On a related note, you should read Kathleen’s very nice
article on Canadian Anglophilia at
pearls that are his eyes. It’s sort of a reply to my
article on Australian Anglophilia at
Freaky Trigger, making me feel like something of a stuffy academic - and that’s quite apart from her searing criticism of my style. Just a clarification though: when I complained that Britpop Indie kids fail to form “any sort of revelatory dialogue between the song and the listener, or to bring about the personal revolutions both sides attempt to will into existence,” I meant that most of these kids are getting off on the image that British indie music conveys - both in terms of lyrics and associated lifestyle - rather than just the music, but really they’re not successful enough in assimilating themselves to that image because, hey, they’ve got real lives too. The “Englishness” is a posture: in the clubgoers, and often also in the song. So you’ve got a group of bands making music deliberately designed to convey a certain (false) impression which these kids are then deliberately choosing to (falsely) adopt, but there’s no actual communication going on. And then these people rant and rave about the plastic nature of American culture! Meanwhile I tend to find that at clubs that play dance music, the audience are really mainly there for the meaningless, unassuming pleasure of the music... at least at the clubs I go to, anyway.
I did express myself in a somewhat sucky manner though. Point taken.
