One reaction I heard to the Olympic opening ceremony was that continental Europe has been rubbish at popular music for the past century. Given that Céline Dion had just nailed Edith Piaf’s Hymne d’amour the timing of this opinion wasn’t great, but still, I found myself semi-agreeing on first reaction. Admittedly, the so-called anglosphere has had some advantages over that period, by being able to mix, remix and cross-fertilize African traditions through the blues with Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh folk music filtered through Appalachia and back, all of which gives us blues, jazz, gospel, soul, folk, country, rock and roll and the rest, insofar as those and their subgenres and fusions really count as stylistically distinct from one another rather than being marketing categories. Still, there’s some potent raw material there, fortuitously coupled with the technology for its production, reproductions and diffusion at just the right time. But still, where are those counter-examples?

One difficulty is purity. What would make something “authentically” European in a world where everyone is listening to everybody else and where the importation of styles from anglo-America has been going on continuously? Well, I’m not going to worry about that, just so long as the European part of any fusion brings something distinctive. Then, rummaging around my musical memory there’s the problem that, born in 1958, my knowledge of what the kids have been listening to recently is patchy, at best, and only alleviated somewhat by knowing what my own kids were listening to in the mid-90s and since.

But here are some thoughts, born of partial ignorance but I’m hoping that commenters will remedy that.
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