The American Smiths

Maybe they were welcome in the American music climate at the time, but we had The Stone Roses, Morrissey and The Happy Mondays to brigthen up the charts back then.

I will say this as well - The Manics are not best suited to be compared to Guns n Roses either. A far better band that changed lives and kicked ass on stage. When they were good at least, but that's another thread surely!?!?

Your brother scares me.

the simpsons

We have a winner!

Sorry but this is the funniest thing I've ever read. Are you American by any chance?

Nor am I actually slagging of yanks, although I did have the experience of living with three culturally/ socially inept ones (2 from Texas) a short while ago. That was in England, actually, and they were seen as twats. Although that isn't neccessarily cos they are American.

Point is - Americans do tend to like really crap stadium rock. Some Brits lap it up as well. Just America seems more guity.

That other thread is indeed really funny - I imagine the chap who wrote that is a handsome, sexy and highly intelligent individual.

Ha ha apparently we share a brother (mine was the treasurer, and he embezzeled a bunch of money to pay for private parties and satellite pirating equipment), though I'd never think of trying to turn him onto anything "weird" except drugs. I took him to this britpop club once and he was baffled by the fact that the girl he was hitting on the whole time turned out to be a lesbian. I think if I were a few years younger, I might have been into the bhangra/hip hop scene too, but I think I just preceded it.

And Axl was hardly androgynous. He looked like a walking thug.

And The Smiths never recorded National Front Disco, it was Morrissey solo and Morrissey solo vs The Smiths is a whole other issue.

a WALKING thug you say?

"I can't believe anyone thinks that Guns n Roses even produced one good song" translates, in objective critical terms, to "I am so mindlessly and carelessly convinced that Guns n Roses are undeserving of my attention that I'm unable to actually listen to 'Sweet Child of Mine'" -- to which, by my count, we can add "Welcome to the Jungle," "It's So Easy," "Don't Cry," and "You Could be Mine," and that's coming from a person with little-to-no familiarity with their proper album tracks. (Here's a fellow I went to high school with discussing "Sweet Child of Mine" on AMG.)

"I'm glad that they are seen as a joke." -- please navigate the AMG (or actually read the thread you're posting to for once) for evidence of the massive falsehood of that statement.

And on and on: "The Smiths inspired lifes [sic] with their lyrics," as did Axl, for better or worse (and as did Cobain, even when he was accidentally inspiring rapes -- is this really an effective route to judging music?). Or they "wrote some of the most amazing ... tunes ever," which reads fine as a declarative statement but it's very convincing as an argument -- I think we all already know you enjoy the Smiths.

Your guilt-by-association with regard to Michael Jackson and Elton John and money and popular-film would be a lot more convincing if your argument for every band you like didn't at some point include "oh, they were important" and "the bands you like are obscure and no one cares about them" -- you need to either sort out your appeals to popularity/relevance or just admit that only middling- popular Britpop gets through the gates of your musical universe. (Were you not just hours ago taunting Julio that Skullflower would sell out if given half a chance?)

No, what bothers me most here is this: "They were/ are/ always will be a joke. Except to some Americans who 'still dig them cos they wrre, like, cool and stuff'," especially after your pointing out that I've never set foot in the UK based on my having a better understanding of the UK indie industry than you -- your caricatures are so far off the mark that it often seems like you just imagine various bands' fan-bases. Seriously, navigate that AMG entry in full and you'll work out precisely what the current US music- fan reaction to GnR is: that much as a lot of us indie-inclined folk were politically obliged to slag them at the time, it becomes clearer and clearer in retrospect that they were an intially-spectacular band, and that even their long decline into bloated, mysterious ridiculousness was a marvelous and occasionally brilliant thing to observe. Few of us want to actually admit that they were "cool" -- we're just forced at the moment to concede that they did indeed Have It for a little while. And for the millions upon millions of people who never had to "concede" that because they were with it from the beginning -- well, your typical dumb appeals to one band being "important and influential" and another being "irrelevant" aren't going to work here: GnR's influence was, for better or worse, far more massive in human terms than the Smiths' ever was. In fact one could make a good case that a lot of the credit given to Nirvana for ushering in the big rock flip-over of the early 90s belongs to GnR, the first step of a three-step walk: people who thinks GnR have everything to do with 80s hair-metal and nothing to do with 90s grunge need to either work on their mental categorization or figure out something good to say about Shannon Hoon.

As for Axl looking like "a walking thug" have you any idea what the word "thug" actually means? I say that not only because most of them are able to walk but because if you stripped off the attitude and the cultural associations and just went by visual inspection, you'd probably conclude that Moz could take Axl in a fight.

(And have you honestly never noticed how often Axl looks entirely like a woman? And not in the hair-metal sense but in an honest-to-god feminine sense?)

I ask because precisely what a lot of people were getting out them -- there at the tail end of the hair-metal moment -- was a band who honestly didn't seem to be selling, and band who had some bizarre over-inflated image of something they seemed to mean and didn't care much about whether that made sense or not. (And it didn't make sense, but trying to parse it was intensely captivating to a whole lot of people.)

Number 2: Even my current music taste does not evolve around what you want to be able to slag me off over (i.e. Britpop) and I have probaby attended more gigs in my time that you have. Gosh, I even recall seeing the likes of The Beastie Boys live at one time. Though heaven forbid I should like anything that isn't rooted in 1995 chart indie world right?

Number 3: I happen to hate Guns n Roses. I'm glad that the Americans are into them and still believe they had something to say. If I could be assed I'd post a link to another music forum I post on where someone made the mistake of mentioning Guns n Roses to a bunch of Stone Roses/ Smiths fans and was eaten alive. Point is?

Number 4: Yes they are a joke. I have yet to speak to anyone over here who takes them seriously and my friends are not into the same music I am either. One of my mates still loves them and he's going to see them live later this year in Leeds, but he also loves The Foo Fighters, Soundgarden, The Lemonheads, Weezer etc

Number 5: Morrissey wouldn't fight anyone. He's got too much class.

Number 6: Guns n Roses are everything that's wrong with stadium rock - no class, no meaning, no point except sex, groupies and $$$$. I want to see a band I can at least, even slightly, identify with. Guns n Roses plain stink. The Americans loved them. Well great. The Americans also bought into Bush and The Cranberries and made a star out of Eddie Veder. Now what do you want me to add to that?

Maybe I should point out that your best bands of recent years have been discovered by us first (The White Stripes, The Strokes and Mercury Rev come to mind).

The Lighthouse Family, Craig David, Moloko, Ocean Colour Scene, Coldplay, Toploader and the motherfucking STEREOPHONICS for one.

I really don't know what it is about you in particular that makes me want to tear out my eyeballs and spent all day desperately trying to drag you screaming out of your own idiocy but I really must make myself stop it. Especially since you're consistently too dim to have even the most rudimentary comprehension of what I'm actually arguing with you about anyway.

Sorry, everyone for acting embarrassingly like Julio and even bothering to engage over this one.

If it hadn't already been done to death, I'd have launched a Smiths website. But too many already. So I decided instead to launch a website around the music of two other great songwriters - Cathal Coughlan and Sean O'Hagan. On https://coughlanohagan.com/, I think I'm building up something worthwhile. Hope you enjoy it.

I'd think American Music Club might fit the bill. Arch self deprecating lyricist over classic melodic rock though there's a lot more country in it alongside Nick Drake and stuff.
Singer even came out of the closet later but is thankfully not a rabid patriot or xenophobe.