What ever happened to Britpop?

"The Brit Box" evokes an era of pale, sensitive, eyelinered boys -- and the Anglophiles who loved them.

By Simon Reynolds

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Photo: Reuters//Ethan Miller

A Salon photo composite of Morrissey and "The Brit Box."

Dec. 8, 2007 | "The Brit Box: U.K. Indie, Shoegaze, and Brit-Pop Gems of the Last Millennium" (Rhino) comes cutely packaged in a tall red telephone box, the kind you've seen in countless old movies set in England. Of course, in the U.K., the classic public phone box -- somber scarlet paint, Her Majesty's crown insignia at the top -- was long ago replaced with a sleeker, modern-looking model. Besides, everyone uses cellphones now. But the out-of-date packaging suits "The Brit Box's" sales pitch to a T. The idea here is that Great Britain is quaint but classy. Just as Fortnum & Mason continues to offer afternoon tea long after the custom of eating scones and cucumber sandwiches died out among the populace at large, British bands can always be relied on to serve up the country's traditional pop values -- wordsmith wit, shapely tunes, English charm -- just as they did back in those fab 1960s.

In America, this shtick appeals to the same sort of Anglophiles who fasten on the British accents in Masterpiece Theatre and PBS's other imported programming (the dowdy costume dramas, lame sitcoms, and sleuth shows about crime-solving antique dealers and spinsters) as a seal of quality. Rock Anglophilia's constituency is a younger subset of the exact same demographic (college-educated upper middle class), and it's based around an identical syndrome: the equating of England with a superior level of refinement and literacy.

For a certain kind of American, being into pop music from the U.K. has long been a way to express a sense of being different from everybody else. The seeds of this dissident taste might germinate with hearing Depeche Mode or Morrissey on a modern rock station, then bloom through discovering college radio and being initiated in Anglo esoterica like XTC or Robyn Hitchcock, and finally blossom when the budding Anglophile starts picking up pricey import copies of British pop papers and magazines. English music weeklies like the NME have inducted American Anglophiles into a fabulous world where bands talk better (reared on the music press, they know how to give good interview) and look more stylish than their American indie equivalents. The British groups usually contain at least one or two pretty boys -- pale, thin, with really good hair, and maybe even eyeliner. Anglo androgyny appeals to young women and men who prefer their pop fantasy object to be sensitive and delicate -- not a buff hunk. Even U.K. frontmen who are considered macho louts in their homeland exude an aura of androgyny by association over here.

Aimed squarely at American Anglophiles, "The Brit Box" covers the years 1984 to 1999, a seemingly arbitrary time span. What actually distinguishes those 16 years as a separate period from the epoch of British guitar-based music that preceded it? Perhaps it's simply the fact that, notwithstanding its cult following in this country, almost all of the music on this box failed commercially in America. From the early '60s to the early '80s, what was big in Britain was, with a precious few exceptions, equally big in America: Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, Cream, Sabbath, Zeppelin, Rod Stewart. The Transatlantic traffic faltered slightly circa punk, but resumed in force with the Police and the Clash, followed by the synth-wielding, MTV-friendly androgynes of the early '80s, the so-called second British invasion led by Duran Duran. With a few exceptions like the Cure and Oasis, what this Rhino box documents is the British non-invasion.

Of course, "The Brit Box" doesn't attempt to encompass all the music that came out of the U.K. between 1984 and 1999. Plenty of English acts enjoyed substantial success in the United States. Tellingly, though, almost all of them --from George Michael to Soul II Soul, Simply Red to Stereo MCs -- were deeply steeped in black American music. Essentially, they represented the continuation of what the British Invaders of the '60s started, the great English love affair with cutting-edge black music: back then, blues and soul; by the '80s and '90s, funk, disco, hip-hop, house. However much they expanded and mutated their black sources, every major group of the British '60s was at heart a dance band, with years of playing in sweaty clubs to teenagers looking to shake their stuff. Anglophiles would probably argue that British indie rock of the '80s and '90s failed to find success here because of the conservatism of American radio. But maybe the failure of U.K. indie, shoegaze and Britpop comes down to these genres' gradual divorce from black music. Fetishizing the guitar sounds of the '60s, they forgot about its rhythmic base and impulse toward sonic hybridity.

The Smiths, who kick off "The Brit Box" with their 1984 song "How Soon Is Now," were a critical force in the drift away from the dance floor and black influences. Morrissey's voice sounded "pale" and "pure" in a way that was almost, but not quite, folky; Johnny Marr's guitar harked back to Byrdsy jangle rather than Chic's choppy funk. In 1986, the Smiths spelled out their opposition to mainstream dance-pop with their single "Panic," whose chorus demanded "burn down the disco/ hang the blessed deejay." For Morrissey, the DJ's crime was lyrical vapidity and complacent hedonism: "the music that they constantly play/ says nothing to me about my life." His interview comments of the time -- he described hip-hop's presence in the charts as "a stench," dismissed reggae as "vile" and derided R&B's gross caricature of sexuality -- prompted some critical supporters of soul music and club culture to argue that his remarks exposed a subtle form of racism in the indie music scene. Bizarrely, this ancient controversy flared back to life last month when Morrissey, interviewed by NME, blamed the erosion of the England he knew and loved as a child in the '60s on immigration, even using the classic nativist metaphor of a culture being swamped. During the resulting furor, Morrissey insisted (as he has before) on his opposition to racism, which he described as "silly."

This apparent contradiction -- being anti-racist but steadfastly avoiding any contact with black music culture -- is integral to indie rock. Indie-rock fans, with their high quotient of college students, may actually be more likely to have progressive political opinions than regular folks. But there is a blinkered parochialism to indie rock taste whose net result ends up looking an awful lot like self-segregation. One of the dirty secrets of the U.K. music press was the fact that sales figures and market research both showed that issues featuring black artists on the cover sold poorly. The charitable interpretation of this is that the regular readership assumed that these were performers in hip-hop or R&B, genres they either had no curiosity about or actively despised.

During much of the period covered by "The Brit Box," I worked as a writer on the weekly music paper Melody Maker, witnessing the rise of most of the bands featured herein. With a handful of exceptions -- the epoch-defining Smiths and Stone Roses, the dizzyingly innovative My Bloody Valentine, the witty, charismatic Pulp -- my attention was focused on other music going on during this period: rock's experimental fringe, hip-hop, dance culture and electronic music. When it came to guitars, I found the stuff coming out of America far more appealing, on the whole -- wilder-sounding, better played, often coupled with a deranged and scabrous sense of humor -- as purveyed by bands like Hüsker Dü, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Butthole Surfers and Pixies. There was a palpable difference in quality and substance between American and British rock, audible on the basic level of rocking -- something few U.K. guitar bands seemed able to pull off during the '80s.

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