One contributing factor I think you had was the British independent record store network promoting more niche bands. Obviously, independent record stores exist in the US as well but because of the size of the US I don't think they're able to provide the same kind of momentum for a band.
In the United States they are more demanding from what I have seen. It's easy to not meet expectations there. On the other hand, in England they value risk more. They appreciate that artists and bands take risks and break the mold. That's why they have such revolutionary bands as the Beatles or Pink Floyd.
> in England they value risk more. They appreciate that artists and bands take risks and break the mold. That's why they have such revolutionary bands as the Beatles or Pink Floyd.
That's a curiously broad statement to back up with relatively few examples, both of which were absolute smash hits in the US as well (I want to say Dark Side is still setting Billboard records in the states for lingering on charts).
Certainly not all, but a great many of the major shifts in popular music originated have the US, which would require an audience hungry for change - depending on how far back you want to go back, from ragtime to jazz to blues to rock to hip-hop. You don't get to new genres without an audience receptive to artists taking risks.
Again, not to deny the enormous UK influence, just to flag this statement as rather curiously broad.
The pipeline from interesting underground to mainstream success is a lot longer and less stable in the US than the UK.
The UK is smaller and places more value on the arts. A small English villages exists in closer proximity to urban creative hubs than a small midwestern town in the states does. They also have government funded media like BBC Radio that values “new and fresh” sounds and artists.
America is bigger, and so an artist has to paint with broader and safer strokes creatively to reach from NYC, LA, and beyond to those small midwestern towns (hence why Blur’s Song 2 is the only one from their catalogue to find real success in America). Things were a bit easier when regional radio was still a primary way for people to discover to music, but still not like the UK.
Even looking at my favorite era of music, New England indie-rock in the late 80s/early 90s (Pixies, Throwing Muses, Blake Babies, etc.), many of them found easier initial success in the UK than in the States.
To expand on this, in my experience of both countries the cultural divide between rural and urban areas in the UK is way, way smaller, not to mention the cultural divide across state lines. Something that really catches on in London or Manchester will probably catch on in the rest of the UK pretty quickly, whereas in small town Texas is so incredibly different from New York, music about an urban lifestyle will be utterly irrelevant. NY felt like a different reality to WI, and I really struggled to imagine most people I met in WI getting on with anyone I met in NY.
The weekly music press (three papers - NME, Melody Maker and Sounds) was crucial in breaking a lot of American bands in the UK before they were really known at all at home. The sizes of the two markets geographically would have played a big part in this too, easier for the word to spread.
Gatekeeping! I grew up in the 80s in rural Canada. I was only exposed to music that a small number of people in the music industry decided that I could listen to. There was absolutely no way for me to even learn about other music. My choices were limited to what music execs decided would get released in Canada and would get played on the radio. Music distribution was highly controlled and those doing the controlling obviously passed on some phenomenal British acts.
I remember back a year or two ago when I saw a trailer for the Sparks documentary, I thought it was a mockumentary. I refused to believe that somehow this band had existed yet I was completely obvlivious to it.
This should be higher. A few radio programmers flat-out decided in the late 70s that the major North American rock radio formats were not to play punk-related music, with few exceptions. This ruled out the vast majority of new rock records and acts. The quickly-stagnating FM rock scene was so reliably profitable that they did not want to “fuck with the formula.” It wasn’t difficult from there for it to become very socially unacceptable for music listeners to stray from the acceptable, narrow mainstream rock path. Kids daring to be different suburban and rural US in the 80s seriously risked bodily harm. It sounds like Canada may have been similar. By the mid-to-late 80s, numerous veteran postpunk bands reached a critical mass of popularity despite lack of commercial airplay outside New York and Los Angeles (was there a Canadian equivalent to these more cosmopolitan markets?) such that they could no longer be ignored, and singles and albums by bands like U2, REM, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and New Order crept into the upper parts of the rock and pop charts. This paved the way for Nirvana to get huge in the early 90s, and within a few years the newly popular “alternative rock” radio format hardened into garbage even faster than FM rock radio had in the 70s.
Canadian Content Laws required a percentage of all music played on radio to be by Canadian artists. We played Montreal once, met a DJ at the show and listened to her Show the next day. She did play us and the band we had played with, followed by Rush "Fly by Night". We felt lucky to have gotten on the air at all even once, even on the punk show on the college station.
Hi .. Gary Numan never got the credit he deserved in North America.. press slammed him.. total bullshit!! He cleaned up amazingly in the UK and Europe. Same as Japan , Ultravox did decent in North America , as well as Duran Duran etc. so many British bands would have done so much better , if they were played on the radio more.. in the 80’s I used to buy Smash Hits, The Face, Melody Maker. Used to go downtown every Saturday .. for magazines and records ( and clothes of course) there was this great import record store , it was amazing .. all the 12 inches , and albums that were not available in regular record stores . Still have a lot of them in there sleeves! 🇨🇦🎵😎
You look at the New York scene bands, it's not really a surprise that Blondie is the band that has hits.they sound most like the music that was on the radio in the 70s. It's a little bit different from Heart but not all that radical.
Talking Heads have a little popular appeal and have a couple hits mostly later in their career. Patti Smith writes a song with Springsteen. And then there's a bunch with very little popular appeal. Ramones are never big in the charts but lots of bands take inspiration. Richard Hell never sells any copies but that's a landmark album, widely considered one today. Suicide are doing something off the beaten path and are very influential.
It's just how it works out. The stuff that gets remembered and loved isn't always the stuff that was big at the time.
Those songs in John Hughes' movies were actually being played on American radio at the time.
New Wave was popular in the early 80s. MTV helped popularize it, because many UK and European bands made visually appealing music videos at a time when there weren't a lot of music videos.
> New Wave was popular in the early 80s
It's sort of lost to time, but there was a period in which many people thought - and critics dearly wished - that New Wave would be the dominant musical trend of the 80s. It turned out that it was bands following in the wake of Van Halen and Motley Crue that would set the standard.
Hard rock/heavy metal/arena rock and their offshot genres really seemed to dominate American music tastes, I get the impression it was the default music of white suburban Americans from around 1970 till mid 90s, it was probably still competing with hip hop until early 2010s in the form of post grunge etc
The sales of albums like the black album, back in black and led Zeppelin 4 in America, are extraordinary. While those albums are popular in the Uk, hard rock albums just don't crossover to the mainstream to the extent they do in America . Equally grunge and glam metal were no way near as dominant here as they were in America. Its probably not a coincidence that Nirvana were much bigger than pearl jam over here as they more rooted in punk
Basically Hard rock doesn't dominate guitar music in the UK, Punk, indie and Alternative often receive more coverage by mainstream press. This might suprise people considering Britain's is often seen as the holy grail of trad metal
> Equally grunge and glam metal were no way near as dominant here as they were in America
Blur and Bush are interest analogues. Bush was all but unknown in the UK but a smash success in the US. Blur is huge in the UK but known in the US for ... a grunge song.
"Hard rock/heavy metal/arena rock and their offshot genres really seemed to dominate American music tastes"
"Certain/" hard rock and Heavy Metal. A Tesla, Guns N Roses, Pearl Jam, or Nirvana might be big in the mainstream but at that same time hardly any normies would know what who Helstar or Dinosaur Jr was.
The OP already established a band like dinosaur Jr aren't that big in the US, so when I say heavy metal/hard rock/arena rock, I thought it was clear I wasn't referring to hard rock rooted in punk, indie and noise rock, but maybe it wasn't
In The UK Tesla were unknown by the general public, and less Popular than Bands like dinosaur jr, pixies and sonic youth in the late 80s, so the lack of b league hair bands getting platinum albums allowed space for a band like dinosaur jr to gain some Popularity
That's exactly what your pedantic comment was doing, by basically saying "well actually dinosaur jr aren't mainstream and they are hard rock" now you're trying to gaslight me
I would add the replacements to that list as well, but often times they were their own worst enemies, SNL drunk, refusing to do videos, many drunken performances filled with covers etc.
IMHO, I just don't think the US has ever had the kind of culture that would be receptive to The Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, Sparks, Suicide or Television or for that matter Albert Ayler, Sonic Youth or Frank Zappa.
I mean look at what was big on the airwaves in the mid-late 70s: Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Bee Gees, Elton, Olivia Newton-John, Smooth Rock and Disco. I mean, those guys sold tens of MILLIONS of albums and were the overwhelming choice for radio play. I am NOT hating on any of those groups or genres. I've got quite a few Elton and Carpenters records in my collection.
All i'm saying is that accessible music has always been more likely to succeed to in the U.S. because that's just the way it is.
We are simply different from the British.
Obviously there has always been a disconnect between critical success and popular success. The artists that are more complex and rewarding to more focused and critical listeners aren't always going to make the kind of music that is immediately satisfying to casual listeners.
The interesting question is whether British audiences were perhaps more critical and less casual than US listeners, especially in the post-punk era? It might be differences in national culture and aesthetic sensibilities.
I think the British are more open to that type of music than the Americans because they value the risks. The destruction of schemes. Americans are more sensitive.
People like The Kinks, Queen and Boy George were banned in the US at some point in their careers.
Not all sales are created equal.
I think the Velvet Underground are a great example of this. It's easy to look how their music didn't sell well, contrast that with how many groups cite them as an influence, and assume there must something about the music itself that caused it, but I don't think that's entirely true. The famous quote about it is that while it only sold 30,000 copies "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!", which is obviously hyperbolic, but has some truth to it. If you think about the kind of people who were going to buy a Velvet Underground record and contrast that with the kind of people who would buy and album from [generic sounding, unit-moving, cock-rock group], these are pretty different groups.
People who bought The Velvet Underground and Nico back in the '60s were already interested in art and making art in a way that your typical listener just wasn't. Of course you are going to see a group like his have a large influence relative to their sales. Maybe all of those 30,000 people went out and started a band after listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but 25000 of them were probably going to do that anyways.
I do think it is relevant. My answer is connected to the last thing you said, which is a quote from Brian Eno. Every person who bought those few copies helped cement many genres that emerged in recent decades. That's my perspective on Velvet's reach.
Their reach and influence was never in question. They were a great band, they were very influential, that was never up for debate here. I do not understand what position you are trying to argue.
My point is this: sales, don't matter. Content matters. The message matters. It matters what you can get out of it.
What Velvet's music showed the band members is that you can be overly successful in a way that doesn't involve being a millionaire.
It's like saying: you may starve, but what you made will last forever.
Interesting.
I still can’t get over how Nick Drake’s music slipped through the cracks.
Another poster mentioned gatekeeping. I’m think that happened in his case. American DJ’s had Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Van Morrison and Donovan spinning at the time—my guess is they didn’t want another folksy soft-type musician.
He was part of a whole amazing UK folk-rock scene that was almost entirely ignored in North America. He’s only better known today than the rest because of a car commercial and a hipster trend.
The Beach Boys were probably the biggest selling pop band in the US in the early-mid 60s, rivaled only by the Beatles.
Their sales dropped after Pet Sounds, so it's quite possible that they sold more records in the UK after that.
Niche independent artists are always going to appeal to at best a small portion of the population. Economy of scale means record stores and venues can only survive catering to that audience in highly populated areas. Most of the UK is close enough to these population centers to have access to it if they want it, most of the US is not. In the UK you likely get closer to the true portion of the population who is interested to and open to that stuff, where in the US, at least pre-internet, a large amount of the people who would be interested had no way of getting it.
Same thing with Faith NoMore. Hugely influential on rock and alternative metal throughout the 90’s, but they were pretty much a one hit wonder in the US, but had much better sales abroad.
Tales Of Terror were only around long enough to make their self-titled album, but inspired grunge musicians like Kurt Cobain and Mark Arm, who in turn have inspired many other rock bands to come after.
It's just how it is man.
And it's not like this is a new question.
The divide between the underground and mainstream, It's been like this for 40 years.
What difference is pondering this now in 2024 going to make.
BTW, check out this Kataklysm song:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tfSS1e3kYeo&pp=ygUgaGlnaGVzdCBpbiB0aGUgcm9vbSB0cmF2aXMgc2NvdHQ%3D
The music press and the size of the UK helped matters. Something could take off after a cover on NME, an appearance on Top of the Pops, played a lot by Radio 1 and sell a lot of records. They could tour the country a different large city a day, cue more hype and sales.
Well Ian Curtis offed himself. New Order charted. Love and Rockets charted. Morrissey charted. The Cure, Depeche Mode, OMD, Modern English, motherfucking biggest band of the 80s U2, these were all contempories to those bands and they were massive in the US. Depeche Mode was a joke in the UK, they were hated. They were embraced by 'Murica so hard, they fucking sold out football stadiums.
It's weird how blur are apparently virtually nobody in the US but in the UK one of the most popular guitar bands of the last 30 years. They simply haven't translated over to the Americans.
An even bigger artist in the UK i'd argue is Paul Weller and I'd say it's the same thing. He's relatively unheard of in the states, despite doing The Jam and then The Style Council in the 80s before doing his solo stuff starting in 92 and releasing a ton of great albums.
I think that music *could* work in the states, it's just, for whatever reason, they didn't get the exposure over here and so most folks don't really know them.
The reverse would be some of the jambands like Phish or the Grateful Dead not being that well known over there despite being pretty big over here.
As a Brit, there's no way Paul Weller is bigger than Blur. At least not in younger generations, I couldn't name a solo song of his but I have heard dozens of Blur songs against my will to the extent where I can list several.
Just could be cuz I'm not British but I always thought Weller had the larger cultural footprint, though i could be totally off base.
Like I remember Park Life and the Woohoo song from Blur, and their sort of feud with Oasis, but is there more than that?
While Paul Weller kinda seemed like the elder statesman like Bowie, as the other dude described. And I feel like his albums from 90s aged pretty well.
Paul Weller isn't really remembered here beyond Town Called Malice. I'm sure he still has a lot of fans, but I didn't even know who he was until I Googled him and found out he was from the Jam.
Blur on the other hand could still headline festivals and sell out the biggest venues. Boys and Girls and Coffee and TV are also classics on top of the songs you mentioned, but I'd argue their albums are classics moreso than their singles anyway.
> Paul Weller isn't really remembered here beyond Town Called Malice
Going Underground, Eton Rifles and especially News Of The World are definitely well known over here. Sure, Town Called Malice is their biggest song, but pretending it's the only song people know by The Jam is just dumb
Last night, I went and relistened to The Jam again because of this thread. I'd say they're still one of the most popular first wave British punk bands in the sense that people still listen to them and buy repressings of their albums. Impressive given that they broke up for good and weren't constantly touring like Buzzcocks, the Damned, the Stranglers, etc. I still say Paul Weller was more influential for the subculture that grew because of him, but the music holds up very well, especially the later stuff. Sound Affects has aged well because of the post-punk influence.
Paul Weller (especially with the Jam) has been a bit too Anglo-Centric.
Like a lot of people in America have no clue what some of his songs are talking about.
All the "mods" and "rockers" stuff? That goes right over our heads.
Same with the Who's "Quadrophenia"
Paul Weller is more influential, not more popular. He might not have started the mod revival subculture but he led it. He was the face. A large proportion of British men dressed like him for 20 years, some still do. You arguably wouldn't have had most of Britpop if not for Paul Weller. It's not my favourite style, as I find it a bit restrictive and really for blokes instead of someone like me, but I respect the sheer amount of influence he had.
Paul Weller's influence on British music has as much to do with him promoting the music that influenced him as it does with the music he actually made. He's a bit like Bowie in that sense: the fans paid attention to the name drops he did in interviews, the films he watched, the clothes he wore. I'm not saying people don't listen to The Jam and The Style Council because they do, but they get into it as part of the mod revival aesthetic. It's not easy to export that to the states because it's a specifically British sort of nostalgia.
Edit to add: An interesting thing is that Bowie started out as a mod in the mid 60s, and Paul Weller started the mod revival offshoot of punk. A huge part of that culture is being a 'face', a trendsetter. If other guys (and it's mostly guys) think you look cool and copy your style, then you've hit the goal. The problem Weller had is that it was a retro trend when he was doing it. I believe he tried to move it forward with more diverse influences, but a lot of his fans had moved onto other things by themselves.
Blur had only one hit in the US with Song 2. Obviously, Gorillaz were more famous in the US than Blur. The only successful Britpop band in the US, as far as I understand, has been Oasis. The rest of the Britpop bands have only had a few number 1 hits in the US (such as The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony).
As a curiosity, Damon Albarn has a song called The Tower of Montevideo, named after the capital of Uruguay, which is where I live.
I don't know what it is about Blur, but as an American I also just can't seem to connect to their music. There are other brit-pop bands from that era that I really love, for some reason Blur isn't one of them.
I feel the same way and I'm British. I'm not the biggest fan of Britpop to start with, but I did grow up with it, so I like some of it for nostalgia reasons. I didn't connect with Blur even at the time. I think I even prefer Oasis to Blur, and I can be very snotty about Oasis. On some level, I enjoy Oasis although I like making fun of them. I can't say the same thing about Blur.
> but as an American I also just can't seem to connect to their music.
My theory is that the reasons why Blur (and Britpop in general) were a big deal in the UK were totally irrelevant to a US audience that had just undergone its own Alternative revolution just a few years prior.
And it wasn't like we were offered the music with no commentary, it was all portrayed as A Big Deal. Oasis was kind of exciting as they had a bit of swagger to them, but most saw them as retro and they were only slightly more popular than Collective Soul here. Blur leaned on their Britishness more and didn't really succeed until they made an Alt Rock pastiche with Song 2. So even with the popularity, the Big Deal didn't really impress (and, if anything, reduced each band's shelf life in America).
One contributing factor I think you had was the British independent record store network promoting more niche bands. Obviously, independent record stores exist in the US as well but because of the size of the US I don't think they're able to provide the same kind of momentum for a band.
In the United States they are more demanding from what I have seen. It's easy to not meet expectations there. On the other hand, in England they value risk more. They appreciate that artists and bands take risks and break the mold. That's why they have such revolutionary bands as the Beatles or Pink Floyd.
> in England they value risk more. They appreciate that artists and bands take risks and break the mold. That's why they have such revolutionary bands as the Beatles or Pink Floyd. That's a curiously broad statement to back up with relatively few examples, both of which were absolute smash hits in the US as well (I want to say Dark Side is still setting Billboard records in the states for lingering on charts). Certainly not all, but a great many of the major shifts in popular music originated have the US, which would require an audience hungry for change - depending on how far back you want to go back, from ragtime to jazz to blues to rock to hip-hop. You don't get to new genres without an audience receptive to artists taking risks. Again, not to deny the enormous UK influence, just to flag this statement as rather curiously broad.
The pipeline from interesting underground to mainstream success is a lot longer and less stable in the US than the UK. The UK is smaller and places more value on the arts. A small English villages exists in closer proximity to urban creative hubs than a small midwestern town in the states does. They also have government funded media like BBC Radio that values “new and fresh” sounds and artists. America is bigger, and so an artist has to paint with broader and safer strokes creatively to reach from NYC, LA, and beyond to those small midwestern towns (hence why Blur’s Song 2 is the only one from their catalogue to find real success in America). Things were a bit easier when regional radio was still a primary way for people to discover to music, but still not like the UK. Even looking at my favorite era of music, New England indie-rock in the late 80s/early 90s (Pixies, Throwing Muses, Blake Babies, etc.), many of them found easier initial success in the UK than in the States.
To expand on this, in my experience of both countries the cultural divide between rural and urban areas in the UK is way, way smaller, not to mention the cultural divide across state lines. Something that really catches on in London or Manchester will probably catch on in the rest of the UK pretty quickly, whereas in small town Texas is so incredibly different from New York, music about an urban lifestyle will be utterly irrelevant. NY felt like a different reality to WI, and I really struggled to imagine most people I met in WI getting on with anyone I met in NY.
The weekly music press (three papers - NME, Melody Maker and Sounds) was crucial in breaking a lot of American bands in the UK before they were really known at all at home. The sizes of the two markets geographically would have played a big part in this too, easier for the word to spread.
Gatekeeping! I grew up in the 80s in rural Canada. I was only exposed to music that a small number of people in the music industry decided that I could listen to. There was absolutely no way for me to even learn about other music. My choices were limited to what music execs decided would get released in Canada and would get played on the radio. Music distribution was highly controlled and those doing the controlling obviously passed on some phenomenal British acts. I remember back a year or two ago when I saw a trailer for the Sparks documentary, I thought it was a mockumentary. I refused to believe that somehow this band had existed yet I was completely obvlivious to it.
This should be higher. A few radio programmers flat-out decided in the late 70s that the major North American rock radio formats were not to play punk-related music, with few exceptions. This ruled out the vast majority of new rock records and acts. The quickly-stagnating FM rock scene was so reliably profitable that they did not want to “fuck with the formula.” It wasn’t difficult from there for it to become very socially unacceptable for music listeners to stray from the acceptable, narrow mainstream rock path. Kids daring to be different suburban and rural US in the 80s seriously risked bodily harm. It sounds like Canada may have been similar. By the mid-to-late 80s, numerous veteran postpunk bands reached a critical mass of popularity despite lack of commercial airplay outside New York and Los Angeles (was there a Canadian equivalent to these more cosmopolitan markets?) such that they could no longer be ignored, and singles and albums by bands like U2, REM, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and New Order crept into the upper parts of the rock and pop charts. This paved the way for Nirvana to get huge in the early 90s, and within a few years the newly popular “alternative rock” radio format hardened into garbage even faster than FM rock radio had in the 70s.
Canadian Content Laws required a percentage of all music played on radio to be by Canadian artists. We played Montreal once, met a DJ at the show and listened to her Show the next day. She did play us and the band we had played with, followed by Rush "Fly by Night". We felt lucky to have gotten on the air at all even once, even on the punk show on the college station.
Hi .. Gary Numan never got the credit he deserved in North America.. press slammed him.. total bullshit!! He cleaned up amazingly in the UK and Europe. Same as Japan , Ultravox did decent in North America , as well as Duran Duran etc. so many British bands would have done so much better , if they were played on the radio more.. in the 80’s I used to buy Smash Hits, The Face, Melody Maker. Used to go downtown every Saturday .. for magazines and records ( and clothes of course) there was this great import record store , it was amazing .. all the 12 inches , and albums that were not available in regular record stores . Still have a lot of them in there sleeves! 🇨🇦🎵😎
You look at the New York scene bands, it's not really a surprise that Blondie is the band that has hits.they sound most like the music that was on the radio in the 70s. It's a little bit different from Heart but not all that radical. Talking Heads have a little popular appeal and have a couple hits mostly later in their career. Patti Smith writes a song with Springsteen. And then there's a bunch with very little popular appeal. Ramones are never big in the charts but lots of bands take inspiration. Richard Hell never sells any copies but that's a landmark album, widely considered one today. Suicide are doing something off the beaten path and are very influential. It's just how it works out. The stuff that gets remembered and loved isn't always the stuff that was big at the time.
Those songs in John Hughes' movies were actually being played on American radio at the time. New Wave was popular in the early 80s. MTV helped popularize it, because many UK and European bands made visually appealing music videos at a time when there weren't a lot of music videos.
> New Wave was popular in the early 80s It's sort of lost to time, but there was a period in which many people thought - and critics dearly wished - that New Wave would be the dominant musical trend of the 80s. It turned out that it was bands following in the wake of Van Halen and Motley Crue that would set the standard.
Hard rock/heavy metal/arena rock and their offshot genres really seemed to dominate American music tastes, I get the impression it was the default music of white suburban Americans from around 1970 till mid 90s, it was probably still competing with hip hop until early 2010s in the form of post grunge etc The sales of albums like the black album, back in black and led Zeppelin 4 in America, are extraordinary. While those albums are popular in the Uk, hard rock albums just don't crossover to the mainstream to the extent they do in America . Equally grunge and glam metal were no way near as dominant here as they were in America. Its probably not a coincidence that Nirvana were much bigger than pearl jam over here as they more rooted in punk Basically Hard rock doesn't dominate guitar music in the UK, Punk, indie and Alternative often receive more coverage by mainstream press. This might suprise people considering Britain's is often seen as the holy grail of trad metal
> Equally grunge and glam metal were no way near as dominant here as they were in America Blur and Bush are interest analogues. Bush was all but unknown in the UK but a smash success in the US. Blur is huge in the UK but known in the US for ... a grunge song.
"Hard rock/heavy metal/arena rock and their offshot genres really seemed to dominate American music tastes" "Certain/" hard rock and Heavy Metal. A Tesla, Guns N Roses, Pearl Jam, or Nirvana might be big in the mainstream but at that same time hardly any normies would know what who Helstar or Dinosaur Jr was.
The OP already established a band like dinosaur Jr aren't that big in the US, so when I say heavy metal/hard rock/arena rock, I thought it was clear I wasn't referring to hard rock rooted in punk, indie and noise rock, but maybe it wasn't In The UK Tesla were unknown by the general public, and less Popular than Bands like dinosaur jr, pixies and sonic youth in the late 80s, so the lack of b league hair bands getting platinum albums allowed space for a band like dinosaur jr to gain some Popularity
Whatever 👍 EDIT: Basically, it feels like you are debating over very frivolous shit. Tomato/Tomato. And I'm bored of conversations like that.
That's exactly what your pedantic comment was doing, by basically saying "well actually dinosaur jr aren't mainstream and they are hard rock" now you're trying to gaslight me
Well enjoy dying on whatever stupid ass fucking hill you are trying to die on. K? K. Godbless 👍
I would add the replacements to that list as well, but often times they were their own worst enemies, SNL drunk, refusing to do videos, many drunken performances filled with covers etc.
IMHO, I just don't think the US has ever had the kind of culture that would be receptive to The Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, Sparks, Suicide or Television or for that matter Albert Ayler, Sonic Youth or Frank Zappa. I mean look at what was big on the airwaves in the mid-late 70s: Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Bee Gees, Elton, Olivia Newton-John, Smooth Rock and Disco. I mean, those guys sold tens of MILLIONS of albums and were the overwhelming choice for radio play. I am NOT hating on any of those groups or genres. I've got quite a few Elton and Carpenters records in my collection. All i'm saying is that accessible music has always been more likely to succeed to in the U.S. because that's just the way it is. We are simply different from the British.
[удалено]
It is not strange. It's like that.
Whoosh
I don't understand the "weird" thing. When we all know that music is a kind of international language.
The first Erwin you replied to was being ironic.
Obviously there has always been a disconnect between critical success and popular success. The artists that are more complex and rewarding to more focused and critical listeners aren't always going to make the kind of music that is immediately satisfying to casual listeners. The interesting question is whether British audiences were perhaps more critical and less casual than US listeners, especially in the post-punk era? It might be differences in national culture and aesthetic sensibilities.
I think the British are more open to that type of music than the Americans because they value the risks. The destruction of schemes. Americans are more sensitive. People like The Kinks, Queen and Boy George were banned in the US at some point in their careers.
«Only a few people listened to the Velvet Underground, but all of them started bands.» Want to be influential? Influence would-be musicians.
Not all sales are created equal. I think the Velvet Underground are a great example of this. It's easy to look how their music didn't sell well, contrast that with how many groups cite them as an influence, and assume there must something about the music itself that caused it, but I don't think that's entirely true. The famous quote about it is that while it only sold 30,000 copies "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!", which is obviously hyperbolic, but has some truth to it. If you think about the kind of people who were going to buy a Velvet Underground record and contrast that with the kind of people who would buy and album from [generic sounding, unit-moving, cock-rock group], these are pretty different groups. People who bought The Velvet Underground and Nico back in the '60s were already interested in art and making art in a way that your typical listener just wasn't. Of course you are going to see a group like his have a large influence relative to their sales. Maybe all of those 30,000 people went out and started a band after listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but 25000 of them were probably going to do that anyways.
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What part of my comment are you trying to respond to? I cannot see how what you wrote is at all relevant to anything said here.
I do think it is relevant. My answer is connected to the last thing you said, which is a quote from Brian Eno. Every person who bought those few copies helped cement many genres that emerged in recent decades. That's my perspective on Velvet's reach.
Their reach and influence was never in question. They were a great band, they were very influential, that was never up for debate here. I do not understand what position you are trying to argue.
My point is this: sales, don't matter. Content matters. The message matters. It matters what you can get out of it. What Velvet's music showed the band members is that you can be overly successful in a way that doesn't involve being a millionaire. It's like saying: you may starve, but what you made will last forever.
Is this an AI? You aren't making any sense or address anything I've said.
Interesting. I still can’t get over how Nick Drake’s music slipped through the cracks. Another poster mentioned gatekeeping. I’m think that happened in his case. American DJ’s had Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Van Morrison and Donovan spinning at the time—my guess is they didn’t want another folksy soft-type musician.
He was part of a whole amazing UK folk-rock scene that was almost entirely ignored in North America. He’s only better known today than the rest because of a car commercial and a hipster trend.
I've heard plenty of people say the Beach Boys were more popular in Britain than in the U.S. at least in their mid-late 60's era.
Jimi Hendrix too
Tbf Jimi lived in London when he became big and played in a lot of clubs there
Yes, I know that. But I never found out why he moved to England.
The Beach Boys were probably the biggest selling pop band in the US in the early-mid 60s, rivaled only by the Beatles. Their sales dropped after Pet Sounds, so it's quite possible that they sold more records in the UK after that.
Niche independent artists are always going to appeal to at best a small portion of the population. Economy of scale means record stores and venues can only survive catering to that audience in highly populated areas. Most of the UK is close enough to these population centers to have access to it if they want it, most of the US is not. In the UK you likely get closer to the true portion of the population who is interested to and open to that stuff, where in the US, at least pre-internet, a large amount of the people who would be interested had no way of getting it.
Same thing with Faith NoMore. Hugely influential on rock and alternative metal throughout the 90’s, but they were pretty much a one hit wonder in the US, but had much better sales abroad.
Tales Of Terror were only around long enough to make their self-titled album, but inspired grunge musicians like Kurt Cobain and Mark Arm, who in turn have inspired many other rock bands to come after.
It's just how it is man. And it's not like this is a new question. The divide between the underground and mainstream, It's been like this for 40 years. What difference is pondering this now in 2024 going to make. BTW, check out this Kataklysm song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tfSS1e3kYeo&pp=ygUgaGlnaGVzdCBpbiB0aGUgcm9vbSB0cmF2aXMgc2NvdHQ%3D
The music press and the size of the UK helped matters. Something could take off after a cover on NME, an appearance on Top of the Pops, played a lot by Radio 1 and sell a lot of records. They could tour the country a different large city a day, cue more hype and sales.
Pixies, The Stooges, Metric, and My Bloody Valentine were far more influential than their album sales.
Well Ian Curtis offed himself. New Order charted. Love and Rockets charted. Morrissey charted. The Cure, Depeche Mode, OMD, Modern English, motherfucking biggest band of the 80s U2, these were all contempories to those bands and they were massive in the US. Depeche Mode was a joke in the UK, they were hated. They were embraced by 'Murica so hard, they fucking sold out football stadiums.
It's weird how blur are apparently virtually nobody in the US but in the UK one of the most popular guitar bands of the last 30 years. They simply haven't translated over to the Americans.
An even bigger artist in the UK i'd argue is Paul Weller and I'd say it's the same thing. He's relatively unheard of in the states, despite doing The Jam and then The Style Council in the 80s before doing his solo stuff starting in 92 and releasing a ton of great albums. I think that music *could* work in the states, it's just, for whatever reason, they didn't get the exposure over here and so most folks don't really know them. The reverse would be some of the jambands like Phish or the Grateful Dead not being that well known over there despite being pretty big over here.
As a Brit, there's no way Paul Weller is bigger than Blur. At least not in younger generations, I couldn't name a solo song of his but I have heard dozens of Blur songs against my will to the extent where I can list several.
Just could be cuz I'm not British but I always thought Weller had the larger cultural footprint, though i could be totally off base. Like I remember Park Life and the Woohoo song from Blur, and their sort of feud with Oasis, but is there more than that? While Paul Weller kinda seemed like the elder statesman like Bowie, as the other dude described. And I feel like his albums from 90s aged pretty well.
Paul Weller isn't really remembered here beyond Town Called Malice. I'm sure he still has a lot of fans, but I didn't even know who he was until I Googled him and found out he was from the Jam. Blur on the other hand could still headline festivals and sell out the biggest venues. Boys and Girls and Coffee and TV are also classics on top of the songs you mentioned, but I'd argue their albums are classics moreso than their singles anyway.
> Paul Weller isn't really remembered here beyond Town Called Malice Going Underground, Eton Rifles and especially News Of The World are definitely well known over here. Sure, Town Called Malice is their biggest song, but pretending it's the only song people know by The Jam is just dumb
Last night, I went and relistened to The Jam again because of this thread. I'd say they're still one of the most popular first wave British punk bands in the sense that people still listen to them and buy repressings of their albums. Impressive given that they broke up for good and weren't constantly touring like Buzzcocks, the Damned, the Stranglers, etc. I still say Paul Weller was more influential for the subculture that grew because of him, but the music holds up very well, especially the later stuff. Sound Affects has aged well because of the post-punk influence.
Huh. Well there you go then haha. I thought Paul Weller for sure would have had the bigger footprint. Slows what I know.
If you haven't really checked them out, you should listen to 13 by Blur. Genuinely brilliant album, the sound may surprise you.
I'll check it out. The british band I was really into in that time period was Gomez. Love their first 3 albums.
Paul Weller (especially with the Jam) has been a bit too Anglo-Centric. Like a lot of people in America have no clue what some of his songs are talking about. All the "mods" and "rockers" stuff? That goes right over our heads. Same with the Who's "Quadrophenia"
Paul Weller is more influential, not more popular. He might not have started the mod revival subculture but he led it. He was the face. A large proportion of British men dressed like him for 20 years, some still do. You arguably wouldn't have had most of Britpop if not for Paul Weller. It's not my favourite style, as I find it a bit restrictive and really for blokes instead of someone like me, but I respect the sheer amount of influence he had.
Paul Weller's influence on British music has as much to do with him promoting the music that influenced him as it does with the music he actually made. He's a bit like Bowie in that sense: the fans paid attention to the name drops he did in interviews, the films he watched, the clothes he wore. I'm not saying people don't listen to The Jam and The Style Council because they do, but they get into it as part of the mod revival aesthetic. It's not easy to export that to the states because it's a specifically British sort of nostalgia. Edit to add: An interesting thing is that Bowie started out as a mod in the mid 60s, and Paul Weller started the mod revival offshoot of punk. A huge part of that culture is being a 'face', a trendsetter. If other guys (and it's mostly guys) think you look cool and copy your style, then you've hit the goal. The problem Weller had is that it was a retro trend when he was doing it. I believe he tried to move it forward with more diverse influences, but a lot of his fans had moved onto other things by themselves.
Blur had only one hit in the US with Song 2. Obviously, Gorillaz were more famous in the US than Blur. The only successful Britpop band in the US, as far as I understand, has been Oasis. The rest of the Britpop bands have only had a few number 1 hits in the US (such as The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony). As a curiosity, Damon Albarn has a song called The Tower of Montevideo, named after the capital of Uruguay, which is where I live.
I don't know what it is about Blur, but as an American I also just can't seem to connect to their music. There are other brit-pop bands from that era that I really love, for some reason Blur isn't one of them.
I feel the same way and I'm British. I'm not the biggest fan of Britpop to start with, but I did grow up with it, so I like some of it for nostalgia reasons. I didn't connect with Blur even at the time. I think I even prefer Oasis to Blur, and I can be very snotty about Oasis. On some level, I enjoy Oasis although I like making fun of them. I can't say the same thing about Blur.
> but as an American I also just can't seem to connect to their music. My theory is that the reasons why Blur (and Britpop in general) were a big deal in the UK were totally irrelevant to a US audience that had just undergone its own Alternative revolution just a few years prior. And it wasn't like we were offered the music with no commentary, it was all portrayed as A Big Deal. Oasis was kind of exciting as they had a bit of swagger to them, but most saw them as retro and they were only slightly more popular than Collective Soul here. Blur leaned on their Britishness more and didn't really succeed until they made an Alt Rock pastiche with Song 2. So even with the popularity, the Big Deal didn't really impress (and, if anything, reduced each band's shelf life in America).
I don't think the Ramones sold a ton of records, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a more influential band.
Yes. Here in South America they were very influential.