Morrissey: stick-limbed symbol of fey Englishness. Photograph: Thomas Nielsen/AFP/Getty
"Straight from the world capitals of rock!" purred the sexy Classic Rock FM DJ from the speakers high on the wall of a Philadelphia coffee house. "San Francisco! Liverpool! ..." I missed the rest. I was too busy racking my admittedly swiss-cheesed memory for the last great Liverpudlian rock band (apart from Frankie Goes To Hollywood, obviously) that wasn't part of the fluffy-haired 80s post-punk piffle-pop implosion, or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of the Beatles. I came up with Big in Japan - an exciting, innovative, non-fluffy band so unlike the Beatles that angry Liverpudlians (led by Julian Cope) organised a petition demanding that they split up.
There's something of a perfect storm surrounding Britain's contribution to the wonderful world of alt.pop at the moment. There's Morrisseygate II, of course. And former Blur bassist Alex James (now a farmer, but not of trout), having spent by his own estimation over £1m of the money you gave him on coke and champagne, deciding to wander gormlessly around Columbia's coca fields for an article in the Times. One assumes his editors were hoping for a pithy and incisive commentary on existentialism and Baudelairean excess seen through the prisms of globalisation and cultural hybridity. If so, they were disappointed. If one needed a metaphor for cultural decline, the sight of one of Britpop's top dogs staring in blank disbelief at the "grotesque and extraordinary process" by which cocaine is extracted from coca leaves (it involves cement, petrol and sulphuric acid) might work.
Then there's the release of the Brit Box - a CD collection of music (mostly) made by white heterosexual males with UK passports and guitars between 1984 and 1999. The box looks like a retro red telephone box. Inside, the CD cases are shaped like ashtrays. You're reminded of the episode of Arrested Development, where we see inside the Californian anglo-ghetto of Wee Britain where one Englishman is shown smoking while brushing his teeth.
Brit writer Simon Reynolds takes the Brit Box apart on Salon.com in a review that reads like an autopsy. Reynolds identifies America's rock anglophiles as the "college-educated upper-middle class" who equate Englishness with "a superior level of refinement and literacy." Noting that Brit Box kicks off with The Smiths' How Soon Is Now?, Reynolds deftly ties Morriseygate II in with the on-going debate about indie racism that started in New Yorker magazine. While professing to be anti-racist, says Reynolds, indie "steadfastly avoid(s) any contact with black music culture". This "blinkered parochialism is "integral to indie" and looks "an awful lot like self-segregation".
Draping itself in the Union Jack, he adds, British indie ignored "the invigorating stream of new ideas coming from black music, a good proportion of them ... spawned on Britpop's own doorstep" and instead cultivated its "quintessential quaintness ... appealing to patriots at home and anglophiles abroad. But in the process they lost the world."
By golly, I think he's right. In fact the only real flaw in Reynolds' sprawling assault on Britpop's inbred inadequacy is where he takes time out to champion equally dreadful and monocultural American bands like the Pixies and Sonic Youth. This isn't simply a matter of Reynolds having a tin ear. Like most British rock critics of his generation, he's a sucker for rubbish rock music with arch lyrics, as long as it's made by Americans.
Of course both British amerophilia and American anglophilia have their dissenters. In Britain this dissent takes the form of chippy parochialism, as when Tony Wilson told the New York New Music Seminar "Wake up America, you're dead!" In America anglophobia is personified by Henry Rollins, who retorted: "Come over here and wake me up, motherfucker, I'll wipe that smile right off your face ... England is such a crappy place. I think the music is unbelievably horrible and the arrogance - like some DJ will take some basic sequencer track and put some Miles Davis over it and say he invented acid jazz house."
In the US anglophobia is harder to sport than the anglophilia, but it's much more fun. In San Francisco I have listened to an enraged American punk rocker talk about meeting Wattie from the Exploited: "He said, 'calm down, mate,' and I'm like, 'I'm not your fucking mate motherfucker, you assholes think you invested punk, you didn't invent shit ...'" And I've sat through many massively entertaining spittle-flecked anti-English rants from Rollins and his sidekick Flea (from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers). The former is particularly hilarious on the subject of Morrissey, whom he fingers as having single-handedly ruined alternative rock music in the 1980s.
The only time the stick-limbed living symbol of fey Englishness and the brutally ripped personification of hard core muscular Americanism are known to have met was when Morrissey attended a Rollins spoken word show in Manchester. Rollins was finishing a skit about the absurdity of being asked by rent-a-cops to help guard a record store from looters during the LA riots. "OK, so what you're saying is you want me to take a rock in the face for Paula Abdul? Now, OK, let me get this right. I'm supposed to take a 2"x4" across my chest for Bono? I'm supposed to stand in front of a huge piece of plate glass and try and defend it from five gnarly youths ... for Morrissey?" At which point Rollins turned to where Morrissey sat in the crowd, gave him the finger and roared: ""Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"
Which must have felt good. The irony being, of course, that Rollins is as much a symbol of monocultural sterility as the Englishman he despises. If you need proof of how barren US alt.rock has become, you only need to check out two recent documentaries.
In American Hard Core, a history of what is supposed to be one of the most radical periods in American musical history, the gay, black and female faces are all but non-existent (as are the tunes). In Before the Music Dies, a heartfelt plea to save real music from capitalism and girl singers who don't write their own songs, the forces of good are represented by a god-awful parade of endlessly noodling hippy jam bands "keeping it real" and "paying their dues" while dressed like they've just walked off a building site.
But let us not end on a bum note. Here's Motorhead extending a warty hand of friendship to our lumberjack shirted and mullet haired cousins by playing tribute to the Ramones.
