I had hoped to soak up as much contemporary British culture as I could while spending the summer working in England. It helped that I'd spent the lead-up to my summer reading Booker-ratified authors like Peter Carey (Australian, yes) and Ian McEwan-I wanted to be ready for the Anglophilic culture that produced such minds.

My trip got off to a disillusioning start, though, and not when I realized that the nation's top pop star sounds like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. While the students I was chaperoning had gone to an arcade, I sat at a picnic table with coworkers when a band-not a group, certainly a [...]