good, fresh ideas to make records without being put off by a lack of chops... it's not a charter for lazy people to churn out pointlessly amateurish approximations of traditional rock and pop music already done better by bands who actually kick ass).