the Sturgill Simpson c/d

I love u Alfred, but I can't understand the manner in which you staunchly defend the most garbagey ends of Nashville.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever),

love you too boo but I can't understand why you're such a reactionary. And are you suggesting Lambert, Clark, Jackson, etc are garbage?

Lambert and Ashley Monroe are two of the best singer-songwriters in any genre at the moment.

xp Brandy Clark is delightful, as a musical writer of course, but particularly as a lyricist/storyteller.

Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert are hardly any different than top 40 factory pop, only with "Nashville" signifiers—musically, at least. And since I'm always a music person first and lyrics person a distant second, I get turned away by how ordinary the songs sound.

I was pleasantly surprised by some of that Lee Ann Womack album from 2 years ago that you championed because of how musically rich it was.

Ha -- to me they play as _sound_ first. Lambert's records sound great: full, lived-in like good Martina McBride, expert dynamics.

(And I do agree with you on Isbell. Dust on furniture is a perfect visual.)

Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert are hardly any different than top 40 factory pop, only with "Nashville" signifiers—musically, at least.

Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert sound like the Chainsmokers, Sia, and Rihanna? Oh.

We better drop this subject.

Chainsmokers and Rihanna, no. Sia? I hadn't thought about her, but totally in some cases.

Someday I'm gonna lock myself up for an entire weekend and trace how we got from the very vibrant musicality of the 80s (and every decade before them) to what happened in the 90s and beyond where everything got really blocky and cut-and-paste with numbing cadences and geometrically square bass lines. Started with Nirvana and Garth Brooks, moved into Weezer and post-Weezer rock and Shania Twain, took hold in teen pop boom at the end of the 20th century, and then Coldplay and OneRepublic oozed it all over everything since.

I know I've talked about the Mutt Lange-ification of Nashville in the past, but it's a real thing that happened, and it took a subsection of popular music that had, for many decades, sounded completely different and then sounded very much NOT different.

I will shut up now.

I am interested in this theory and would like to subscribe to your newsletter

I know I've talked about the Mutt Lange-ification of Nashville in the past, but it's a real thing that happened, and it took a subsection of popular music that had, for many decades, sounded completely different and then sounded very much NOT different.

The country and A/C charts of the '80s had records whose sounds and mixes were indistinguishable (Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle). It's true that Van Shelton, Yoakam, Travis, Rosanne Cash, etc dropped much of the gloss but not by much.

I only know enough musical theory to be dangerous. Not enough to actually describe the whys and hows popular songwriting got super boring in the last 25 years (other than a lot of it has to do with Logic/Pro Tools and digital recording). xp

I like what our Jess said on FB: "this strikes me as very similar to indie hip-hop at the height of the shiny suit era: the rhetoric was so confused because they were simultaneously saying "i don't want your damn recognition" and "why won't you fuckers pay attention to the *real shit*?" you can either attempt to change the system or you can stand proudly outside of it. this wishy-washy in between shit just makes you look like a chump."

The country and A/C charts of the '80s had records whose sounds and mixes were indistinguishable (Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle). It's true that Van Shelton, Yoakam, Travis, Rosanne Cash, etc dropped much of the gloss but not by much.

interesting that sturgill specifically calls out the last 30 years of nashville vapidity, when 30 years back is exactly the beginning of yoakam, travis, van shelton, black, et. al., which i would think would be up sturgill's alley. i'd think he'd be totally into what music row was pushing 30 years ago.

but if he can get his own "are you sure hank done it this way" out of all this, then power to him and good for everybody.

Sturgill is mythologizing. His past never existed.

Country industry has also always been about a mythological past too tho

both otm. and sometimes they get really good songs out of it.

The country and A/C charts of the '80s had records whose sounds and mixes were indistinguishable (Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle).

what i want to know is WTF happened to country-music rhythm sections in the 1980s? you still get some great songs, but even many of the best albums--like say merle haggard's--have this no-bottom, metronomic, equalized-out-the-motherfucker rhythm section sound that seems deliberately lifeless to me. i don't get it.

i mean compare that to waylon's rhythm sections -- even into the early 1980s -- which have a lot of bottom and are almost funky. well actually they /are/ funky at times. and of course much earlier country where the WHAP of the drums is always there.

i was listening to some country station out of virginia recently, they play "classic" country which to them means 60s-80s, i guess. and the shift from almost anything pre-1982 or so to anything later was often really pronounced. the bottom just disappears, the dynamic range shrinks.

(there's this other thing where in a certain subset of country balladry of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a premium seems to be placed on sounding as sedated as possible. i'm all for minimalism, where a height of expressivity is reached via a minimum of means or at least a minimum of perceivable strain and variation. but some of this stuff---like kenny rogers and ronnie milsap and eddie rabbit, and those are the dudes i kind of LIKE--sounds like they invented the singing somnambulist.)

i guess this belongs on another thread or something.

i like sturgill simpson well enough except sometimes his aesthetic (and voice) gets uncomfortably eddie bedder-like.

*Vedder

Thee Anthony FantanoVerified account ‏@theneedledrop 14 hours ago
There's no better person than Sturgill Simpson to really GIVE IT to the country industry right now. I'm getting hot just thinking about it.

I love Eddie Vedder and I don't really hear it in Sturgill, who I also lost

the opening track to the latest album is still the best thing I've heard all year

Someday I'm gonna lock myself up for an entire weekend and trace how we got from the very vibrant musicality of the 80s (and every decade before them) to what happened in the 90s and beyond where everything got really blocky and cut-and-paste with numbing cadences and geometrically square bass lines. Started with Nirvana and Garth Brooks, moved into Weezer and post-Weezer rock and Shania Twain, took hold in teen pop boom at the end of the 20th century, and then Coldplay and OneRepublic oozed it all over everything since.

I've definitely been similarly bothered by these standards in pop music approach and production. It's the kind of approach and sound that instantly takes me to a grocery store in the suburbs, or the music/movie department of a Walmart, or a Ford commercial break during an episode of House Hunters. And like reality show editing/production, there is a distinct formula that is designed to be as unchallenging as possible to whatever excessive degree necessary.

that's not the approach in The Chainsmokers, Drake, and Panda.

"Panda" rather

Am I to understand there is currently some pop group called the Chainsmokers

Varies per artist of course

I'm saying – I hope I'm not being a dick – that current pop doesn't really sound like car commercials, and when I hear The 1975 in a VW commercial I wonder why more pop on Y-10 doesn't sound like VW commercials.

Certainly if a particular artist has nothing else redeemable about them cookie cutter production becomes a bigger distraction, and it's the landfill that I'm referring to as the worst offenders. So many of them sound like they're being groomed to the point that they aren't part of genre as much as they are just being targeted towards a demographic instead and don't actually sound that much different from each other because of the formulas JF touched on.

the new sturgill album was such a huge bummer for me, loved the last one's kinda cool late 60s private press stoner country vibe and this was is just fucking barf to me self conscious tom waits rips and "important" elvis gloop and shit, just lifeless as fuck compared to meta-modern sounds which staked out some really cool territory in alt country

i'd have to know more of what you're talking about in re. "cookie cutter production". there's a lot of music out there, a lot of pop music. in any era there's bad and there's good. it seems weird to say something like "90s pop music sucked" or whatever. that's using a very broad brush.

all the criticisms evan is making are very similar to criticisms made in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s and probably every decade previous.

I'm trying to think of Hot 100 charting pop that sounded like Weezer.

all the criticisms evan is making are very similar to criticisms made in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s and probably every decade previous.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Tuesday, August 30, 2016 11:05 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True there's just a particular 2000s version of it I hear in the production that JF described as "in the 90s and beyond where everything got really blocky and cut-and-paste with numbing cadences and geometrically square bass lines."

i don't know how that applies to miranda lambert or ashley monroe or brandy clark or angaleena presley tbh, among others. there's not much ordinary about any of them and i don't think simpson's sound is so extraordinary and *real* in comparison.

or Eric Church and Brad Paisley

I wasn't really personally commenting on how it may or may not relate to those particular artists, was more broadly responding to JF's post.

I'm with upper mississippi sh@kedown, the new sturgill album was such a let down.

I'm trying to think of Hot 100 charting pop that sounded like Weezer.

I bet you won't find any. It's more about the approach to constructing a pop song, in a very rigid manner, than it is about how fuzzy the guitars are.

hook, pre-chorus,chorus!

what else do you need

I'm not even talking about the parts. I'm talking about how they reach those parts.

I know I'm incapable of accurately verbalizing my complaint in any coherent matter because, like I said upthread, I only know the bare mins re: music theory.

There's just a stiffness in songwriting now, not just rock, pop, and country, that didn't used to be there when everything was written out of jamming/live playing instead of being jammed into 4/4 bars in Pro Tools for easier post-production. I don't know if technology is completely to blame, or if people just became less interested in the swinging looseness popular music used to have, but too much stuff sounds like it was written with the metronome as the starting point and built outwards.

jammed into 4/4 bars in Pro Tools for easier post-production

digital editing is def the culprit of the phenomenon you're discussing imo

when everything was written out of jamming/live playing

i don't think that was ever the case in pop music.

if you're talking more about recording than writing, which you might be, then it should be noted that bands were recording to click tracks long before digital editing existed, and long before the '90s came around to apparently ruin everything.

recording to click tracks long before digital editing existed

these are two v different things imo

true. i'm just not clear on how working in protools forces artists to be any more or less swinging or loose than working with click tracks.

oh for the days when Script Politti and Kraftwerk jammed in the studio

hey those early Kraftwerk records are really good

I like the Script Politti stuff there they are more like pop group or the slits

People have been talking about Nashville going to hell since Patsy Cline added strings.
Zzz.

The great Jimmie Helms expressed it well in 1978:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El9UwK9U4Z4