Why did the British rule rock from 1964-198?

In Tidal, the insightful British rock writer Simon Reynolds gives his take on an old question: Why did the U.K. hold the lead in global rock music from 1964 onward for two or so decades?

It’s not as if the mighty USA had no tradition of rock ‘n’ roll. In contrast, the pre-Beatles British track record was thin. Here’s one guy-on-the-Internet’s list of the 20 best pre-”Love Me Do” Britrock tracks, with Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’ All Over” as the best. It’s not bad, but it’s about two orders of magnitude less impressive than what Americans were doing with electric guitar music in the decade before the Beatles went on the Ed Sullivan show.

Another weird thing is that the Brits didn’t really have much of a Baby Boom until the early 1960s (other than the one year 1946):

Of course, Baby Boomers didn’t invent rock. That was largely the work of very loud members of the Silent Generation. But Baby Boomers bought a whole lot of rock records. There were almost 5 times as many 14 year olds in the United States in 1964 as in the United Kingdom:

Nor was Britain a country with a particularly strong musical tradition.

Reynolds hypothesizes:

Why the U.K. Got Absurdly Good at Rock & Roll

… But by the early ’60s, a difference had become audible — a contoured clarity to the riff structures hitherto only heard in Eddie Cochran (who produced his own records, and was much bigger in the U.K. than in America).

… This stark, almost diagrammatic quality carries on through the Kinks and mod groups like the Eyes, on to Led Zeppelin, Free and the Groundhogs, and beyond them to Wire and Gang of Four. It almost feels like you see the music as much as hear it; compare this lucidity with the organic, live-sounding quality of so much American rock — the marauding murk of the Stooges on Fun House, for instance.

Compare the American Kingsmen in 1963 to the English Kinks in 1964:

This is not to say that the reductionist riffing that the Kinks made a splash within only months after the Beatles got to America is the core of British rock, or even of the Kinks’ music. But I think Reynolds is on to something here:

Perhaps British rock feels less “organic” because we’ve never had an organic relationship with the music or its sources in blues and country. … Hearing rock ’n’ roll primarily as recordings first and foremost, rather than as live music, made a difference.

During the jazz age, live improvisatory skill was highly valued in world-conquering American music (African-Americans tend to be particularly skilled at improvisation).

As their precursors had with jazz and blues imports, British rock ’n’ roll fans studied the records, playing them over and over and isolating specific bits of performance. (This studious approach no doubt contributed to the remarkable lineage of British guitar heroism.) In the U.K., the record is the primary text, what a live performance is trying to realize and replicate; in America, it’s the other way around.

That meant that Americans, with the exception of a few weirdos like Brian Wilson, fell a little behind the Brits in the key years of 1965-1967 as the recording studio laboratory rather than the concert staged emerged as central to pop music creativity. Perhaps white American rockers felt less comfortable taking rock in its hyper-white direction?

You can see the difference in psychedelia: The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” is jazzy and loose; the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” is a studio construction, impossible to recreate onstage.

The rest of the article makes some good points, such as that the ubiquity of art schools in Britain and failure of the Brits to do much with rap.

Without trying to exhaust this large topic, I’d add:

First, Britain was exhausted and broke after WWII. When it finally regained its vitality in the 1960s, it turned out that the rest of the world, with America in the lead, had missed it. One of my weirder ideas is that Woodstock was, in effect, a victory party for the winners of the Big One, just delayed a generation.

Second, the introduction of regular Boeing 707 jetliner travel across the Atlantic in the late 1950s amplified American Anglophilia by making it easy for British celebrities to get to the U.S. and easy for Americans to visit England (e.g., I spent a week in London in 1965 at age 6).

Third, the modal rock star turned out to be a not terribly masculine but still ardently heterosexual young man who made an ideal unfrightening “practice boyfriend” for the vast number of American adolescent Baby Boomer girls. John-Paul-George-Ringo represented the Platonic essence of boyish charm. Boys quickly figured out what girls liked and came to idolize high-cheekboned rock stars.

Over the previous few centuries, the English “public” (i.e., extremely expensive private) schools had created a national culture of boyish charm that moved far down the social ladder. In Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche notoriously opines, “Charm is the great English blight.”

Most people, however, like charm, and the Brits tend to be better at it than the Yanks.