British post-punk largely erased America from its pop imagination

Evidence

One of the things that is most remarkable about post-punk, actually, is its near total erasure of America and Americanness. When I was in my early teens, the only American pop you’d hear that wasn’t disco would be encountered while trudging round the shops on Saturday afternoon, as Paul Gambaccini’s Hot 100 was broadcast over the store PAs, and it was a window into a horrifyingly deprived world of barely imaginable banality. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1013

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the usual narrative of British pop’s mid-century absorption of American rock; links to the reader’s recurring theme of transnational cultural flows in the Morrissey and soundscape material. — connects to: The most interesting American post-punk groups were Europhiles dislocated from US culture — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1014; Post-punk’s conceptual-cultural richness was a brief historical contingency; Post-punk bands staged primitivist returns to music to reject arty cosmopolitan pop — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1139 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to how moral or aesthetic panics about ‘immodesty’ or pop operate along national lines, and to the economics of the American cultural export market in the Grafting piece.
• SHARE: Narrow, nerdy, and specific enough that only a certain music-history obsessive would really get a kick out of Fisher’s claim that era American pop was heard mainly over store PA radios.

Broader Connections

• The most interesting American post-punk groups were Europhiles dislocated from US culture #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1014
• Post-punk bands staged primitivist returns to music to reject arty cosmopolitan pop #contradicts (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1139
• Post-punk’s conceptual-cultural richness was a brief historical contingency #complicates (0.70)