A military parade for American cultural power

We live in awards obsessed times. On 16 February, the BRIT Awards in London honoured home-based acts, as the great and the not-always-so-good gathered to praise a galaxy of UK pop stars.

But the BRITs bash is just a baby sister to the Grammys which last month confirmed two women—Beyoncé Knowles and Lady GaGa—as the current frontrunners in pop’s glamorous but ever voracious fame game.

What, though, is the point of these lavish, self-congratulatory champagne fests where stars raise their profiles higher still?

In some ways, the biggest of these occasions—notably in USA—are imperial displays. The Americans, for the last century, have been the aristocracy of the entertainment industry.

From Broadway to Hollywood, New York to New Orleans, Chicago to Nashville—this is the land that has created an enduring and captivating model for the rest of the world to idolise. 

There have been brief moments when the UK has managed to smuggle a seat at this top table: when the Beatles led the British Invasion in 1964, they opened the door to dozens of groups who would grip the US imagination for several decades.

Last year, it seemed that the British—dormant for too long Stateside—had finally returned. At the 2009 Grammys, Radiohead, Paul McCartney, Adele and Robert Plant, reminded us all that music with an Anglo accent still had a place in American hearts.

But this year's Grammys saw the US reassert its world-leading status. Those dominating traditions—black urban music, and Southern country music—were back big time and, even when Elton John crept out of the shadows to join GaGa for a duet, there was a strong sense that was just a small sop to those of us on the other side of the Atlantic.

The music industry has been facing straitened times—its annual turnover of $30 billion down some 25 percent on ten years ago—but the US, the greatest market of all, consuming a third of world’s popular music, remains the lynchpin.

The Grammys may reiterate American power in this sphere, but such a ceremony remains a potent PR reminder that, even if the gramophone industry is feeling the chilly economic draft, those ubiquitous musical brands—from rock to soul, pop to country—retain a pervasive and thrilling power for audiences around the globe.