Zak, you and many of the people outside the U.S. don't seem to have the enzyme to digest some of the music that is dearest to us. I could not play in bar bands if I was not prepared to do "Sweet Home Alabama," "Free Bird," or "Gimme Three Steps" on request. Yet you folks apparently aren't even familiar with Lynyrd Skynyrd, not to mention Molly Hatchet ("Flirtin' with Disaster") and a couple of dozen other bands that comprise an entire genre known as "Southern rock" with a capital S.
Then there was the "L.A. Sound" of the 1970s. The Eagles are probably the band that musicologists use to epitomize that genre, and "Hotel California," "Take It Easy," and "Already Gone" are staples on the West Coast. But even Fleetwood Mac was hailed as part of the L.A. sound once they assimilated Americans Buckingham and Nicks--and relocated to L.A.
How about heavy metal? Your guys may have invented it, but once Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath disintegrated our guys took over. Metallica and Guns'n'Roses practically reinvented it. Judas Priest and Motorhead are barely footnotes in that chapter of music. Our guys have kept it going and keep changing it. Speed metal, thrash metal, funk metal... those are American sounds. And the new stuff I call infrared metal because of its sound spectrum, like Korn and Limp Bizkit... we've run away with the genre.
Corporate rock. No one admits to liking it but it's an enormous catalog and somebody is out there listening to it. You've got Foreigner all right, but we've got Boston, Journey, Styx and a dozen other bands in that style, and our friends up north gave us Loverboy, one of my favorite concerts.
And since we always count Canada as part of America when it suits us, how about that entire vein of depressed Canadian chanteuses that I love so much: Sarah McLachlan, Jann Arden, Alanis Morissette? You've got nothing like that.
Don't get me wrong, I love British music, going back to when "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" knocked my radio on its ear. I still cry over Sandy Denny's demise and I always take the trouble to read Kate Bush's lyric sheets so I can get past her accent. I've tried to turn everybody I know onto "Trippin' " by Robbie Williams. I have Sporty Spice's solo album. My wife and I met because of David Bowie and we have a shrine to him on our mantel.
But when you ask, "Who's done the best music?" there has been music created on both sides that the people on the other side don't even know about because they don't relate to it.
Like, no one has mentioned the Grateful Dead????
tablariddim said:
How fitting, it's a British term. From Yahoo:
Just about all the etymological sites we came across agreed that the term dates back to the mid-19th century and the genteel world of British horse racing. Back then, a jockey who found himself way ahead as he approached the finish line would relax his grip on the reins and drop his hands. Not as confrontational as a spiked football, but still a bit of gestural in-your-face-ness. By the late 19th century, the idiom had been extended to non-racing contexts, and it remains in frequent use today.
