Imagine a band with a sultry female singer, an impressive new-wave pedigree, a sound that expertly blends Motown soul with contemporary pop/rock, and oodles of international success over more than a decade. Sign that band to a nice contract and give them a long-overdue Stateside push. Then explain to them, as their new album sends them to the peak of their global popularity, why the largest market in the world will be forever off-limits.

The story’s a true one. The band is Texas.

While writing last week’s column about Robbie Williams, I found myself musing (and in some cases mourning) over some of my other favorite U.K. acts that, despite longstanding popularity on the other side of the Atlantic, never gained traction in the States. Explaining this phenomenon is sometimes easy, as with Robbie and his inability to convince Americans that a self-deprecating irony lurked just beneath his arrogant surface. Then there’s a band like the Manic Street Preachers. Their story was a little too weird (original lead singer Richie James, a depressive bent on self-mutilation, eventually disappeared and was presumed a suicide); their attitude was too wrapped up in radical British politics and class warfare; and their big U.S. break (opening an Oasis tour) was cut short because the fuckin’ Gallagher brothers couldn’t keep from wringing each other’s necks. By the time they released their highest-selling album in 1998 – a smash that won them Q magazine’s “Biggest Band in the World” prize – their American label, Epic, had dropped them from its roster. (more…)

“England and America are two countries separated by a common language.“
—George Bernard Shaw

In July 1998 my wife, my son, and I moved into a terraced house on a side street in London’s Fulham neighborhood, commencing an adventure in living abroad that we thought would come easily. We were well funded by my wife’s firm, we were within easy walking distance of a plethora of parks and shopping, and we were tremendously excited to be escaping the downward spiral of the Lewinsky scandal in the U.S., not to mention the vapid teen pop and rancid rap-rock that was taking over American radio at the time. As long as we remembered to look right at the intersection, we figured we’d do just fine.

Four months later we were dying to get the hell out of there. Our landlords were pure evil, hovering over us to make sure we didn’t ding their precious furniture; my wife was having trouble adjusting to the ways of business in the U.K.; our son was chafing at his city surroundings and making life miserable for the Czech teenager we’d hired as an au pair; and the coldest, wettest London autumn in a generation had left us drenched, drained, and feeling awfully alone.

Mostly, though, we couldn’t comprehend the Brits. We could understand what they were saying, to be sure; we just couldn’t understand why. We couldn’t figure out the style of humor that made their comedy shows funny, we couldn’t make sense of the nationwide mania for spending days on end watching a lawn-bowling tournament (”the bowls,” as they call it), we couldn’t fathom the fatalism that dominates their class system and their international relations.

We didn’t get why we couldn’t find Oreos or even Q-Tips in the grocery stores. (It was months before we learned that the Brits called Q-Tips “cotton buds” and kept them in a different part of the store than we were used to.) And we definitely couldn’t adjust to the fact that, compared to the States, the pace of life was so much slower in London, even at the height of “Cool Britannia.”

Culture shock had made our life inexplicable. But then, over a period of a couple months, Robbie Williams explained it all for me.

(more…)

It’s time for the third installment in our six-part series (assuming I finish before the end of the decade) documenting the most putrid pabulum of the rock era. And this time it’s personal. As a (slightly) post-boomer, I attacked the ’50s and ’60s with the relative objectivity of someone for whom the songs from those decades were forever oldies. However, I was trusted to hold a round slab of vinyl in my hands for the first time at Christmastime in 1971 (the Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits), and at that point, objectivity flew out the window.

In compiling this list, I took a non-scientific poll with a sample of two: myself in the present, and myself as a 6-to-14-year-old music obsessive. To say that the small sample size skewed the results would be an understatement, so we’ll suffice with a warning: If you’re looking for a list of the songs a right-thinking 50-year-old (or 30- or 20-year-old) would identify as the worst of the ’70s, you’re going to have to look somewhere else. You won’t have any trouble doing so; the Web is chock-a-block with sites identifying songs like “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and “The Night Chicago Died” among the worst of all time.

There’s even an article on CNN.com titled “1974: Crème de la crème of clunkers,” in which Greil Marcus is quoted as saying, “We could say [1974] was a conspiracy by Malcolm McLaren to set the stage for the Sex Pistols.” Well, I love ya, Greil, but fuck off: My inner 8-year-old child – whose favorite songs are still the awesome “rock” triplets from that year, “Rock the Boat,” “Rock Your Baby,” and “Rock Me Gently” – says 1974 was the Greatest Year in Music History! With that grain of salt, take this: (more…)

Patti Myers wants her favorite band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and she wants you to help get them there. “If you are fortunate enough to own any of [their] music, then you have been blessed with a precious gift,” she says. “If you’re not familiar with their music, you’re missing a beautiful experience. [They have] a way of drawing you into the song, holding you captive, then releasing you, feeling better for it.”

Myers has even posted an online petition that she one day hopes to submit to the hall’s selection committee, extolling the band’s achievements and concluding, “Their classic music is still heard on the radio today all around the world, proving that they have earned their place in the Rock Hall of Fame.” That petition has attracted 94 signatures to date.

Patti Myers’ favorite band is Player.

Just in case you can’t make it through the year without one more sighting of celebs in tuxedos and bolo ties, tonight the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its newest members during a ceremony broadcast live on VH1 Classic at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. (Apparently the ceremony isn’t quite important enough to knock “Flavor of Love” and “The Salt’n'Pepa Show” off the mothership: VH1 proper is waiting until March 22 to air the induction ceremony, presumably in heavily edited form.)

All this week, my colleagues at Popdose will be discussing who’s in, who’s out, who should be in, who shouldn’t be, and whether or not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a good idea in the first place. We begin today with the story of Patti Myers and other music fans who, on a wing, a website and a prayer, have undertaken to build a groundswell for their favorite acts to gain admission into rock’s hallowed Hall.

First, though, a preview of this evening’s festivities. (more…)

As any loyal Popdose reader with a lingering affection for British power pop surely knows, the name of this column is cribbed from Nick Lowe’s 1978 album Jesus of Cool, which just last week was re-released on CD Stateside with its intended title. (Its initial U.S. release, in hugely bastardized form, was titled Pure Pop for Now People.) I bring this up not because I want to talk about Nick Lowe, but because his onetime wife and protege, Carlene Carter, this week has returned from a lengthy absence with a wonderful new album titled Stronger. As a huge fan of both artists — and as someone who should be, but for some reason isn’t, contractually obligated to mention Mr. Lowe as frequently as possible — I couldn’t let this confluence of events go uncelebrated.

Nearly 20 years ago, Carter was among the few artists lucky enough to release her best work during VH1’s brief love affair with country music — and that simultaneous, glorious period when women dominated the genre. As a result, her hits “I Fell in Love” and “Every Little Thing” were everywhere, even managing to break free of the TNN/CMT/”This is VH1 Country” ghetto and earn some prime-time pop airplay. I couldn’t have been happier. (more…)

At first glance, the video for Al Jarreau’s 1984 single “After All” seems simple enough. Jarreau sings on a soundstage “rooftop” while a pair of dancers interpret the song’s romantic inclinations through movement, eventually winding up in a position to “consummate” the relationship Jarreau is describing. There’s no plot, no animation, no special effects that couldn’t have been created with a paintbrush and a fog machine.

A simple, low-budget video, right? Perhaps even amateurish, if viewed in the context of many of the other clips of its year, from the Cars’ “You Might Think” to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” not to mention videos by pop-oriented black artists such as Lionel Richie’s “Hello” or Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”

It’s tempting to guess that little money or effort was expended on “After All” because Jarreau was not being marketed particularly strongly by his record label, Warner Bros. — or perhaps because he was being marketed to African-Americans rather than a white audience, and presumably artists targeting the R&B charts would have received smaller video budgets than their pop counterparts.

Certain facts undermine such a guess. First, “After All” was the lead single from Jarreau’s High Crime album, the follow-up to two Top 15 albums that each produced a Top 25 pop single. Second, “After All” was (let’s face it) a pretty goddamned exquisite, but completely colorblind ballad co-written by pop uber-songwriter/producer David Foster, who was then riding high on a pair of bestselling albums by Chicago. Third, the video for Jarreau’s previous album-leading single, “Mornin’,” had been a big-budget extravaganza setting Jarreau within an elaborate cartoon world.

And finally, is that male dancer white? (more…)

You’d think that slogging through the detritus of the 1960s would be a more delicate maneuver than slinging the shite of the ’50s. You’d be mistaken.

The Sixties were the baby boom’s golden era, a decade whose music will be revered above every other until … well, until the boomers either shut up or die off. (Not that I’m encouraging the latter, of course; some of my best friends and relatives are boomers, and I hope they’ll stick around until they’ve completely drained the Social Security trust fund.) Nevertheless, the British Invasion, the folk revival, Motown and Stax, the blues revival, psychedelia, countrypolitan, acid-rock — all these glorious movements contributed a fair amount of crap to the popular canon, and an alarming percentage of that pabulum found its way to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100.

It would be easy to focus on the early ‘60s, to beat up exclusively on Steve Lawrence and Bobby Vinton and Lawrence Welk and other such anachronistic reminders of the pre-rock era. But what fun is that? C’mon, it’s the Sixties — let’s hit some moving targets! (more…)

I would hope that every music geek had a friend growing up like my friend John – a guy who was just as passionate about music as you were and wanted to talk about it all the time, and who absolutely, positively hated every artist you liked. John and I could talk for hours about one band after another, and most of the conversations would go like this:

“I was listening to G—— while I was doing my homework…”
“Oh, man — why? They suck!”
“No, they don’t. H——- sucks.”
“No they don’t — they’re awesome. Anyway, what’s with the keyboard part in that G—— song? That’s not a rock’n'roll song — that’s Dan Fogelberg.”
“Oh, sure. You and your 20-minute guitar solos. I don’t think any guitar solo should last longer than 30 seconds.”
“That’s because you’re a pussy.”

In other words, it was like your basic Popdose post — except WE WERE 14! (Here at Popdose, we don’t apologize for arrested development…we advocate it.) Anyway, John had an advantage over me when it came to discovering artists he could claim as his own: Every summer he would go visit his extended family in Puerto Rico, where the radio stations seemed to revel in turning fringe-dwelling AOR acts into local chart-toppers. By the time we finished high school the list would grow to include Duke Jupiter, Saga, Glass Moon, the Monroes — and on and on. (Heck, Glass Moon even got a 7-Up commercial there!)

John would bring these albums home from San Juan and I’d inevitably say, “Who the fuck is that, and why does the bass player have that Village People moustache?” But no matter how crappy (I thought) the music was, John would act like he had some cosmic understanding that I couldn’t share because I didn’t give two shits about “What Do All the People Know” or “I’ll Drink to You.” And he’d say, “Yeah, well, they’re better than (insert whatever long-ago-discredited-but-since-resurrected mainstream act I was listening to at the time here).” Usually it was “Hall and Oates”; I was a big fan, and John would say the words “Hall and Oates” the way Bill O’Reilly says the words “liberal Democrat.” (more…)

Welcome to the first installment of an occasional series that dares you to wallow in the very worst of the very best — or best-selling, at least — singles from what Casey Kasem used to call the “rock era.” We begin in 1955, generally considered the dawn of the era because it’s the year when Bill Haley & His Comets topped the charts with “Rock Around the Clock.” (Bill Haley invented rock’n'roll about as much as Abner Doubleday invented baseball, but we’ll leave that alone.) Future editions of this series will cover each decade, straight through the noughties — though I’m not convinced that I’m the best person to judge the relative merits of “Laffy Taffy” and “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’).”

From the 1960s forward, we’ll focus exclusively on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which for four decades did a very good job synthesizing the most popular singles in the nation. I would argue that it no longer does that job nearly as well, primarily because the radio industry has splintered since the early ’90s and because the multitude of formats in which fans can purchase/steal music makes precise sales calculations nearly impossible.

The Hot 100 chart didn’t debut until August 1958; before then, Billboard published four different pop charts — “Best Sellers in Stores,” “Most Played by Jockeys,” “Most Played in Jukeboxes,” and a “Top 100.” Today, chart guru Joel Whitburn considers none of those charts to be a definitive ranking of a particular week’s hits, though Fred Bronson has used the Best Sellers list as the basis for the first 39 entries in his Billboard Book of Number One Hits. Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles books, on the other hand, list 58 #1 singles between “Rock Around the Clock” and the advent of the Hot 100; I’m siding with Joel here, if for no other reason than I really, really want to rip on Perry Como. Here goes: (more…)

Grammy week is upon us, and I couldn’t be less excited. I used to live for the Grammys during the early part of the year, just like I lived for the Oscars and the Golden Globes — even though the Grammys are traditionally even more artistically bankrupt than the Globes. Most likely anybody who stumbles across Popdose can name at least a dozen past Grammy travesties right off the top of your head, so I won’t go into them here. (OK, but just a few, and all from the glory years of 1988-89: Jethro Tull getting Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance; DJ Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince beating Public Enemy for the first Best Rap Performance trophy, and off camera at that; Milli Vanilli, of course.) But this year is special: It’s the first in memory that I couldn’t give a damn who wins any of the major categories, or indeed any award that’s likely to be handed out during the televised ceremony.

Sure, plenty of artists I like are nominated, but unless you’re rooting like mad for either an Amy Winehouse recovery speech or an Amy Winehouse train wreck — or, perhaps, both over the course of the evening — is there much of anything to root for at all? Are we supposed to hope the Foo Fighters win all the awards that the Chili Peppers didn’t win last year? Are we supposed to cheer for “Umbrella,” a terrific song that nonetheless doesn’t really seem like Song/Record of the Year material? Or are we supposed to hope Kanye West wins Album of the Year so he doesn’t once again pitch a fit over being shunned in the top categories? Zzzzzzzzzz…

And what’s up with that Album of the Year category, anyway? Herbie Hancock’s Joni Mitchell tribute? Really? And, yeah, Vince Gill made a virtuoso five-album set that showed off his multifaceted talents, but what impact did it have? Where’s Radiohead, or Arcade Fire, or the White Stripes? Where’s the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album? Where’s Springsteen, for God’s sake? (He’s never won this category.) Where’s Daughtry? (more…)