Lost highways ... American music is a voyage of self-discovery
If you haven't heard the Fleet Foxes album yet you're probably already suspicious, purely on account of the rave reviews it's received. I have a feeling the Washington state five-piece don't ponder the origins of their music too much, and if they do they probably reckon it's quite Anglo-influenced in places (I've noted Fairport Convention mentioned in dispatches a few times; can't hear it myself), but the fact is that their eponymous debut is getting everyone excited because it displays all the hallmarks of a great, quintessentially American record, from a long and distinguished lineage.
The question then arises: can we put our finger on the essential spirit of great American music (as opposed to great music that just happens to come from America)? I would, crudely, boil it down to two things: mystery and harmony.
Beyond all the obvious lyrical signifiers of America (pretty much the lexicon of the Boss: turnpikes; boardwalks; state troopers; the Kokomo and the levee; a poignant recollection of some joyous yet profoundly painful coupling involving Mary in the summer of 66; sundry incomprehensible technical details about cars) lies a deeper, less definable unity of feeling. Much of the best American music doesn't so much talk about being American - it somehow sounds like America.
Being British, the mystery of American music is partially just cultural unfamiliarity, yet the best of it suggests that the United States is a mystery even to itself, and that the music is a voyage of national self-discovery. I hear these attempts at exploring a sense of national identity running through the work of artists as diverse as Chuck Berry, Willie Nelson, REM, Kings of Leon, Curtis Mayfield, Los Lobos, Tom Waits and Sufjan Stevens.
For a nation so comparatively young yet so geographically and culturally disparate, the most truly American of all American music seems like an attempt at understanding - even writing - its own history for the first time. Route 66, after all, is much more than just a road - unlike the M6. In a country built on myth, the music soundtracking this quest becomes mythic and mysterious too.
It's also why complex harmony is such an integral part of so many definitively American bands: the Beach Boys, the Byrds, CSN&Y, the Band (I know most of them are Canadian, but Arkansas hollerin' boy Levon Helm was the group's heart), REM and now Fleet Foxes, who are practically all voice. It's a legacy of gospel and barbershop, of course, but those intricate harmonies also suggest wide-open spaces, vast reserves of loneliness and freedom, the capacity and imperative to travel, disparate parts fleetingly coming together. Harmonies both embrace and try to reconcile the confusing enormity of the place.
All of which helps explain why no British band has ever been able to create a convincing approximation of being American: they fail to understand the country in a very different way than Americans fail to understand it.
