#uk-pop

(this is a parody of tinymixtapes' review of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's Nanda Collection. I have some major issues with the review! Since I don't just want to drive traffic to them I'm hopeful it can stand as a more general illustration of how ridiculous certain modes of writing about non-Western music are. You have to pretend I'm American. This is not meant to imply this is specifically an American problem, it was just the best fit I came up with. I haven't heard the album in question; it didn't seem necessary)

Robbie Williams

Take the Crown

[Island; 2012]

4/5

Styles: UK-Pop, cups of tea, extravagant weddings

Others: The Killers, Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk, British costume dramas

On 29 July, 1981, Prince Charles - the heir to the British throne and a national superstar of sorts -  married Lady Diana Spencer in a fairytale ritual at St Paul's Cathedral in London. The following year, American audiences were treated to a TV movie recreation of their relationship and the event.

Which brings us to Robbie Williams. Take the Crown - the ninth album from dancer and charity soccer player turned music sensation Robbie Williams - is the sound of a stoic Brit with a stuff upper lip taking himself to St Paul's Cathedral and reciting vows. Isn't it beautiful? Hear how it is steeped in history, tradition and duty. For like that royal wedding, Take the Crown can only be described as a staid, meticulously-staged fanfare of performed Britishness. And indeed, it is beautiful.

Take the Crown is not simply UK-pop par excellence. It is UK-pop personified. It is a multi-faceted, hyperdimensional prism simultaneously articulating, parodying, and problematizing a genre, a moment, a culture. Which is why we ought to be paying particular attention. See, whatever function UK-pop might serve in its native country, it’s clear that the genre’s appeal to American audiences has always relied on certain voyeuristic pleasures. Like an overheard phone call or a tantalizingly open window, UK-pop lures us in with the promise of an unedited peek into a world that doesn’t realize we’re looking. And in the case of UK-pop, this view is all the more seductive for its impossibly alien Otherness. And if you haven’t already peeked through the window, one look at a Robbie Williams music video and you’ll understand. But this, we tell ourselves, is what Britain must look like when no one is watching. And so the bizarre, carnival world of UK-pop takes its place in the American consciousness as a warped, mutilated synecdoche of the country as a whole.

But like Princess Diana before him, Robbie Williams has an uncanny knack for perfectly anticipating his real audience. Indeed, Take the Crown is no more meant for British audiences than the royal wedding was. Look at his name. Almost a sensible American name, you can imagine it as "Bobby Williams", but it is warped into British nonsense. Look at the song titles. "Candy", "Gospel", "Shit on the Radio": a mixture of British approach and pure American English. Look at the fact that he recorded an album of Rat Pack covers, rendering American classics British. For like Diana's ludicrously anachronistic union with hereditary rule, the Robbie Williams image is not so much a statement of British identity as it is a performative gesture towards a foreign, decidedly American notion of what British-ness is. Because in the end, it is all meant for us, for the voyeurs half a world away. And turns out the joke’s on us. Because it turns out the world we were peeking into realized we were here. And then it all became a performance. A fiction.

One of my FAVORITE ISHlists Ever!!! K-Pop! J-Pop! UK-Pop!

Music from all over the world! I hope you love it!