Foreign Music Affairs

In a music world dominated by so much American hip-hop and dance pop, I was certainly surprised to find out that The Suburbs, an ambitious album from the Montreal band Arcade Fire, had won the 2011 Album of the Year Grammy. Yes, I have heard Arcade Fire's music. Their work is very sharp an acerbic, with a lot of heart. That's why I can't believe they won the Album of the Year Grammy. Alternative rock bands from Canada aren't supposed to win such prestigious mainstream awards. Even though band founder Win Butler and his brother William are in fact Americans, just the fact that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences would nominate a band from across the border is news to me. I got to thinking that the only non-American pop act anyone cares about these days is Canada's Justin Bieber. It turns out, in fact, the the United States is one of many countries where The Suburbs hit number one on the charts.

The British haven't done so badly at the Grammys in recent years either. Although it was taken for granted that Robert Plant and American Alison Krauss would win the 2009 Album of the Year Grammy for Raising Sand, because the veteran Plant is popular with NARAS voters, I wonder how many people saw this coming at the 2009 ceremony - soul singer Adele winning the Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal awards on the basis of her single "Chasing Pavements," a song with a title that doesn't make sense in American English. (The word "pavement" is Britspeak for "sidewalk;" Adele was comparing the pursuit of a broken relationship to chasing an empty sidewalk.) It's also worth noting that two British bands that have been lucky to click with American audiences, Coldplay and Radiohead, have also been Grammy winners, with the record sales to back them up.

The past decade has been a mixed one for non-American pop acts, especially the Brits. The veteran rock critic Dave Marsh, noting the domination of American acts on the U.S. charts in the mid-eighties with the Brits were represented by poseurs such as Duran Duran or grizzled veterans such as Phil Collins, declared at the time, "British rock has never been so irrelevant." Wonder what he thought of the first decade of the new century? For awhile, unless he was Chris Martin or Thom Yorke, a British rocker couldn't get arrested in America. British bands like the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand were winning accolades in their homeland even as their names drew blanks here; in America, Arctic Monkeys may just as well have referred to missing links and Franz Ferdinand may very well have been the Austrian archduke whose assassination sparked World War I. (I'm kidding, of course; Americans know next to nothing about evolution or world history.) And were we really paying attention to Amy Winehouse for her music?

The Arctic Monkeys supposedly released one of the greatest albums of all time (so a U.K. music poll insisted) when they issued Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not in 2006. We Yanks responded with a collective "Yeah, right" by getting that album no higher than number 24 on the Billboard charts. And Franz Ferdinand's 2005 album You Could Have It So Much Better didn't have it much better than 378,000 copies sold in the States in its first three years on release. (Their 2004 debut album only got up to number 32 here.) But Coldplay and Radiohead have kept the flame alight (another British word there) for British pop in America, and Adele seems to be poised to succeed on a much bigger scale than Amy Winehouse could ever have dreamed, now that her second album is coming out. ("Chasing Pavements" only got up to number 21 on the Billboard singles charts, but that could only be because too many Americans didn't know what the heck she was talking about.)

I've complained about the sun setting on the British musical empire here before, and I'm under no allusion that U.K. performers are going to reclaim for rock and roll American audiences lost to rap and Lady Gaga. Nor do I even believe that even British dance popsters could succeed in America on a big scale. Or, for that matter, British rappers. Hip-hop by nature is vulgar, narcissistic, and ill-mannered, which is why we Americans are so much better at it. But the recent accomplishments of British performers, coupled with those of their Commonwealth brethren in Canada (I'm not talking about Justin Bieber here), proves that, despite the nationalistic way of thinking Americans have gone back to with regard to popular culture, there's still an audience here open to non-American popular music.

Even if we still insist foreigners have to sing in English to have a hit here.

Wonder how long it will take Adele to stop writing songs with titles like "Chasing Pavements?" :-O