[Bret L]

Songs of Our Soil



"Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard’s Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new.

A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I’m talking
about when it comes to music is a certain ability to see the forest
through the trees.

From that 30,000-foot perspective, the answer to what’s new in country
turned out to be (as with most genres of popular music in the last
couple of decades): not much.

Indeed, what seems odd for an old fogey like me is how much a country
radio station these days sounds like a mainstream FM rock station in
the 1970s.

Rock music, from its emergence in the 1950s until the rise of punk in
the late 1970s, was primarily an Afro-Anglo-Celtic mélange, heavy on
blues and twang. The British Invaders, for example, wanted to sound
like they were from Elvis’s hometown, Memphis. Northern California
bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival claimed to be “born on the
bayou,” and Topanga Canyon singer-songwriters, such as The Eagles,
were fundamentally country. Explicitly regional bands such as Lynyrd
Skynyrd of Alabama and ZZ Top of Texas were huge.

In the New Wave era, though, white rockers such as Johnny Ramone
started to disentangle rock from its roots in the blues and in Scotch-
Irish folk, while country has happily stayed planted in this rich
American soil.

Why did the 20th century see such sweeping changes in musical styles,
while people in the 21st century still seem fairly satisfied with the
genres that emerged in those few tumultuous decades after WWII?

In the very big picture, what revolutionized music over the last 100
years was electricity. Beforehand, to play loud enough for the kids to
dance to, you needed an orchestra, a brass band, or a pipe organ, none
of which came cheap or casual. Electrical amplification allowed
smaller groups of musicians. Combined with other new electrical
technology such as recording and radio, amplification created
superstars whose magnitude we’ll likely never see the like of again.

By the early 1980s, technology allowed any conceivable sound to be
produced on demand. Technical innovations since then, such as the
Internet, have mostly served to allow fans to mainline their favorite
styles (here’s Wikipedia’s list of the countless current styles, such
as Christian Industrial and Dirty South) without them having to put up
with the crud other people like.

Although country is not particularly prospering, it has been somewhat
less rapidly debilitated by the economic implosion in the music
industry caused by downloading over the Internet. Country music fans
don’t pirate as much music off the Internet. For one thing, its fans
don’t tend to be techno-obsessed nerds.

The typical country fan has a life, and thus has a less pressing need
to assert a unique individual identity through musical tastes. Indeed,
having too much of a life is a common theme in country. In Darryl
Worley’s current hit “Sounds Like Life to Me,” a friend who has fallen
off the wagon complains:

Sarah’s old car’s about to fall apart
And the washer quit last week
We had to put momma in the nursing home
And the baby’s cutting teeth.

But Darryl tells him to “suck it up” because “it sounds like life to
me.”

While more than a few rock and hip-hop subgenres are intended to be
physically painful to anybody other than males under 25, country is a
sociable, big tent genre aiming to please both sexes and a wide range
of ages above teen-age. Like NASCAR, country music tends to serve as
an ethnic pride rally for the one ethnic group in America not allowed
to hold ethnic-pride rallies.

So, the styles within country range considerably, from a heavy ZZ Top-
sound on Brooks and Dunn’s last single “Honky Tonk Stomp” (which,
indeed, features Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top) to Loggins & Messina-style
soft rock.

Although some singers write their own songs, the professionalized
Nashville system encourages division of labor. A salaried Nashville
songwriter is famously expected to be in his office composing hit
songs from 9 to 5. Thus, the level of craftsmanship that goes into the
lyrics is high. (The deftness of the sidemen is also excellent, but
country music isn’t about instrumentals.)

Country’s emphasis on clever lyrics means that singers are, despite
their good old boy accents, expected to have fine diction, like
Broadway stars in a Sondheim musical. No mumbling allowed. This can be
unsettling for old rock fans used to listening to incomprehensible
British rockers with National Health Service-quality dental care.

All that clever rhyming can make the songs a little prosaic, however.
When every line has been worked over to make it lucid, there’s no
mystery or ambivalence into which you can read your own meanings. In
contrast, the lyrics to the alt-rock group R.E.M.’s first hit, “Radio
Free Europe,” were inaudible (and now that I’ve finally looked them
up, I realize that was just as well because they don’t make any sense,
either), but that just made the song more intriguing for the young in
1983. Country, however, is aimed at older people, ones who aren’t
quite ready, yet, to switch their radio dials from music channels to
talk radio.

It’s widely assumed that the Next Big Thing in country music will be
beautiful young blonde women, such as Taylor Swift (who was bizarrely
accosted by rapper Kanye West at the Video Music Awards last weekend).
You should never bet against beautiful young blonde women getting
their way, but, surprisingly, that trend hasn’t quite gone through the
formality of taking place yet: currently, 26 of the current Billboard
Country Top 30 hits are sung by guys. And yet, country audiences
appear to be around 55 percent female and women are widely considered
within the industry to be the target.

Freud famously wondered, “What does a woman want?” Nashville music
executives, though, don’t find that a perplexing question. Male
country singers tend to be deep-voiced, good-looking, and big (e.g.,
Trace Adkins is 6’-6”). One of my readers has industriously calculated
that 16 of the latest 20 male country stars to come along claim to be
at least six feet tall versus 7 of the last 20 rock stars (and only
about 25 percent of all non-Hispanic white men).

When we lived in Chicago, my wife used to take guitar classes from the
alternative country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, who would
fulminate amusingly to his students at the Old Town School of Folk
Music about the indignities he’d had to put up with as a songwriter in
Nashville. As Fulks phrased it in a song about Nashville with a title
that’s NSFW:

Hey, this ain’t country-western!
It’s just soft-rock feminist crap!

It’s not so much that women country fans would call themselves
“feminists” as that they get what they want from country music these
days as much as young men get what they want from Hollywood
blockbusters. Hence, you aren’t going to hear many lines anymore like:

But I shot a man in Reno
Just to watch him die.

Country songs sung by women now tend to be You-Go-Girl sassy, aimed at
Oprah fans. Male singers, on the other hand, get to be sappy, to make
fun of themselves, and do other things that wouldn’t be considered
appropriately “empowering” for women to do. Not surprisingly, allowed
a wider choice of songs, there are more male stars.

One striking difference between country lyrics and lyrics for rock,
pop, or rap songs (in which it’s the default that the singer is
single) is that singers are so often explicitly married or heading
into (or out of) marriage, and may well have kids. Hence the large
number of songs devoted to making married men feel good about being
work-a-daddies bringing home the bacon. For example, the verses of
Trace Adkins’s latest hit recount his hellraisin’ past, while the
chorus is:

But when I bow my head tonight
There’ll be no me myself and I
Just watch my wife and kids please lord
That’s all I ask for any more.

Women get to fantasize about taming an alpha male (without, hopefully,
having to shoot him, as one of Trace’s ex-wives shot him in the heart)
to happily play the beta provider role. Men are reassured that if
being a dad rather than a cad is good enough for an enormous slab of
manliness like Adkins, it’s okay for them, too.

I find it plausible that all this pro-family propaganda in country
songs actually improves the conduct of white working-class American
men. Compare them to their distant cousins in Britain’s white working
class and you’ll see the Americans come out better behaved on measures
of things like burglary and binge drinking. "

http://www.takimag.com/site/article/songs_of_our_soil/