Ulysses

Went to Whitechapel Market today. The market itself was fairly unremarkable-- about a mile of stalls selling pashminas and fruit and bootleg Bollywood dvds. But I did see a set of promo posters for the new Franz Ferdinand single, Ulysses, lurking on a piece of construction-site plywood about 100 feet from a building called Albion Health Center. A surprising reminder of how present both indie music culture and the Albion ideal in England are in everyday life. It seems that both are much more prevalent than their counterparts in America-- can you imagine a building called "Manifest Destiny Health Center?" I guess we have something similar in our fixation on freedom and related ideals, but those are more abstract while Albion seems to be a much more concrete notion of the nation as a whole. The adoption of the Albion concept is also really interesting to see in everyday contexts because it leads to the assumption that it is present in the national psyche, which explains why it appears so often in the nation's musical output.

The Franz posters, and the sheer amount of underground music advertising here, is also quite different from America. There's something much less industrial about music in Britain; it seems more organic and artists outside the Top 40 market flourish in ways that acts in America never quite do. I don't know if this is a result of the alternative media, like NME and club scene here, being so much more present, just a cultural difference in musical preference, or something about the types of social issues that these bands tend to address that connects with the population. At any rate, it made me happy to see ads for a band I actually like, rather than endless, blaring MTV promotion for Rihanna's ten thousandth single in six months.