Top 10 Reasons British Music is Better Than American Music

Not many people understand that British music is better than American music.  They don’t understand this because of the political hegemony that America occupies in the West and “The Blues”.  It’s time to dig out the reasons why British music has always been better than American music.  It’s obvious to us here at Old-Wizard, and has been since we started getting into music and realizing the patent difference in quality between the two countries.  Hopefully this list will only act as a preface to one’s actions of going back through the great music that the British made and realizing where the quality is.  If all else fails, then one will just be in a position of admitting that they have bad taste in music.
10. Better Style

Who were the trendsetters in music?  Well of course the British.  Everyone followed the style of British musicians and they still do today.  When Liam Gallagher grows his hair out so does a nation.  When Pete Townsend develops mod culture and style that goes along with it, a nation wears the style.  When The Stone Roses epitomized the “baggy scene” in loose pants, everyone started buying them.  No American band inspires this kind of mimicry.  The British know what great style is and combine their great songs with it.  The Americans write average songs and wear straight legged Levi jeans.

9. Better Haircuts

This is obvious.  Check out George Harrison’s hairdo.   Check out Robert Plant’s blonde curls.  Look at Liam Gallagher’s Zeus like hair.  What do musicians haircuts from America look like?  They’re thick dark pieces of shit and more often than not look dirty.  The Brits would never allow themselves to get away with having dirty hair.  Their rock stars; they’re the God’s of the modern age.  They can’t appear at shows with crap hair.  When style has been made by musicians, even in more blatant pop (E.G. Lilly Allen) it’s always been from British musicians.

8. The Birth of Rave Culture

Could you image a world without rave culture?  A world without DJ Shadow or Aphex Twins?  A world without the Chemical Brothers or Massive Attack?  Where would the beat be in music with Rave Culture?  Thank God for Tony Wilson and Factory Records for putting this absolutely essential music genre on the map.  The birth of the DJ was the birth of music as the groove, as it always should be.  The British bands that have spawned from this style are innumerous from The Stone Roses to The Happy Mondays, to New Order, to Monaco, to The Space Monkeys…all British bands…of course.

7. More Ambition

The Brits aren’t afraid to be big.  Starting with Lennon’s quote of being bigger than God which he stated simply as an empirical fact at the moment, The British weren’t afraid to take their music to the masses.  They weren’t afraid to dream beyond their bedroom and the music from Brits benefited from this attitude.  American music is afraid of ambition probably from some reaction to its cultural political surroundings that places itself in a position of manifest destiny.  So because of this we get lo-fi shit or boring bitch fests.  It’s time to turn modesty on it’s head and there’s no better place start than British Music.

6. Shoegazing

Britain gave us one of the best music genres in the past 20 years in Shoegazing.  Do you think Americans would be creative enough to come up with the sounds you hear out of “Loveless” or “Nowhere”?  Do you think an American could create a song like “Leave Them All Behind”?  They could copy it and it wouldn’t be good enough to even be covered by a small American “zine.”  Because of the Brit’s the music listener was able to enjoy Lush, Slowdive, and Chapterhouse.  There’s something distinctly British about these bands;  they all have imaginations, something lacking in most American music.

5. Oasis

In case anyone didn’t know.  Oasis came from Manchester England.  That’s a northern city in England.  Oasis is one of the greatest bands of all time if not the greatest band of all time.  America doesn’t have an Oasis, nor did they ever have an Oasis or any band that could compete with Oasis.  Take whatever America’s best band has ever been (can’t think of many) and match it up against Oasis’s songwriting catalogue and Oasis will undoubtedly win.  In fact, take Americas top 5 bands and put their songwriting catalogue against Oasis’s.  It’s still a no-contest.

4. Better Record Labels

This is certainly a difficult task to list all the great record label that came out of Britain.  For starters, there was Factory Records who hosted The Happy Mondays, Joy Division and The Inspiral Carpets just to name a few.  There is Creation Records who hosted Oasis, Ride, Swervedriver,  and Hurricane #1 just to name a few again.   There was 4AD which hosted the Cocteau Twins, Lush, and Slowdive just to name a few again.  Nude Records had both Suede and Geneva.  The list could keep going on.  No American label could match the quality output of bands on any of these British labels.

3. Condemns the awful indie genre.

British bands correctly condemn indie music whether it be American (which it is most of the time) or British (when some publication tries to tie them into that tag).  The greatest bands wanted nothing to do with it.  Ask Oasis if they’re indie.  They’ll laugh at the word.  Ask the Stone Roses if they were indie and Ian Brown will say “The indie scene is shit”.  Ask Brett Anderson about the word “indie” and he says “It’s a dirty word to me.  A word that means people who don’t know how to play their instruments or write songs”.  This penchant for criticizing indie music has gone a long way for making British music bigger and better sounding than American music.  American music has it’s head up its own ass too much too see that their own self-reflection and loathing is superfluous.

2. Better Bands

Think about it.  The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Oasis,  Pink Floyd, T-Rex, The Kinks,  The Stone Roses?  What does America have besides The Byrds and The Beach Boys?  One can make an infinite list of all the great British bands and barely be able to make a top 10 list of the greatest American bands of all time.   Who are the top 10 greatest American bands of all time?  We can’t even think of 5 off the top of our head right now.  This is a no-brainer.

1. Better Songs

The most obvious reason why British music is better than American music is the songwriting.  C’mon now,  Oasis, Radiohead, The Verve, The Stone Roses, Suede, Dodgy, Coldplay, Shed Seven, Travis?  These are bands that mastered songwriting craft to a T.  There isn’t one American band out right now that could come close to the quality of songwriting produced by these bands (except maybe for Wilco), and these are just the modern British bands.  We aren’t even putting Zeppelin, T-Rex, The Who, and Bowie on this.  There are too many no-brainers on this list.

Related List: Top 10 British Bands of All Time