In January, the British music magazine New Musical Express named
the 100 greatest British albums of all time. Mostly, the list
contains the usual suspects: The Beatles, Radiohead, The Stone
Roses, etc. Shockingly, however, the album listed at No. 5 is the
(very) recently released Arctic Monkeys album, “Everything
People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.”
The fifth position places it above The Beatles’
“Revolver,” Radiohead’s “OK Computer”
and Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” (which NME
bafflingly thinks is better than “Closer,” but
that’s another story).
Subsequently, this praise has driven the album to No. 1 in the
UK, where it has become the fastest-selling debut of all time.
Here in the United States, Entertainment Weekly called Arctic
Monkeys rock’s “next big band” and the New York
Times hailed “Everything” as the likely album of the
year. Which leads me to ask, simply, “Why?”
“Everything” is not a bad album. It has a great
single in “I’ll Bet You Look Good on the
Dancefloor,” and a few other memorable tracks. Yet for some
reason, this album causes people to do things like declare it
better than “OK Computer.” I’m only saying this
because it happens constantly with British bands.
A few months back I interviewed Cameron Bird of Architecture in
Helsinki and asked what he made of the British music scene, his
band being Australian. Was there a cultural rivalry?
Bird responded with something a member of the British music
scene said to him. This person said, “America may have
invented rock, but we perfected it.”
With this attitude in mind, the British press has a habit of
latching on to new bands as the “next big thing.”
This tendency is similar to American sportswriters searching for
the “next Michael Jordan.” Depending on the writer,
this player is either Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, high schooler O.J.
Mayo or a 2-year-old from Memphis who can make a layup. With so
many players termed the “next Jordan,” it suggests that
the standard they’re being held to isn’t really that
special. This is precisely what the British musical press does when
it hypes up a band.
Usually, if a band is hyped in the UK, the American press sees
that as a validation of quality. This leads to curiously
enthusiastic reviews of artists like Arctic Monkeys, who without
the hype would not be recognized as being any better than, say,
Kasabian.
The UK hype machine is astonishingly powerful; overlooked now is
the fact that before the American press pushed The Strokes as
“saviors of rock,” the British press had already done
so. One Daily Bruin staffer described the British fascination with
The Strokes as being akin to the second coming of Jimi Hendrix in
London.
The British obsession with The Libertines is even more telling.
The Libertines released one great album (2002’s “Up The
Bracket”), then imploded and recorded a lackluster follow-up,
breaking up around its release in 2004. The press continued to
cover former Libertine Pete Doherty as he formed a new group,
Babyshambles, and proceeded to see more white lines than Ben
Roethlisberger. In fact, I’d say that in Babyshambles’
first year of existence, it was the most-discussed band that
hadn’t released an album.
Ultimately, “Whatever You Think I Am, That’s What
I’m Not,” aside from having the most appropriate title
ever, is not worth all this emotion, on the positive or negative
side. It’s the “Crash” of rock ““ middling,
but with extreme energy expended toward it for no good reason.
Without the hype, it’s about as notable as the planet Earth,
as logged in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy” ““ “Mostly harmless.”
Instead, because of outlandish hype, an innocuous album becomes
one that many will hate for no reason other than to voice
displeasure with hyperbole.
I feel bad for Arctic Monkeys. It’s got the most difficult
second act to come up with since The Stone Roses released its
self-titled debut. Then again, if it’s that easy to make the
“fifth greatest British album of all time” with a
middling debut, then maybe I don’t feel so bad. In fact, this
makes me want to go pick up a guitar, because if NME makes a list
of the 100 greatest American albums of all time, I’m
confident I can get on it with my Gibson SG, GarageBand on my
Powerbook, and a few nights of fouling out with the opposite sex at
a night club.
So thanks, Arctic Monkeys. If there’s one thing
you’ve done, you’ve made it possible for all middling
musicians to believe they can achieve immortality without writing
the next “Yesterday” or even “Champagne
Supernova.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go crank up
the distortion, pluck some folk chords through a sea of noise, and
create the greatest shoegaze band of all time ““ which
I’ll of course name “Hyperbole’s
Children.”
Humphrey wonders how different rock would be today if
“The Velvet Underground & Nico” had achieved
comparable praise in the late ’60s. E-mail him at
mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.