The New Yorker's Music Critic on Breaking UK Acts In America

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Atlantic Crossing

This week in the magazine and online, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the difficulty that British acts sometimes have making it big in America. Here, with Ben Greenman, he talks about the article.

BEN GREENMAN: For starters, are there real differences between American pop and British pop? If so, what are they?

SASHA FRERE-JONES: America and Britain have similar striations and varieties of pop but different players. Big, pretty voices rule the charts in both places and battle it out with whichever strains of youth dance music are dominant: hip-hop and reggaetón here, grime and other descendants of rave there. Then, there are certain broad tendencies that guide which products each country will accept from the other. I didn’t include some British and American acts in my unscientific sample simply because it’s no surprise that they don’t translate well. Country music has a reliable tendency to talk about America and its mores, which is of interest to Americans but less so to the British. And England’s native-born style of rapping, grime, has not enjoyed much success here. Dizzee Rascal, the genre’s best-known performer, sold a startlingly low fifty-six thousand copies of his début, “Boy in da Corner,” despite loads of positive press. Dizzee’s hyperactive beats and strangulated delivery make for good art, but his East London accent is tough going for many Americans, and the current state of British slang will confuse anyone who doesn’t have Google close at hand. Grime rhythms are also very much outside American swing, which you can hear even in brand-new hip-hop forms like snap music (Dem Franchize Boyz, Yung Joc, Rashad) and hyphy (the Federation, E-40). In my article, I was focussing on acts that seem like they could work here but don’t, or become, at best, reliable cult favorites. These are pop and rock performers who have met the basic requirements of stardom—being physically attractive and writing catchy songs—but get stuck in transit. A great, rackety young band like Arctic Monkeys would likely never sell as many records in America as a pop singer or a rapper, though there is always a chance that the album will hang on for a while and maybe sell five hundred thousand copies.

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