Why I Love Country Music

i like many things in all these categories but would betray them and sneer at them like a shot if anyone accused me of having grown up

strangely enough this has nevah happened

Now, Hank Williams surely wanted to sell a bunch of records, and most of the now-revered "heritage" country artists would no doubt go along with that program. And trad Nashville still turns out great records now and then, or at least they still did up to the point I stopped checking, several years ago. But ever since the countrypolitan movement started taking country more pop and making it more broadly marketable in the '60s (Patsy Cline being the pinnacle of artistic achievement and crossover marketability there), the country music factory has had its efficiency experts working overtime, squeezing that wild-hair country je ne sais quoi into widgets. Why do you think that artists periodically rage against the Music Row machine every few years (the "Outlaws" in the '70s, Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle in the '80s, take your pick in the '90s)? Yes, the stuff institutional Nashville pumps out by the truckload every year is technically "country," but it has little to do with the roots or the finest qualities of country music.

So, most people probably don't like country music because most of it sucks. Why the rest don't like it is likely small-mindedness or merely a matter of taste.

There's a number by Dale Watson, a 1990s new boy who harks back to Merle Haggard, called Nashville Rag, with the lyrics "I'm too country now for country / Just like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones..." and so on. He's right - many notionally country stations don't play any of these people.

Bob Dylan's music (especially that with the "The Band") has always been rooted in Traditional American music, albeit dressed up for a contemporary era using traditional rock instruments.

On Tour in 1992 Dylan had a slide guitar player replete with country hat and tassles who sat on stage plucking and sliding next to Dylan's maniac drummer who thrased the drums so hard his sticks shattered and flew across the stage.

Eclectic!

If it aint country it aint music
Have ya see bubba lately?

Sorry, but this is utter horseshit. And I'm not even gonna get on my why pop-country is so much better than alt-country horse this time; by now, anybody who's still spouting that old purist-assed anti-Garth/Shania line is so clueless they're not worth arguing with.

..And point me to your writings on pop country being better than alt country.. I'm genuinely interested.. I guess it depends on what constitutes "alt".

xpost

Why would you listen to something simply because it's offensive and challenging, other than as an exercise? I mean, I do this, too, and I completely agree with you that Travis Tritt is more challenging to ILM-dom than Merzbow. People don't listen to noisefuck-style music because it actually challenges them; they listen because they think it sounds good or exciting or exhilarating or whatever. I enjoy subjecting myself to stuff that I find aesthetically revolting from time to time, but it's not what I want from music.

Anthony Hamilton's
album is just as "country"
as anything else

It isn't, really. But somehow it's more annoying... Maybe because real twang is slightly annoying in the first place.. ?

how people MAYBE used to talk in the south 40 fucking years ago
I'm not sure what you mean there (except maybe Wilco or Gillian Welch, I guess..) I don't see any of the others as trying to imitate the old style (lyrically, that is.) Seems to me that they're trying to be poetic and , OK, maybe a little sappily pessimistic .. but that's artist (or "artist" if you prefer) -vs- popstar, which you'll find in any genre.

Have you been to the rural South lately? SCOTS seems pretty genuine to me, even though they're sort of a novelty act.

I never said anybody should. (Though sometimes the exercise can be fun, or enlightening, or whatever.)

well there's your issue right there. argh.

Maybe because real twang is slightly annoying in the first place.. ?

Please tell me you didn't say this.

Also, I'm not begrudging country music anything. I'm really trying to examine why I just don't care for it.

Maybe because real twang is slightly annoying in the first place.. ?
Oh, I said it! Don't hang me for it.. It's a prejudice I live with every day. I'll try to change, Mr. Raggett - honest.

No, they try to do it *musically*, and they fail at it.

in fact I will say
that that is the overall
theme there throughout time

and since hip-hop is
largely concerned with that too
(not every song)

I submit my theme:
country music is hip-hop
and vice versa too

I think you do ...! I mean "artist" .. meaning, trying (& sometimes forcing) introspective lyrics, rather than bubbly, happy-go-lucky lyrics. (Not that each don't venture into the other's territory...) You know what I mean, you just don't want to acknowledge it, because it's bullshit. (And I mean bullshit from the lyricists' point of view, not my own.)
Morrisey versus Bobby Sherman .. you can't tell me they don't approach songwriting differently.

Lots of people find Southern suburbanites nauseating, though

Heck, lots of people find suburbanites in general nauseating! But I've always been a suburban person, so I really can't complain much.

ha next year when I
move to North Carolina
I'll be one of 'em!

Which is what is really interesting to me! It's this strange but involving dynamic that you can present yourself as a representative of something 'real' when...well, not fake, just another level of reality, if you like. The reality of a now that is trying to be colored up as a reality of a then.

I remember Tico Ewing saying this somewhere as well. The problem is I don't really hear this danceability in popular country either. And GIllian Welch is a pretty extreme example of alt.country being backward looking. I hear punk and folk and rock in alt. country, meaning I think it can be appreciated on its own terms without being proclaimed as "real country" or some such nonsense.

..OK Too Hard to Handle .. Too Free To Hold rocks out at the end.. Kind of a long wait though...

>>>Hot-shit duo Montgomery Gentry are more traditionally manly—on Carrying On (Columbia), they work a hybrid variation on the demented wildass abandon of Hank Jr. and the compulsively regretful hell-raisin' of Waylon. "She Couldn't Change Me" is about an uppity honey what gets sick of Montgomery "sittin' on the porch in my overalls" and hits the road. But the pull of his scruffy country charisma is just too strong—she turns around and heads back in the end. Just to be fair, though, the second-catchiest thing here, four tracks later, turns the tables. When Montgomery hooks up with a gal who's "Hellbent on Saving Me," he winds up on his knees, asking the Lord to change him "just enough" (rhymes with "to keep her love").

Being a tough redneck in the New South means never having to crack a joke, but the guitars here clang hard enough to propel MG past the tight-assedness of their models. The title track is as hard a Skynyrd shuffle to make it past Today's Country's squeamish quality control. (Protests Gentry, "It ain't nobody's business what kind of flag I fly." " 'Cause that's my right," Montgomery chimes in.) Granted, "Ramblin' Man" isn't an Allmans cover and wouldn't necessarily be any more welcome if it were, but "My Father's Son" is a dynamite sequel of sorts to last year's class-conscious hit "Daddy Won't Sell the Farm." Now that Paw has literally bought the farm, Gentry's got to fight off the foreclosure. And "Cold One Comin' On" tweaks a great trope, referring to either a barroom brew or an empty bed, and to heartbreak either way.<<<

Here's Frank Kogan on the followup album (like me, he named *Carrying On* his album of the year in 2001; I believe that like me, too, he now thinks he underrated the followup):

>>On the first track of Montgomery Gentry's first album, these c&w whiners instructed us not to judge them until we'd walked in their shoes, while showing no interest themselves in what it's like to walk in anyone else's. On the title track of the new Our Town they tell us significantly that their local Church of Christ is well attended, but they make no mention of any mosques or synagogues and presumably wouldn't want to know the Mideast ancestry of their twang. But their music isn't content to just rock back on its reactionary haunches; instead, it filches rock 'n' roll "na-na-nas" and AOR harmonies and Mexican melodies and wicked slide guitars from near anybody's palette. Montgomery Gentry are not as rambunctious and obnoxious this time, to their musical if not moral detriment, but nonetheless they rock harder than you do.<<

Here's Joshua Clover/Jane Dark on a song from their FIRST album:

>>Daddy Won't Sell the Farm," by rawhide traditionalists Montgomery Gentry—one of whom is the brother of c&w softie John Michael Montgomery—is rilly a lovely vision of how Papa bought this farm back in 1968 and won't sell to the big concerns, so he struggles on with his rustic lifestyle in the shadow of minimalls and burger joints. It nestles comfortably in the tradition of Small Farmer vs. Big Corporation songs, and the larger tale of the Indomitable Rube vs. Evil Modernization/Urbanization—it even quotes Hank Jr.'s "A Country Boy Can Survive," the genre's demented flag-bearer.

And yet, how bizarre. This isn't one of those "We been here since the Civil War and we were born rebels" tales. Cuz daddy "worked and slaved" for the man, till he had enough to leave the system and cop some rustic peace in the very year that students and workers were tearing up paving stones from Paris to Iowa.

There are no coincidences in country music (check that cloying chain-of-life song about a guy who stops to change some lady's flat). Daddy is the first country hero as far as I know who's an openly political hippie. Cuz you just don't choose '68 when writing this song unless the guy's part of the Back to the Land movement. Pop's a folk hero alright, but not a hero for the Dukes of Hazzard so much as the Woodstock nation. This is akin to a hip-hop song making common cause with cops. Except cops actually are dirty and antisocial.<<

Those may or may not help; I'm not sure. I hope they do, though.

>>>MONTGOMERY GENTRY Carryin' On (Columbia) A tuneful, hard-hitting case study in the conservatism of the "rock" claimed by studio hotshots wherever popular music is manufactured in our once-great land. It's possible to imagine the identical beats and licks vitalized by, say, a younger John Anderson. But mixing them with male chauvinist reaction makes more sense, and turns them rancid. At a time when female spunk has become a Nashville cliché, these two putative roadhouse rats, one the brother of cowboy-hat millionaire John Michael Montgomery, inhabit a world where women are either saintly or compliant. They "rock" because they're "rebels," only what they rebel against is the present, in male-specific terms: "They say this way of life is done/But not for my father's son." Like their antecedent Charlie Daniels, they beg the question of whether they're also that kind of rebel. But attention ought be paid another high-profile couplet: "It ain't nobody's business what kind of flag I fly/'Cause that's my right." Uh-uh, stupid. The way flags work is that they're the business of everybody who sees them. That's why you fly them high—and why the other side tears them down. B MINUS<<

And musically challenging - I guess it's a matter of taste/preference - but I'm just not hearing a lot of surprises .... (read: dissonance, I think.)

So while they wouldn't send me running out of a BBQ in Georgia, they aren't likely to sell me any records either...

But thanks for the recommendation...

(Xpost)
"incidentally, speaking of alt-country, did you ever hear of Elizabeth McQueen and the Fire Brands? They come from Austin, and say they're doing "pub rock," but I like THEIR new album a lot. It's got a real rock'n'roll throb to it -- reminds me of early new wave rockabilly era Carlene Carter or Rosanne Cash. Nice"

..Thanks for that recommendation too..

I don't like the way that upthread he attacks Lloyd Cole and lots of country singers. LC is not really a country singer, of course, but I am tickled by the premise of the thread which is that he is.

I like some of the country singers that chuck attacked, plus some that he didn't, eg. Shania Twain whose recent 45s have excited me.

HOW does the kind of lyrical imagery you're referring to challenge you
.. I don't like it just for the sake of it being there - I like it because if you have to think about the lyrics a little bit, you can interpret the lyrics to mean different things, many things. Sometimes that's not a good thing, if the artist wants to convey something specific - but most of the time, I get more out of a song where I'm able to personalize it to the way I visualize it.

Dissonance is hardly the point
..By dissonance, I mean (mostly) cognitive dissonance - i.e. something unexpected or unnatural.. but also musically dissonant - but that's just my personal preference.. That doesn't mean Slipknot...? (The chords in Louie Louie seem pretty dissonant to me.)

>i coulda explained that being tracky is something music DOES.<<

Yeah, Sterl, but it's something ALL music does. That was my point!!

the beatles may not have been palling around with george jones, but they were much much much into the everly brothers and carl perkins, both of whom had a lot of country running through their veins.

Obviously a lot of people seem to go for it. I just don't demand that much creativity from a critic.)

(Though I guess railroads are kinda tracky in the first place, maybe.)

Hardest rocking tracky country song ever:
"Train Kept a Rollin," Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio

But that's obviously because everybody traded in their copies for this album, which has all the dance mixes!:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDCASS80311061622542118&sql=Awt9fs33la39g

So for an alt-country example.. I hate to use it because I'm not really a fan of Gillian Welch .. But the first time I heard "Paper Wings" the guitar verse caught my ear...

..And I kind of hate to use the term alt-country - because, honestly, I'm not really a fan of alt-country so much.. I mean, it isn't a genre I usually seek.. But this thread started because I find it more listenable than Garth Brooks. My original thinking/point was going to be that Lloyd Cole and Robert Forster write some great country songs, but they don't really conform to all of the traditional or modern country aspects and would not make it on country radio unless they were remade by Travis Tritt or Clint Black.

hmmm... I think I just talked in circles ..

When I go out, I'm gonna go out shooting.

I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid.

I have some opinions on how y'all could have avoided fighting, but you'll have to work it out for yourselves. Suggestion, though: Don't assume that the other guy is trying to say something stupid.

Haikunym wrote (in reference to the latest Montgomery Gentry single): "'Hell Yeah' is one of the best rap records of the year." Well, if it's rap, it's rap that's absorbed nothing from any hip-hop of the last 30 years - which is to say that it's absorbed nothing from the rap/hip-hop genre, even if it shares some ancestry with hip-hop, and has some similarities. (FYI, "Hell Yeah" is the latest single from Montgomery Gentry.)

A point that Chuck was making, and that got lost in the hubbub, is that not very much contemporary country music is using black dance rhythms from beyond the '70s, whereas previous country music used rhythms from their r&b contemporaries.

(Question for the musicologically inclined: Are there any rhythmic developments in today's country that don't come from previous developments in some other genre? Is country still evolving its own rhythms, or is it all hand-me-downs? LeAnn Rimes and Brooks & Dunn might be test cases, in different ways.)

This fits in with Amateurist's point (which isn't a huge exaggeration):

i love how half the country is like "i like everything but country and rap", a quarter is like "i like country fuck rap" and the last quarter is like "i like rap fuck country" (cf. de la soul track where rednecks talk stupid shit as george jones plays in the background)...

And Chuck's question doesn't really challenge it:

But where does that leave Bubbba Sparxxx, David Banner, Kid Rock, Nappy Roots, Toby Keith, and all of those kind of people who do both?

As far as social signifiers go, it leaves Banner clearly in hip-hop, Keith clearly in country, I haven't heard the new Nappy Roots, but I'd say clearly in hip-hop on the basis of their previous LP, Kid Rock jumping from hip-hop to country (and I haven't heard his latest either, so I don't know if he's mixing the signifiers anymore or not), and Sparxxx conducting an interesting social experiment if - but only if - "Comin' Round" becomes a huge pop hit. And even then, I predict the result will be that he doesn't get played on country radio.

One might want to confute or defy the social map, but a feature of the map is that, no matter what the contortions and convolutions of the use of the word "country" and "rap," or the battles over whether Shania or Clouddead or Jay-Z or Sage Francis is really real, there's a barrier that says that if a song is in country it's not in hip-hop, and if it's in hip-hop it's not country. And we have no choice but to perceive this barrier (whether or not we buy into it), no more than we have a choice not to perceive gender. (And we don't perceive gender with 100% agreement, but nonetheless we almost always perceive it.) Play "Hell Yeah" and Jay-Z's "Takeover" (chosen because they each not only rock, but because each moves me in an emotionally similar way), and 100 out of 100 know which one is classed as country and which as hip-hop.

Maybe not all Toby fans think that hip-hop sucks; nonetheless, Toby doesn't play hip-hop (as his fans would perceive it) and wouldn't be allowed to - wouldn't even be allowed to incorporate any particular feature that signified hip-hop. Whereas Bubba can be perceived as hip-hop as long as he incorporates some feature that signifies hip-hop strongly, even if he incorporates lots of country features. And the fact that David Banner's black southern drawl resembles white southern drawls, and the fact that "Cadillac on 22's" uses the chords to "Lay Lady Lay," justify my voting for it in the country music poll, but these facts don't put him in "country" on most people's social maps.

Anyway, that there's a barrier between hip-hop and country raises lots of questions, since there's no comparable barrier between pop and country, and rock sounds have been pouring into country wholesale (yet the rock and country audiences remain distinct, whereas the "adult" pop and the country audiences don't).

So you could start the discussion from here. (I don't see where any of the fighting actually addressed the issues.)

With genre terms, the phrase "what they normally mean" is problematic, since using such a term in the way that other people use it does not necessarily entail using it to designate the same things that other people use it to designate. In fact, such terms demand that you sometimes use them to designate something different from what at least some other people designate by it.

This is because genre names do double duty as both value judgments and descriptions. No one who knows how to speak expects everyone to agree on what movies the term "good movie" refers to. That's because the term not only differentiates movies from other movies, it differentiates your tastes and your values from other people's. On the other hand, most people who use the word "tree" don't expect a lot of disagreement over what's a tree and what isn't (and don't get worked up on the subject in any case: "What! You call 'elms' trees? Come look at my oaks! I'll show you some real trees").

So anyway, "country" and "hip-hop" and "pop" and so on are battle words because they're value judgments that we use to differentiate ourselves from some of our fellows and identify with others, and our differing usages and designations move us around in relation to each other. Yet we also believe in our social maps, believe that they're right, or at least good in some socioemotional way.

I probably said this better on other threads, about sociology of pop and controversy words/Superwords, but don't have time right now to look for the links.

Anyway, ignoring the sociology - of who is using the term to designate what - is not an option, not a possibility; nor is failing to defy (some) other people's designations. You do both, just by speaking.

The appeal of your style of writing is not that it merely observes the sloppiness of genre boundaries, but that it *forces* such sloppiness, and in so doing it shows the fragility and arbitrariness of those boundaries. In that sense you're a sci-fi/fantasy critic, when most critics want to be realists or Romantics.

Well, what I'm saying is that we're all such sci-fi'ers, simply by using the language normally. (So it's not sci-fi.) But Clarke, I don't think I agree with your four major terms here: sloppiness, fragility, arbitrariness, and boundaries. But I don't have time to go into this. Another facet of genre titles is that they not only designate genres but sounds. So an alternative-rock song can have a pop melody without being a pop song, but sometimes having such a melody might make it "pop," even if it doesn't make it popular.

As a possible counterexample to the point that hip hop that borrows from country will be identified as hip hop not country, what about Velvet Crush's version of 'Why Not Your Baby' by Gene Clark? I think the drumming borrows from hip hop and the background singers sound like rhythm and blues, but as a whole the song still sounds country/folk to me. Of course, Velvet Crush is not hip hop.

OK, one more shot at this:

If you were to ask me "What's your favorite punk album of 2003?" I could give you four different answers.

(1) Transplants Transplants (because it's the best of the albums that sound stereotypically "punk rock," especially after the hardcore punks hijacked the term and restricted it to themselves).

(2) Clone Defects Shapes of Venus (because it's the postpunk/alternative-rock album, and is messy and gung-ho and all those punk things) (also because it sounds like the music I was making in 1982).

(3) David Banner Mississippi (because it's ferocious and destructive and self-destructive and idealistic and can run at you and smash you [when it isn't crashing over its own heaviness], as punk use to do).

(4) There were no punk albums in 2003 (because so far the only punk album this decade has been The Marshall Mathers LP, and if you don't have the brains and the self-challenge of that album, you're just not doing it).

I'm perfectly capable of resorting to all four usages (as well as others) in close proximity. And the usages aren't unrelated - 1 and 2 are musical vocabularies/traditions, 3 is effect, 4 is an ideal of what I want the music to do; obviously, those vocabularies had helped produce those effects and create those ideals, though they rarely do now, which doesn't necessarily mean they fail to do something else worthwhile. But my heart is with usage 4.

I wonder what equivalent usages you guys use with country. My intuition is to look down on the purists, but that's because if I were a country musician chafing at the genre's limits, I wouldn't do so in the name of "real country" but in the name of better music that didn't give a fuck about being country. But I'd never be a country musician in the first place.

Yet purism isn't reactionary by definition. It depends on how it's used. (Just as I don't think I'm reactionary for thinking that hardcore punk isn't real punk, since it's about group solidarity and my punk isn't.) (Of course, I've also written that punk is better as a tendency than a genre, and better as an impulse than as an identity.)

No one is consistent in how they use genre terms, but people will frequently try to lay down narrow rules for how other people should use terms, though this laying down is usually ad hoc, mainly to discredit someone else and to win arguments.

Hm, I always knew I wasn't punk!

And Shapes of Venus was the best postpunk/alternative album of the year. (There were a number of good ones. If you just take the albums I heard from Detroit, for instance, possible-P&J-winner Elephant was the fourth-best. And there must have been scores of such albums from Detroit that I didn't hear.)

Yeah, Ned, you're about the last person I'd call a punk. (And don't be offended by that.)

better than Groovski? say it ain't so. i quite enjoyed that clone defects album though.

I'm not! :-)

But anyway, there's enough interesting tension in country for it to fling itself to unexpected territory. And the rap barrier may break.

Well, first off, even thinking of just commercial country, it does claim a lot of sounds that it wouldn't have in years past (loud guitar rock is one of its options; death metal singing isn't). And it's not just incorporating pop, it's helping to shape it, albeit in the "adult contemporary" category.

And it's too big to call "marginalized." But it tends to be left out of the general cultural discussion. That is, the people who don't listen to it barely know it's there (except in the way that they know that, say, Mexican music is there), and few feel the need to educate themselves in it. Not only does it tend to be absent in Pazz and Jop, its absence isn't even an issue. (And Wilco and Lucinda Williams and Magnetic Fields are never discussed there in relation to country.) Whereas the people who listen to country sure know that rock and hip-hop are there.

But I wouldn't say it's more left out now than in 1948 (for instance). But it defines itself differently from how it did in 1948. Christianity and social conservativism weren't absent from the music in 1948, but they weren't defining characteristics in the way that they are now (not that the genre is locked into those characteristics, or that all the performers promulgate them, but they're in your face a lot, aggressive rather than matter of fact). And this will have some effect on what signifiers it's willing to take in. It won't think of itself as containing vanguard elements, or musical innovation, even when it does.

The last time I was in Knoxville I got my hair cut in Vestal, and the TV was on and it was some kind of "my boyfriend got a sex change" show ... inbetwee segments, the ads came on, and of cours they're basically the same ads I get in New York. I was struck by how loud, how abrasive, and how alien to the pace and feel of that barber shop the TV was (though I may have felt the same way at a sleepy barbership in Midwood, Brooklyn, too) and it came home to me - again - how television lays this vast same-ing blanket over the country, where what goes in New York and L.A. is what goes for everybody, and a lot of that shit is scary and not that pleasant and is liable to give you the feeling that things are frankly a little out of control, that the freaks are multiplying. I think there is plenty of country that very consciously sets out to counteract that feeling of anxiety and insecurity, and I don't see anything wrong with that per se.

Rolling Country 2006 Thread