I'd be never connected with the 1980s Glam rock thing even though I recognized the art school roots of a lot of British pop. And I never really listened to Rozy Music apart from what I heard on the radio or saw on TV.
A quote from K-Punk on the difference betweeen British and American pop/rock music:
"British pop's irreducible artificiality makes it resistant to the Romanticist naturalization that the likes of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs achieved in respect of American rock. There is no way of grounding British Art Pop in a landscape.Not a natural landscape in any case.
If Art Pop had a landscape it would be the agressively anti-naturalistic one Ferry collaged together on 'Virginia Plain' (named after one of his paintings, which was itself named after a brand of tobacco). Is this an internal landscape, what the mind's eye sees? Perhaps. But only if we recognize that - as Hamilton's collage and Ballard's fiction insist - in the late twentieth century the 'space' of the internal-psychological was completely penetrated by what Ballard calls the media landscape.
When the British pop star sings, it is not 'the land' which speaks (and what does Marcus hear in the American rock he mythologizes in Mystery Train if not the American land?) but the deterritority of Amerikan-originated Consumer culture."
K-Punk mentions Brian Ferry and Roxy Music as examples and says:
"Part of what made the early Roxy sound so cold - particularly by comparison with the hot authenticity of American rock - was the fact that they were evidently not an aggregation of pontaneous, creative subjects, but a meticulously executed Duchamp-type Concept: a group whose every gesture was micro-designed, and who credited their stylist, fashion designer Anthony Price, on their album sleeves."Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 2, 2005 10:57 PM | TrackBack