Why I Love Country Music

My father went to Ethiopia a year or so ago and on the way to the hotel from the airport he was talking to the cab driver until the guy suddenly turned and said "Shh! It's Shania Twain!" and turned up the radio.

to Colin: talk to H in Addis about African people's love for Jim Reeves, dude's like a god all over Africa

Nothing, I guess. Alt-country "white" tendancies with indie rock and power pop. If you're averse to those things, you're going to enjoy pretty limited range alt-country.

one of the questions in the poll is: "We’d like to know whether you think Shania Twain, Jay Farrar, Nickel Creek, Kenny Chesney, Gillian Welch, Faith Hill, David Grisman, Keith Urban, the Bottle Rockets or the like should be considered a country music act in 2003." so there are questions even among the country critics about people like Chesney and Urban and Hill as well as the others; notice the lack of Wilco or Drive-By Truckers there?

but they do say that we get to choose who WE think is country in all the categories. wonder what they'll say when I vote for Anthony Hamilton for best album? (I probably won't...but I might.)

And you can pinpoint obsession with the past and dismisal of country pop on 70s country-rock canon faves like Gram Parsons, country-era Dylan, Doug Sahm et al. Haha, blame the 70s all around.

"So why try to fit them into funny-looking, wittily designed ones?" would be a possible response.

The new Bottle Rockets CD totally devolves into corn and kitsch and obviousness, and never rocks half as hard as Brooks and Dunn or Montgomery Gentry even though people tell me they're the hardest rocking alt country guys out there

By "rocking harder" you just mean "I like it better" though, right?

Re Alt country sensibility:

I like songs here and there, like I've said. But as genres go, it's way the hell down there. It just sounds really really dull to me.

It's interesting, actually, my dad's a fairly constant country lover in the sense that he's always tuned into the top 40 country station wherever he's at and from what I can tell hears how the music is different without specifically remarking on it -- ie, he finds new acts as they get popular and when inspired gets a CD of theirs but rarely have I ever heard him say that a group brings something new or different to the table, even though he actually picks up quite a slew of different releases across the mainstream. I've regularly gotten him birthday or Christmas gifts of various new and old country folks that he might not otherwise have heard of, usually shading into an alt country/adult album alternative [remember that?] sense -- Iris DiMent, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Dale Watson among others. He's loved them all and sees no trouble in listening to Watson -- a declared hater of the Nashville machine and pop country -- next to a Garth Brooks compilation.

Another random thought -- is another parallel to rap the fact that there's a notable range of different high profile female performers in country? The whole 'women of rock' critical canard couldn't be played in either rap OR country because people would laugh.

"Fire and Rain" is pretty undeniable, too. I just hate their SENSIBILITY, I guess.

I always enjoyed your term 'semensmarm' for Taylor myself.

Do you also think the word "danceable" is meaningless, since different music might two different people dance? That's just bizarre.

That said, best thing on it by a mile is "Hillybilly Stomp," which is pure Devil-style Kid Rock. So maybe the Kid shouldn't completely abandon that which done brung him. On the song tip, the Seger cover (wow!) and the Crow duet come closest to matching.

The new album may wind up scaling the bottom of my top 10

Re: your last post, "sad" and "awkward" are very different descriptors than "quiet" and "noisy." I'm not as anal as I'm coming across here, honestly!

My point was that all of them are OPINIONS, not FACTS. And so what?

if you can dance to something, it IS dance music, and if music rocks, it IS rock music.

I see what you're saying here, but my linguist side wants to resist it. I just don't feel like that's the way language works! That's not the way people use those terms! However, I think it's important to play around with the terms like you do, if only to effect that perspectival shift.

x-post... It's not like they actually stop being heavy metal or dance music! It's that people don't call them that anymore! So in a very real sense -- insofar as meaning is gleaned from usage -- they stop being those things!

And you seem to want to strain against this inevitability, whereas I accept it and want to explore why. I'm certainly not saying that new fans are smarter -- people don't change their terminology because they think they're better than the people who used those old terms. They use the terms *differently*, just like you said. The words aren't betraying themselves, they're being used in new ways to describe new things. A fact of language and of life.

So you basically think that the majority of people are always right? Wow.

There's no right or wrong involved, isn't that what you're trying to say? I'm agreeing with you there, so stop trying to make it seem like I believe in the existence of tangible genre boundaries.

It would also make my writing a lot more boring than it now is. It would REMOVE me from the mess and fight of the genre world. I don't WANT to be removed from it, or stand above it. I want to be IN it.

The pleasure I get from music has nothing to do with whether or not I can muster up the courage to call it one thing rather than another. The pleasure I get from your *writing* has a lot to do with your courage to do so. But these are two different though related kinds of pleasure, and I find it funny that you imply I'm not as much a part of the world of listeners as you because of what I say about the *discourse* surrounding music. I have plenty of opinions about music; having an opinion about music is completely different from having an opinion on what genre it belongs to. It's as though as a writer you can't separate your enjoyment of music from your enjoyment of the discourse. Not that I can, either, but to imply that because I resist using a term in a completely different way than it is usually used that I don't have any opinions about music or don't enjoy music is unfair and just wrong!

Okay, phew, I think we're finally coming to an understanding. I see what you're trying to say here, and it's admirable.

In 1986, I called "Walk This Way" a rap song in an Aerosmith review in the Voice, people told me I was being perverse, Rick Rubim read my article, and six months later Run DMC covered the song; a couple years later, in 1988 or so, I was reviewing obscure indie art-punk noise bands like White Zombie and Soundgarden in Creem's heavy metal magazine, and it pissed both Metallica fans AND Poison fans off, but a few years later, guess whose records they were buying?

You still never answered my Poison/Garth/Vanilla question, though...

>>That's part of what makes music FUN. It DOESN'T neatly fit into little boxes.
"So why try to fit them into funny-looking, wittily designed ones?" would be a possible response.<<

And my response would be, what the hell do you have against funny looking wittily desigined boxes? I'm not saying YOU have to invent them yourself, okay, Clarke? But if you tell me I shouldn't, I hereby promise I'm going to come at you with all barrels blazing, okay?

Re: Poison/Garth/Ice, I already said I don't think it's an issue of right or wrong. I think playing with genre-labeling is fun, too -- I don't think I'd enjoy your writing as much if I didn't -- I'm just arguing against the "rightness" or "wrongness" of genre claims. Which is what you're doing, too, so we agree!

Besides, funny looking boxes seem more like REAL LIFE to me when the question is classifying music. Especially if the boxes have lots of holes and trap doors in them, and maybe a couple missing flaps on top.

As long as your boxes have Zep III-style spinny contraptions and stuff, too, because that's what makes them interesting. Stuff that you as a writer and a critic add to the boxes. 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.

what if the beatles liked country

they did...at least, buck owens and the country side of rockabilly.

i like the point about country and rap both being, largely, quite macho genres and their (oft) mutual ostentatious dislike having much to do with this.

Amateurist, you rank with the most pathetic literalist sheep around. That the way I use genre names isn't useful to *your* understanding doesn't bother me much. But many people *have* found it useful, somehow -- including, as I pointed out, many people who bought Run DMC's "Walk This Way" and many metal fans who enjoy Rob Zombie.

Clarke -- I'm very flattered by your compliments, honestly. But there's another thing I'm curious about: If you prefer using words like "metal" or "dance music" or "rock" the way you assume most people out there do, why not use the word "rocking" the same way? Why does THAT particular word bother you so much? I mean, I'm guessing most people with any consciousness of both acts wouldn't think it meaningless at all to say that, say, Motorhead rocks harder than Clay Aiken. And they probably wouldn't think there was anything subjective about it, either. But you're suggesting you'd disagree with them on both counts; you'd hear them say "Motorhead rocks harder than Clay Aiken," and you'd ask "So, by rocking harder you just mean you like them more, right?" Which of course is not what they'd mean at all. So again, what is it about that word that makes you zero in on it?

Of course, I can extend the same argument to 99% of hip-hop as well.