The Overwhelmingly British Press
a.k.a. What happens when the vast majority of electronic music media is based in the UK?
Last week, DJ Mag announced the nominees for its upcoming Best of British awards. Described as an “annual celebration of UK talent,” the awards are something the publication has been doing for the past 15 years, and unlike its ghastly Top 100 DJs list, the artists recognized actually represent an encouragingly diverse array of British dance music. (It’s certainly hard to imagine any other awards show honoring acts like Mala, Joy Orbison and Anz.)
So what’s the problem? Some might argue that there isn’t one. House and techno were born in the American Midwest, but it was the UK that most loudly sold it to the world. It was 1988’s Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, a compilation spearheaded by English DJ / journalist / A&R man Neil Rushton, that famously first introduced the genre to massive European audiences, and more than 30 years later, there’s no denying that the UK has long been one of electronic music’s most vital hubs, arguably embracing the genre, along with its artists and culture, in a way that the US never has. Moreover, the country has made countless contributions of its own, many of them vital; jungle, drum & bass, dubstep, grime and basically the whole hardcore continuum are all sounds with distinctly British origins (even if they do owe a major debt to Jamaican soundsystem culture), and the smiley-faced aesthetics of the UK’s late-’80s rave culture continue to loom large today.
This kind of large-scale “borrowing” is something the British music industry has been doing for a very long time, and regardless of whether it’s categorized as appropriation or simple cultural exchange—and to be clear, the appropriate label absolutely depends on the specific context and the actors involved—it’s reshaped the global music landscape. Perhaps it began with the British Invasion of the 1960s, when a flurry of mop-topped artists dominated pop charts around the world with what was essentially a rehashed version of American rock & roll (which itself was rehashing—some might say stealing from—rhythm and blues and other distinctly Black genres).
In the decades that followed, the UK music industry would follow the same playbook again and again, championing genres like Northern soul, punk, dub, reggae, disco, house, techno and dancehall. These styles didn’t necessarily upend the mainstream in the same way The Beatles once did, but they all had a major cultural impact. And while the histories of these sounds are often framed as a prolonged “exchange” across the Atlantic—a notion that’s not without some merit, especially considering the increasingly fluid nature of culture in recent decades—it’s nonetheless telling that when the music involved is traced back to its source, it almost always seems to originate outside of British Isles.
Knowing that, it’s tempting to throw out words like “colonizers” and “cultural extraction,” labeling the British as the proverbial “bad guys” in the story and calling it a day. The country’s imperial past certainly factors into the larger narrative here, and is something worth exploring, but what DJ Mag’s Best of British awards got me thinking about wasn’t actually the “taking” aspect of the UK’s musical history. Although the country has undoubtedly developed a stunning (some might say concerning) capacity for repackaging and recontextualizing others’ music and subsequently selling it back to the places from which it came—a strategy helped along significantly by the British press and its tendency toward grandiose, tabloid-style blagging—what’s perhaps even more remarkable (or concerning, depending on your perspective) is how the UK has secured a place as that music’s preeminent storyteller, record keeper and tastemaker.