Guardian - pop music = conservatism

Rock'n'roll is the latest victim of corporate globalisation - and it shows

John Harris
Saturday May 8, 2004
The Guardian

A few years ago, I travelled to Brazil to watch the American rock band REM perform at Rock In Rio, an outdoor festival of unimaginable vastness. It was quite a spectacle: close to a million people, a stage seemingly the size of an aircraft carrier, and a stifling heat that led to the odd breakdown of pop etiquette - this was the festival at which the then virginal Britney Spears left her microphone switched on and unwittingly regaled the crowd with the f-word.
Twenty-plus years into their career, REM are among the few surviving standard-bearers for a transatlantic subculture that took root in the wake of punk, founded on the notion - vague, but usually palpable - that rock music should express some kind of dissent. Staunchly anti-Republican, proudly eco-conscious, and with a record of playing benefits for liberal causes, they used their trip to South America to issue at least one attention-grabbing soundbite: "George W Bush is not my president," their vocalist, Michael Stipe, told the local press.

On the night of their show, unfortunately, none of that counted for very much. Rock In Rio was sponsored by AOL, who were using the event to launch their Brazilian operation. The visual language was globalisation's semiotic trickery in excelsis: lest anyone fear that AOL's arrival represented any kind of online imperialism, their logo had been resprayed in the heartwarmingly Brazilian colour scheme of green and yellow. The presence of some of the USA's biggest musicians, however, drove the most important message home: opening AOL accounts could, it seemed, induct the Brazilians into the same spangled world as Britney, Guns'n'Roses and - oh, yes - REM.

For musicians whose sensitivity to such chicanery places them a few notches up the evolutionary chain from Busted and Avril Lavigne, the implied contradictions can be pretty hard to swallow. Put bluntly, Anglo-American popular music is among globalisation's most useful props. Never mind the nitpicking fixations with interview rhetoric and stylistic nuance that concern its hardcore enthusiasts - away from its home turf, mainstream music, whether it's metal, rap, teen-pop or indie-rock, cannot help but stand for a depressingly conservative set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language, the implicit acknowledgement that America is probably best.

Even the most well-intentioned artist can't escape: once you have run onstage, plugged in your guitar and yelped "Hello, Tokyo!", your allegiances have surely been established. I once saw Radiohead's neurotically ethical Thom Yorke address a crowd in Modena as follows: "Sorry, we don't speak Italian. We're sad fucks." Even a clumsy "grazie mille" might have underwritten his public fretting about the effects of corporate power - but no. This, after all, was rock.

To make things worse, though the output of MTV, VH1 and the snowballing number of radio stations owned by Clear Channel might be dressed up in pop's customary language of diversity and individualism, the music they pump out is now standardised to the point of tedium. As the record industry's corporate structure has hardened into an immovable oligarchy - EMI, Time-Warner, BMG, Sony and Universal - so the range of musical options on offer has been dramatically scythed down. In 2004, there are but a handful of international musical superstars: Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Norah Jones, Coldplay. To characterise the process behind their global success as top-down is something of an understatement. MTV may have initially been marketed with the superficially empowering slogan, "I want my MTV"; more recently, with billions gladly hooked up, it has used the flatly sinister, "One planet, one music". Those four words beg one question: who decides?

In the context of the music's historical roots, this a surreally topsy-turvy outcome. Never mind those arcane debates about the true origins of rock'n'roll: it's surely instructive to understand modern pop as the endpoint of a centuries-long lineage of people's music; stuff that originated outside the patronage of church and court, and took in a mind-boggling diversity of voices. Come the 20th century, its endlessly variegated textures might have seemed under threat; and yet, through the appearance of the blues, country music, R&B, rockabilly and rock'n'roll - not to mention the first stirrings of the modern music industry - the devolved, uncontrollable ways of folk culture remained in place.

The resulting commerce, split between an ever-changing array of record labels, was often as anarchic as the music itself. Hit American records usually took root as word slowly spread from state to state. By the time British musicians worked up the confidence to join in, the transatlantic traffic must surely have confounded any sensible predictions. Who would have seen that four-head monster emerging from Liverpool, or have anticipated the likes of Ray Davies and Pete Townshend so consummately blending an American form with their own unmistakably British experiences - let alone selling such a collision back to the States?

Two factors hardened pop into the hegemonic monolith it is today. Firstly, though the transatlantic cultural exchange brought pop a new artistic richness, it failed to repeat the trick elsewhere. With a few notable exceptions, continental Europe has long been barred from offsetting an ongoing deluge of Anglo-American imports with any lasting worldwide successes of its own; even the popular music of Africa, where the fusion of regional styles with western pop has long been inspirational, seems unable to snare our attention. And then there is the aforementioned domination of a once chaotic industry by those lumbering corporations. Wither such examples of creative autonomy as Chess, Tamla Motown, Island and Creation? Long since gobbled up, like so many of the western world's more interesting elements.

Underlying that picture is a tragic irony indeed: music founded in a spirit of spontaneity and self-expression ending up at the core of an ever-more standardised planet (those Pepsi ads starring Pink, Beyoncé and Britney speak volumes). Moreover, as the music industry shrinks, pop's increasing dearth of diversity is starting to impact on the UK. Each year, the odds against British acts making inroads in the US seem slimmer than ever; in music, too, there is but one superpower.

Such, to use a phrase beloved of the Bush White House, is the cultural aspect of the New American Century. How long, I wonder, before Halliburton and Exxon start sponsoring festivals?

· John Harris is author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock

johnrhysharris@hotmail.com

John Rhys Harris plays drums for the rock band Gay Dad.