Taylor Swift - Speak Now (Oct 2010) - hype, anticipation &c

Hmm, I'd say her songs are more universal than that, which I don't think is the same as defaulting lower middle class, which is just sort of patronizing.

But not a lot of country music lacks a Tele.

A certain type of country played by a certain type of performer? Yes. "Country music," categorically? No. When I look at live shots of the top-selling country acts of the last few years I see a few Teles, a few Gretsches, a few Les Pauls, a couple of PRSs, a Strat or two . . . "Tele" as a country music signifier is currently limited, as far as I can see it, to solo male singer/songwriter types -- Dierks Bentley, Brad Paisley, occasionally Ricky Skaggs, etc.

many xps

Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell too, right?

Yeah, maybe it's a dude thing these days, I guess.

anyway, way back when I threw it in there because someone called Taylor Swift country, and I guess to my ears there's almost nothing country about her. But I didn't take into account the apparent shifting definition of country, assuming it can be defined at all. I do, I suppose, still like genres, especially those rooted in such long and storied traditions. Can reggae be reggae without many of the things we think of as reggae?

http://forward.com/workspace/assets/images/articles/blog-matisyahu-022211.jpg

Ha, for a second there I wasn't sure if that was a David Allen Coe joke or a Matisyahu joke. I'm still not sure?

http://www.cmt.com/sitewide/assets/img/artists/coe_david_allan/davidallancoe06-280x336.jpg

taylor's first album Sounded Country but since then she's outgrown it commercially and the last album was lovably catholic; nevertheless yes she still tells v. concrete stories and most of the stories are about girls from small towns who value family, sweethearted bad boys, and pickup trucks. also her vengeance thing, which as she became poppier started to turn critics off, is totally country-girl and when miranda lambert does it nobody ever complains.

Catholic, dude?

in the sense of eclectic.

inclusive.

Can reggae be reggae without many of the things we think of as reggae?

Sounds like a slippery question, because it depends what those things are, but the short answer is "yes". If you'd only heard reggae up to 1974, and were then presented with a early-90s bam bam ragga record you'd have trouble identifying musical forms in common, surely you'd find greater differences there than between Taylor and, say, Dolly.

oh interesting! I had always assumed that the adjective catholic had meant more like, "uptight". Learn something new everyday.

how has she outgrown it commercially when country and hip-hop (and Adele) are the only genres which can command multiplatinum sales these days?

"repressed"

taylor swift is bigger than brad paisley. and adele.

But she's part of the only other genre which commands these kinds of sales figures, so she can't have outgrown it; it's a tautological point.

Is Taylor Swift pretty much the biggest fish in the pond right now?

Gaga is bigger than Taylor, by far.

xpost That's a really good and helpful point, Tim.

I don't know if Taylor is bigger than those folks, to be honest. She may appeal to more people, that's for sure - as in, a broader audience. But like I said Brad Paisley played to as many people this past weekend as Taylor did. Dunno where Adele fits in on the concert field, though. Where does she play in the UK?

Brad Paisley’s This Is Country Music Debuts At #1 On Billboard’s Top Country Albums Chart With Sales Of More Than 152,000, Marking The Chart’s Best First Week In 2011!

The album, the third and latest by Ms. Swift — still a month shy of her 21st birthday — sold 1,047,000 copies in the United States in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

talking about an order of magnitude here

anyway i'm not saying she's not country (i'm saying she is country!) just that her peers are gaga, wayne, kanye, etc., and that the sonic impurity of her countriness is both cause and symptom of her hugeness.

Yeah, she's a total pop star on par those erstwhile peers, for sure. But I don't really know how to gauge "popularity" anymore besides how many tickets they can sell, I guess.

If we're also sort of talking about this other stuff now, I did find that Brad Paisley show really illustrative of certain contrasts. Blake Shelton opened up, and he was absolutely everything (or many things) I don't like about modern country music, from the lame banter to the cover of Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative." But I thought Paisley was great, and found lots of ways to push and pull the genre in interesting directions without ever completely jumping genre ship.

Blake Shelton's good though. "Who Are You When I'm Not Lookin'" is one of my favorite singles of the year.

I had high hopes, actually, since I'd heard good things, and like the "Honey Bee" song. But he was lame.

He also has some song where he's all like "If you don't like my rebel flag you can kiss my ass".

"We're sorry, Mr. Shelton, kkvgz is deleting you from his ipod!"

He sang that one, yes.

I believe the song is called "Kiss My Country Ass." It's about being country.

It's about hating blacks and committing treason against the U.S. govt as far as I'm concerned.

http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/kiss-my-country-ass-blake-shelton-a-rant

oh great! Another I-hate-modern-country thread!

I like country music! Maybe even more than you, who knows?

I'm here nor there on modern country. Just pointing out a thing about a guy.

i like brad's verse about the confederate flag on "camouflage": "well the stars and bars offend some folks and i guess i see why." also i love that brad is so self-conscious about his role as Red State Ambassador he puts a verse about the confederate flag in a jokey song about how much southerners love camouflage. which is the perfect place for it. guy's got a light touch.

Hmm. Apart from "Camouflage," "A Man Don't Have to Die," and the Carrie Underwood duet, This is Country Music suffers because the playing and songs aren't up to his light touch; there's slippage.

you've always had more tolerance for the guy's incredible sap (and yes i know this is A Genre Staple) than i have; i can't get with "a man don't have to die" or the awful awful cancer-kid one. i love the five-minute prog-country songs though! and the instrumental ft. clint eastwood whistling. i could listen to him solo for a really long time.

but yeah camouflage is on another level.

"A Man Don't Die" is sugar, not syrup.

I left his show very impressed. But I'd take Taylor's crowd over his in a second. I saw a barely-standing girl try to smuggle in a water bottle filled with whiskey ... under her mini skirt. Yes, mini skirt. The (drunk) dudes in front of me were cracking up watching her wobble along the pat-down line, the bottle falling out every few feet. She still made it in, by the way! Don't know if she ever made it out, though.

Yeah, I mean, teenage girls are the worst, right?

haha oh wait that zing don't work, I misread you

still dont get why we oughta be essentialist about country in understanding Swift's stardom.

the dumb thing about saying Taylor "isn't country" is that if you listen to modern country radio, basically no one is. Everything sounds like rote classic rock or else grunting hair metal or washed-out Adult Contemporary limpness. It's just easier to blame her and point to her as avatar of all the evils of modern country because she sings about girly things (like love, which of course was never talked about in country, uh sure) instead of patronizing like the boys and inserting the word "country" in every other song title, parading around their Skoal rings and American flag tattoos on their hairy shoulders. But looking at actual songwriting, Swift is much more in line with classic country virtues of rich storytelling and attention to detail (and like, diction and what words mean, and how the way you sing those words can impart meaning) than all the other big country radio stars. I mean if you listen to country radio, what sounds "more country," "Sparks Fly" or "Country Girl (Shake It For Me)"?

If you're lucky enough to get your station to play Sunny Sweeney then great, but otherwise you're stuck with a bunch of crap that doesn't work as either "country" or generally as "good songs." Also, I could forgive Paisley sap (lapped it up, in fact) until the singles off this new album, which I refuse to listen to due to how lousy those singles are.

Sunny Sweeney's dope as fuck.

What country *is* is what country says it is, though.

Just as it doesn't make sense to say dancehall isn't reggae, and just like it made no sense for Philip Larkin to say that modern jazz wasn't jazz. It's an argument that always comes around when genres change, and whoever says "but that's not [genre x]" is always on history's losing sides, heroic or otherwise. Genres evolve, and they evolve around the fights and agreements within the communities of musicians and listeners who identify with that genre.

These arguments have taken place throughout the history of c'n'w, too. It's a genre which seems to enjoy arguing about what counts as country and what doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN50ZU6jVwM

Everything sounds like rote classic rock or else grunting hair metal or washed-out Adult Contemporary limpness

Country has sounded like this since the early seventies! Shania and Garth just legitimized it.

Begging the question, then: why even call it country? Why not just call it rock? What makes it country except adherence to a few apparently outmoded cliches of what country even "is," or at least "was?" Clearly many purportedly country singers consider themselves country, whether they "sound" like country or not. What is it about what they do that makes them identify as country? And what is it about those that don't identify as country that makes them not country, despite sounding like contemporary notions of country? Like Springsteen, or Aerosmith, or Train or Sheryl Crow?

Genre questions are impossible to answer. I'm with Tim: it's a variant on Charles Evans Hughes' line about the Constitution ("The law is what we say it is").

What makes me uncomfortable is wagging our fingers at contemporary country for falling short of an ideal that never existed. George Jones recorded plenty of schmaltz, while Buck Owens and Hag could make pretty scorching rock.