The American bands

This week saw the release of the 12th Foo Fighters studio album, which is the 12th Foo Fighters studio album I won't listen to and whose presence I will slightly resent. 

I'm not going to specifically slag off the Foo Fighters as there are plenty of musical acts I myself like which are extremely mundane, but it just got me thinking about the American bands - the big American rock bands, as in, whichever US guitar bands might have headlined a biggish UK festival in the last, say, 30 years.

Let's say post-grunge, so I'm not talking about Nirvana. I'm also not talking about Bon Jovi, who really, perhaps with the exception of Guns n' Roses, exist in their own space - so mainstream that, in some sense, they're not mainstream anymore. I'll say about the Jove, I'm probably fonder of more of their songs than most of the bands I'm going to talk about, combined.

I suppose I'm not really talking about "metal" either, which is just its own thing, though will include some bands which are in and around being metal.

So, who do I mean? I mean

Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Blink-182, Linkin Park, The Killers, Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Pearl Jam, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Kings of Leon, Slipknot, Nine Inch Nails, Black Crowes, Counting Crows, and let's say, for good measure, The Offspring, My Chemical Romance Weezer, Good Charlotte, Dave Matthews Band, Paramore (a later vintage, so a bit different) and, I'm even going to say it, Queen of the Stone Age (though I made more of an effort to like them, and do, a bit) ...

but I mainly mean the ones at the top of the list, and actually I'm not going to slag them off at all. It's just funny how I really never got into these bands, and that I kind of lump them all together even though they sound pretty different. I mean, I guess they do. I've actually not sat through more than two full albums by the whole list combined.

But what's funny is that pretty much all of them have one song I've grudgingly gone "yeah, fine, that's a bit of fun" and it's usually the obvious song, the absolute monster smash, or near enough, but I've never had the slightest desire to investigate beyond that. Maybe it's just my lingering Britpoppery. I'm still a Blur/Jam little Englander.

But, of course, a lot of my favourite bands in the world are, or have been, the tier of American guitar band, of the same era,  a bit below this - Wilco, The Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Shins, Decemberists, Rilo Kiley, Waxahatchee, The National, Iron and Wine, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, Mercury Rev, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem etc etc.

so I can't be so anti-America per se.

I guess there are two main bands who slip through the cracks - REM (and actually it took me a pretty long time to finally admit I liked REM) and The Strokes, who are, as I've long maintained, a small band who got bigger than they should have, and are great on record, but not good to a large crowd live.

Oh, and the Pixies, who I once saw headlining Benicassim and were immense, but, again, think they're a bit different. And The White Stripes (so, you know, a few sort-of exceptions).

Anyway, someone who explains actual music well, and someone who explains actual cultural differences well, could and would explain this. I feel like I do have the explanations fairly clear, in an unspoken way, in my head, about why those are not actually very very good bands, sorry, but am quite sure, if I attempt it, I will sound like an arsehole, even to myself. So I'll leave it.