the Sturgill Simpson c/d

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

And Inventor of Outlaw Country James Marvell of the Country Cavaleers took a synoptic approach to country's identity crisis in 1981. I know Sturgill has heard this groundbreaking--and breathtakingly arrogant--single, because a copy lies buried in the Country Music Hall of Fame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRUkSOafYA

Slave to the metronome and editing pencil tool is the bane of pretty much everything from pop to country to death metal.

It's been going on a while, I remember an article about Clint Black from quite a few years ago talking about him building up everything via MIDI by himself in the studio.

Pop country should probably been pushing more Merle Haggard as that tune he did with Willie from last year "Gone to Pot" would have been a big hit back in the 80s, but in a way, Simpson doesn't really have anything to with that stuff anyway. Dude's more like Wilco than Miranda Lambert when you get down to it. Pop country is about making money, fxxx art, it's just when Billy Sherrill was doing it, the music was still good.

cool opinions

Dude's more like Wilco than Miranda Lambert when you get down to it

colorless?

No Depression fans vs. Bro Country

i think country is probably stronger than it's been in a long, long time. the pistol annies albums (and each member's solo albums) have kinda led the charge for me but i also have a soft spot for little big town, jason eady, brandy clark, kacey musgraves, lindi ortega, and a few songs here and there from some others. i can't claim to be an expert on the genre at this point, i think i spread myself a bit thin across genres to focus on any one, but i will say the albums i've listened to most over the past year (after 'art angels') were probably 'the blade' and 'platinum'.

The industry viewpoint.

"Where would Sturgill Simpson be without Nashville?"

Counterpoint: He could have gone to Austin/Memphis/New Orleans and perhaps have been just as successful.

Counterpoint: He could have gone to Austin/Memphis/New Orleans and perhaps have been just as successful
Just as successful, I don't think so. Somewhat successful--a live act people liked who made seoond-tier Americana records for the faithful--maybe. I mean I don't buy into the let's-give-credit tone to the Tennessean piece, that's just the way people think in Nashville. He ain't on country radio even coming outta Nashville and he sure wouldn't be had he matriculated from the above cities, seems to me.

so... I like his cover of Slim Slow Slider. His voice really fits the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnLbstn5g

Thing I think is that Sturgill's fans are really more rock and roll folk than country pop people. I'm sure there are plenty of Nashville fans of the arty persuasion that get into Gillian Welch or Buddy Miller digging Simpson, but I don't think he really is apart of the big blonde hair and songs about beer and bonfires folk buying his records.

By comparison, Dale Watson's beef with Nashville to be is a bit more legit in a way, as he was apart of the label system and he had the old codifiers down cold yet was spurned. My parents that saw Buck Owens, Dolly with Porter and the Johnny Cash show with the Statler Brothers courting in the 60s and really like Watson's music they have heard. Dale Watson has that old sound down cold. Watson perhaps kinda feels he got robbed of picking up that mantle, so I can see his beef is a bit more legit in a way perhaps in a way Simpson's is not. Both make cool tunes to me, just discussing the politics of country music business.

It kinda sucks that magazine dissed Merle, but they probably didn't figure on him dying either in hindsight. The big country station in this part of KY plays mostly old stuff just like classic rock radio with smattering of the big hair stuff. Being that Simpson is a local guy, you would 'think' he would perhaps fit into programming but shit man that stuff is probably decided in LA or Mumbai by aggregate databases.

One son of a redneck reporters opinion...

the merle thing... that happens all the time in journalism... a reporter or even editor promises you a cover, there's a last-minute editorial change. it happens, it's a little crummy, but it doesn't seem like synecdoche for nashville's corruption or something. it could happen anywhere. in any milieu.