I agree with you about the vitality of the UK scene versus the US, and I
have a theory about why they move at different speeds.
In the US, virtually all of the pop music press (other than industry rags
like Billboard) publishes on a monthly schedule. The average fan on the
street sees a change in who's "in the news" and who's "climbing the charts"
twelve times a year. Of course the different mags have different features,
but they all compete to cover essentially the same popular territory. In
the UK, the pop music press has been on a weekly schedule for decades now,
and the emphasis is on the immediacy of music trends; trends that the
typical bloke can see changing 52 times per year -- four times the frequency
of a music fan in the US. Papers like NME and MM lean more towards a
newspaper metaphor whereas in the US, Rolling Stone and SPIN are
feature-oriented magazines, so through both presentation and content the US
and UK sources are different in their impact on the reader.
In short -- although few of us would like to admit it -- I see the *media*
as the primary determining factor in the vitality of a music scene. If
listeners and audiences are conditioned to accept change at a higher rate,
then artists can be more adventurous and diverse without having to sacrifice
broad-scale recognition and success.
Whaddaya think? : )
John