I suspect pop works to too quick a timetable for competition to be anything other than transient anyway. I don’t know how well the theory applies today, now that communications are better and there is at least some progress towards a durable European political whole.
Falco rock me amadeus lyrics series#
It’s affected my view of the map too – it’s possible to see Europe splintering into a whole series of islands round its northern and western edges, such that not just the British Isles but also the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and even Spain and Portugal for most of the last 200 years, have been able to perceive themselves as being elsewhere and different from ‘Europe’. The idea being how natural and then political barriers have allowed Europe, a very small area in world terms, to function in modern history as a collection of separate, competing laboratories and progress essentially via conflict rather than consensus – achieving far more than, say, China has managed over the period. #39: Sweden-as-island is part of a theme that’s been recurring in a lot of my (non-pop) reading over the past year – Europe’s extraordinary political, economic and cultural vitality explained by its unusual internal divisions. But this means we’re talking about the mid- to late 90’s, so I’ll leave it for now. And that appears to have been a turning point after which British music no longer is anywhere near as influential. I can’t speak for other European countries but I think this holds true for Swedish music at least up to the real mainstream acceptance and hence popularity of rap music, in which case the UK seems to have been bypassed entirely as a source of influence. So you get American music (which in itself draws on African roots), that gets exported to the UK, which does its own take on it, and then the result is further exported to the rest of Europe which in turn combines that with various local traditions. And, I assume, also from African countries where English is widely spoken. There are probably obvious reasons for this – the shared language as well as a large community of immigrants from the Caribbean. It seems as though the UK has long acted as a gateway, or filter, between American (in a wide sense) music and the rest of Europe. Lonepilgrim – good point, especially when it comes to various kinds of Caribbean music. But I guess that sharing the language with the US and (at least partially) Canada, Ireland, and quite a few other places, makes it easier to frame it as anglophone versus non-anglophone (not necessarily regarding the music itself, but at least regarding its writers/performers/producers). British versus non-British music, viewed from a British perspective – that I could understand. It’s just that I fail to see the true utility of that kind of negative definition.
It’s not uncommon to hear Swedish people talking about “the Continent” or even “Europe” as something else, foreign, distant, that they themselves aren’t part of. Living on a peninsula on one outskirt of Europe gives rise to the same phenomenon as living on an island on another outskirt. I’m not railing against it merely because I’m part of “the Continent” from a British perspective the same thing happens here. It’s a definition that hinges on geographical origin rather than the form of the actual music. You’re defining something merely in terms of its “otherness” – it’s not from here (or even from there, which in this case probably means the US) – so it’s something else.
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