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British New Wave and Synthpop

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On wiki there are articles for British jazz, British hip hop, British soul, British rock music, British rock and roll, Britpop, British rhythm and blues, British pop music and British popular music...now if there are so many differences between what the terms new wave and synthpop mean to people in the UK and USA, shouldn't there be articles about these popular genres viewed only from a British perspective, maybe called British punk and new wave and British synthpop (with obviously no hyphens used) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.173.247 (talk) 17:45, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

and Jazz-Pop as well

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To what extent should Americans make generalisations about the British music scene and come up with their own definitions?

In regards to Sophisti-pop...

Obviously there are some factors that link the artists in this genre but its obvious the idea of Sophisti-pop falls apart when other publications get involved and don't know whether its about jazz-pop, soul-pop or some kind studio sophistication...such as Classic Pop's Oliver Hurley.

Hurley should know better as he is based in Bristol, doesn't look like a teenager who has just found a genre online and being a freelance journalist who has had commissions from The Guardian, Loaded [so he cannot be that young] and The Face in the past, should know his stuff. However, he starts off his article on Sophisti-pop stating "By mixing elements of jazz, r&b and soul, a new wave of artist emerged during the mid-80s, bringing with them a certain cultured elegance to the charts. Here is our pick of the sophisti-pops" and ends by putting ABC's The Lexicon Of Love from 1982 at number one.

"This is one of the definitive albums of the 80s and among the finest British debuts ever. Sure, it’s over-the-top – Martin Fry’s vocals wouldn’t be out of place in musical theatre – but you can’t argue with the likes of The Look Of Love and Poison Arrow, while Date Stamp invents Frankie Goes To Hollywood. But the highlight is All Of My Heart, a perfect realisation of what sophisticated pop can achieve".

Even on wikipedia, The Lexicon Of Love is listed as a sophisti-pop album (you can guess where the reference came from!) but also on here it states that

"Sophisti-pop is a subgenre of pop music. The term has been applied retrospectively to music that emerged during the mid-1980s in the UK which incorporated elements of jazz, soul, and pop. Music so classified often made extensive use of electronic keyboards, synthesizers and polished arrangements, particularly horn sections.
Stylus Magazine suggested that acts were influenced by the work of Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry's mid-1980s albums, Bête Noire and Boys and Girls.[5] According to AllMusic, major artists included Simply Red, Sade, The Style Council, Basia, Swing Out Sister, Prefab Sprout and the early work of Everything but the Girl"

...this obviously contradicts what the American term 'sophisti-pop' has been agreed upon by Alfred Soto and Thomas Inskeep, a genre, that seems to be made up in 2007, a genre that some people are being too overprotective of and taking a one-sided view. So who should we believe? Alfred Soto and Thomas Inskeep or Oliver Hurley (who to give him credit, may have a point when he says that The Lexicon Of Love could be one of the best albums of the 1980s...though sophisti-pop?).

We don't know if Soto and Inskeep have read through countless back issues of Q, Vox, Smash Hits, Number One, Big, Blitz, The Face, Record Mirror, Music Week, Cut et al. from the 1980s or have just came of age reading Rolling Stone, Relix, Paste and are basing their knowledge from seeing these acts on MTV America, looking at their chart positions in Billboard and hearing them on the AT40 chart show.

We know its unlikely that Dominic Sandbrook will devote much time on the issue (even though he devoted time to The Face on last Tuesday's programme[1][2] and will be talking about yuppies in episode three, called "World in Motion" on BBC Four on 8th December 2020), but it should have been someone like Sandbrook (or at least Hepworth & Ellen) who should have been the originator of this...

We don't know if Soto and Inskeep are just going through their CD collection (a collection which doesn't probably include a lot of, ahem, Stock-Aitken-Waterman (sic) or Phil Collins) but it does strike me that when dealing with Sophisticated Pop and the British music scene in the 1980s there are some obvious omissions. Acts that always seem to crop up online when dealing with this 'genre' include The Blue Nile, David Sylvian/Rain Tree Crow and a lot of the Kitchenware bands (though Prefab Sprout gets a passing mention in 'Debonair Lullabies').

I suppose you could argue that if its Soto and Inskeep's own 'personal thing' maybe its right to exclude them but if its a guide to sophisticated 80s pop, then maybe they haven't got the right records in their collection. To give them credit they do mention Maggie Thatcher (or at least 'Thatcherite') a few times, but one of those mentions is in a list of names with Caspar Weinberger, a name probably unknown to most British kids reading Smash Hits in the 1980s, a character whose Spitting Image puppet most people probably couldn't point to in a Buzzcocks line-up and a political figure probably unknown to a lot of people in the UK who haven't watched CNN's The Eighties on Sky. There is no mention of Top of the Pops, The ITV Chart Show, BBC Radio 1 or Saturday morning children's TV shows like Saturday Superstore (no Matt Bianco mention either), all references you might expect when dealing with mainstream 80s British pop...because being American they didn't experience the British 80s pop scene at first hand, they were not living full time as a pop music fan/teenager/child in 1980s Britain (though being American they might refer to this country as England/Scotland/Wales), getting all their information second-hand, making up a music genre in the mid 2000s as a sequel to Yacht Rock, without much of the same humour, care or attention to detail. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.173.247 (talk) 15:44, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07n7grm
  2. ^ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07n7gtn/the-80s-with-dominic-sandbrook-1-the-sound-of-the-crowd
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At the top of this article it states "For British popular music in general, see British popular music", however a lot of the examples/acts that seem to be discussed in the article 'British pop music' seem to be in the dance, indie and alternative/indie genres rather than about 'bog-standard' chart pop (i.e. the stuff some people might describe as cheesy). Shouldn't a lot of the examples be moved over to the British popular music page (or have a separate chart pop article that includes both teen pop and heritage acts) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.173.247 (talk) 13:47, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Stadium Rock: the Big Music

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Can somebody write a bit about Stadium Rock aka 'The Big Music' (see Rob Hughes from Classic Rock on 13 June 2014 [1]) as Simple Minds, The Alarm and Big Country were big in the 80s and because Stadium Rock (of the Q magazine kind) seems to be slightly different to what Arena Rock means. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.173.247 (talk) 13:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-return-of-the-big-music
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