Why I Love Country Music

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