I got this Brit Box today, bought it from a reseller via German Amazon for half the price that it's being offered on amazon.com for. I find it a pretty party compilation, although I must warn you that the articles in the accompanying booklet are far more outraging than any review written about this Box. For instance, I really don't know what Andrew Perry, who wrote one of the articles for the booklet expects from music. But there he opines that there was basically no good British music between The Beatles and The Smiths and wonders how British pop music could get from Sex Pistols to Spandau Ballet in only 4 years. Ahem... Statements like these are like a slap in the face of many grand British artists from the time between The Beatles and The Smiths like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Roxy Music - to name but few. Except if you're, like obviously the people who worked on this compilation, not into that kind of music.

But then the question is - what kind of music ARE they into? They want indie, but they ignore the crucial years in the development of the British independent scene - those between 1978 and 1984, when this compilation starts. They want pop, but they can't get over the loss of punk and find Duran Duran embarassing. They think that Kurt Cobain is the major reason for the downfall of the British influence on music in the early 90's, whereas the early 90's gave birth to the best known and most influential Brit-Pop bands like Blur, Oasis, Radiohead, Supergrass, Pulp...

I think that the major problem of many British music journalists is that they have this picture of The Beatles in their head and are stubbornly waiting for some new Beatles to come miraculously and fulfill their latently nationalistic, colonialistic dreams of musical world domination. But Beatlemania was not based solely on talented musicians and good songs, it had a lot to do with good timing and circumstances that just can't be repeated anymore. Blind to all the great artists that have been and are emerging from Britain even now almost continuously in more varied genres than these journalists seem to know, they keep wondering what ever happened to British pop music. What? Nothing ever happened to it, its contribution to the global pop scene has been constant over the past 40 years or so.

What makes most British music magazines a very boring read is their constant search for "the next big thing" while big things are happening all around them. Whose fault is it that they only don't seem to fit THEIR idea of good pop music?