English vs American laddishness

The Sasha Frere-Jones interview in which he discusses his New Yorker article on why Americans are leery of English pop is more insightful than the article itself.

Regarding the insoluble problem of how to make English issues acceptable to a wide American audience, Sasha defines the boundary of what's acceptable:

The problematic content in these songs is the description of social and political realities or ideas about them. (Also, the Jam and the Specials sounded really English. There’s a line that is being constantly redrawn: we can take some accent, but not a lot.) Americans can handle aesthetic darkness as long as it’s depoliticized and personal. Look at Depeche Mode—we love Goth music, which is essentially a passive pleasure: depression as comfort. The Cure and Depeche Mode ended up with big American fan bases (although the Cure’s happy songs are what really caused them to break out here). We like the moody types, such as Radiohead, but we don’t like it when somebody says, clearly, “This bad thing happened and I have a theory as to why, and also we are from England because you can hear my weird accent and I just talked about takeaway curry and you’ve haven’t the foggiest.”

But the English have as pronounced a weakness for depression-as-comfort as the rest of us; the irony employed by the likes of Morrissey and the Pet Shop Boys is a mere garnish, a subtle way of hiding the non-subtle ways in which these acts enforce their miseries to a willing (ok, passive) audience. Which means they've got more in common with the laddishness of Oasis, Blur, and the Arctic Monkeys than they (and their fans realize). Even determined swishes like Placebo hide their ambivalences behind power chords and granitic rhythms that (I'm just supposin') Linkin Park and Staind might admire; and since Staind and Linkin Park sell millions of records without a drop of lip gloss why do we need the English equivalent?**

The moral? Laddishness is universal -- and territorial.

**Green Day could be our Placebo. Billie Joe is as cute-ugly as Brian Molke. They write songs which femme boys, macho boys, undergraduate women, and Anthony DeCurtis can hum and love. But their sexual politics are if anything more stunted than Placebo's. Where Placebo at least suggest they've made it to 12th grade, Green Day have flunked 10th grade sex ed twice.