Europeans have eclectic tastes in American music, the vast majority of it fairly well chosen. For a music writer it can be a little astounding. Their top forty stations play all genres of music from mostly the US. Their regular airplay includes styles ranging on some stations from trip-hop to heavy metal. All that music comes together and the listener begins to notice patterns beyond genres and formats.

Anachronistic flavors of 1950 and 60s baked in cakey layers of post-Warsaw pact European unconscious; Early seventies punk played by young Croatians and sung exclusively in their regional dialect. The music’s socioeconomic subtext is altered and magnified and translated through every new period of heavy rotation.

All those years of political idealism washed away by sound waves coated in capitalism’s material fetishes - so unanimous, so potent, like seeing McDonald’s signs on every Paris Street corner and slowly forgetting where you are, where you come from, who you are. It is culturally intoxicating. While their radio stations play music highly varied, it retains an element of American self-righteousness.

I crossed Paris in an evanescent fog of French synth-pop. By the time we landed in Venice the mood had changed into something more recognizable: pulsating house. Every two minutes the music would fade out and the DJ would whisper something dirty in Italian before cuing into the latest track from what I imagined to be the Milan club scene, though it might have just as easily been from LA. Croatian radio was bursting with new Madonna and old AC/DC.

To listen is not like remembering Europe’s past, but instead forgetting the present, forgetting the late 90s in a transcendental haze of 80s pop-metal. Familiar music suddenly becomes an anthem of failed socialism, a token of material well-being, plastic, malleable, non-chronological - like lines of credit in a Slovenian casino we pass on the highway. I can hear U2 singing a song, through the sound of trucks passing at 130 kilometers per hour, to loosen the purse stings of sunburned Bavarian vacationers

It was my own tasteless decadence I thought of most, like I’m sure many liberal Americans do on trips to Europe, when my mind lost focus. Could I really live in a village my whole life with no money and still be happy?

But here, in Europe, especially the East, Croatia and Slovenia, American decadence is something to be solemnly striven for. Those sloppy power chords and snatches of bad English sung in foreign accents are all the proof I need, all the proof they need. Material wealth is the only way to live. And – though I was superficially revolted – deeper down I felt that Europe, the EU, deserved its day in the sun economically. American music has become their soundtrack for new economic opportunity.

As we crossed Croatia every little town had new car dealerships – a sure sign of economic growth and investment. My foreign exchange student’s family had just purchased two new French Renaults.

I suppose this position sounds as though I’m calling the European “villagers” naive in a horribly paternalistic tone. Maybe, but I just feel like we, meaning Americans, are further along the road to empire at this point. We had the forties, coming to power in a mushroom cloud of heavy industry. We hade the fifties, cultural homogeneity codified by TV dinners and white picket fences. We even had the sixties and seventies when the voices of homegrown cultural descent were silenced by the threat of moral collapse and economic stagnation. All the while, our economy amassed wealth continental Europe hadn’t seen since the Eighteenth Century. All the while, our music was becoming the most potent artistic force on the planet.

Even after many Americans have concluded (perhaps falsely) that their post-9/11, post-.COM, post Twentieth Century lives are less naïve, more evolved, our music continues to deliver our classic rock values to parts of Europe just getting a first taste of American style freedom.

And every place I scanned the airwaves, Gnarls Barkley could be heard dancing its way across EU borders and into the waiting arms of every sleepy village, waking to find a thousand years of history softly slipping away like scratched vinyl, or dreams of a socialist future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 12:24 am by Erik and is filed under Features, On Location. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.