Anthony Hamilton'salbum is just as "country"as anything else
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 18:54 (twenty years ago) link
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 agoI'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.
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 18:56 (twenty years ago) link
I never said anybody should. (Though sometimes the exercise can be fun, or enlightening, or whatever.)
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 18:58 (twenty years ago) link
well there's your issue right there. argh.
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 18:59 (twenty years ago) link
Maybe because real twang is slightly annoying in the first place.. ?
Please tell me you didn't say this.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:00 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:02 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:03 (twenty years ago) link
No, they try to do it *musically*, and they fail at it.
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:05 (twenty years ago) link
in fact I will saythat that is the overalltheme there throughout time
and since hip-hop islargely concerned with that too(not every song)
I submit my theme:country music is hip-hopand vice versa too
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:06 (twenty years ago) link
― Clarke B., Friday, 5 December 2003 19:09 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:11 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:11 (twenty years ago) link
ha next year when Imove to North CarolinaI'll be one of 'em!
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:13 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:16 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:19 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:19 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― bnw (bnw), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:20 (twenty years ago) link
― Clarke B., Friday, 5 December 2003 19:21 (twenty years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:22 (twenty years ago) link
― bnw (bnw), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:23 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:25 (twenty years ago) link
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:26 (twenty years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:27 (twenty years ago) link
― Clarke B., Friday, 5 December 2003 19:27 (twenty years ago) link
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:30 (twenty years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:30 (twenty years ago) link
I didn't mean to say it was - I was saying that alt-county ISN'T. and pop (of any genre) tends to be more often (but as I said, they each venture in to the other's territory.) And pop-country seems to me to be a little less than genuine when it tries to be pessimistic. It's either maudlin or a cartoon (as you say) of what country is "supposed to be". Not that alt-country isn't guilty of the same thing.. Getting back to the original question, I don't know why I don't like modern country. I still haven't figured that out.
Regarding Morrisey vs Bobby Sherman... Morrisey always frowns. Bobby always smiles. I didn't mean that one's approach was superior to the other - I meant that one thinks he's a tortured soul and the other is just writing songs that he thinks people will like.
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:31 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:32 (twenty years ago) link
i always assumed morrissey was writing songs that he thinks people will like.
― fact checking cuz, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:33 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:34 (twenty years ago) link
As soon as I realized that the main reason for me hating it is because I grew up with a lot of people who loved it uncritically and was being a corny-ass "rebel" for all these years, I opened up to country radio a lot. Just listen to it during drive-time or something. You'll like some stuff and not-like other stuff. It won't have anything to do with fake twang or sociology or anything.
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:36 (twenty years ago) link
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:40 (twenty years ago) link
― Broheems (diamond), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:40 (twenty years ago) link
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:42 (twenty years ago) link
― dave q, Friday, 5 December 2003 19:46 (twenty years ago) link
― Clarke B., Friday, 5 December 2003 19:58 (twenty years ago) link
...and might a i also site the likes of:
Waylon JenningsConnie SmithErnest Tubb
also see, What is Country?
― christoff (christoff), Friday, 5 December 2003 19:59 (twenty years ago) link
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 20:00 (twenty years ago) link
― Clarke B., Friday, 5 December 2003 20:03 (twenty years ago) link
i think nearly all artists of all stripes do it for both reasons.
― fact checking cuz, Friday, 5 December 2003 20:04 (twenty years ago) link
xpost
― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 5 December 2003 20:04 (twenty years ago) link
on the fucking money!
I've said this before, but what I like about mainstream, radio-friendly country music is the songcraft (Nashville still has a stable of mighty fine writers) and the subject matter.
This is music for the masses, buy it at wal-mart, dance to it every saturday night (dancing culture is HUGE in country, by the way) and it's addressing some really intense subject matter in a very adult way. It's talking about the emotions and issues that come with being married and having kids and growing older, and I don't get that anywhere else in pop music and rarely anywhere else either.
Here are a couple from the top 20 Country chart last week.
http://www.countrylyrics.circularmoney.com/kennychesneytheregoesmylifelyrics.html.htmlhttp://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/atkins-rodney/honestly-write-me-a-list-10202.html
― teeny (teeny), Friday, 5 December 2003 20:09 (twenty years ago) link
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 5 December 2003 20:16 (twenty years ago) link
― Clarke B., Friday, 5 December 2003 20:27 (twenty years ago) link
----
There's a war going on and shit, so I don't have time to argue with y'all much, so I'm just going to cut and paste a couple things I posted on other threads a few months ago and leave it at that. First:Best Tim McGraw Album: Place in the Sun.Best songs on Tim McGraw's new album: Comfort Me, Tickin' Away, Red Ragtop, That's Why God Made Mexico, Illegal, Sing Me Home, Who Are They, Tiny Dancer.Best Tim McGraw song to mention the Village Voice: Who Are They.Best Tim McGraw song mentioned by My Name is Kenny: Where The Green Grass GrowsSecond-Best Tim McGraw song mentioned by My Name is Kenny: Refried DreamsBest Tim McGraw song to rewrite "Indian Reservation" by the Raiders:Indian OutlawBest recent song by Tim McGraw's wife: OneBest early song by Tim McGraw's wife: Wild OneAnother song by Tim McGraw's wife that's just as good: The Secret of LifeOne Album which would be immeasurably better if Tim McGraw was the singer: 69 Love SongsBest songs on Kenny Chesney's most recent album: Young, Big StarBest song on Kenny Chesney's Greatest Hits album: How Forever FeelsBest country album of 2002: Toby Keith, *UnleashedBest country single of 2002: Ty Herndon, "Heather's Wall"Best Taylor Dayne single of 2002: LeAnn Rimes, "Life Goes On"Best country album of 2001: Montgomery Gentry, *Carrying OnBest rock album of 2001: Montgomery Gentry, *Carrying OnBest anything album of 2001: Montgomery Gentry, *Carrying OnBest songs on Montgomery Gentry's current album: Break My Heart Again, Free FallOne band that *might* rock harder than Montgomery Gentry: Turbonegro
-- chuck (cedd...), March 28th, 2003.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And now this (from my Pazz and Jop ballot of a couple months back):In Nashville country, there are producers (Mutt Lange, most obviously) as enamored of middle-eastern modes as Timbaland is, and other boundaries are being exploded left and right. Faith Hill and Toby Keith are singing what amounts to soul music, and Montgomery Gentry are rocking as hard as any garage-revival band in Detroit, and LeAnn Rimes is making full-fledged disco albums, and Brooks and Dunn are collaborating on stage with Sheila E. Most rock critics can't hear any of it, of course, but they still think Wilco are brave for tip-toeing outside of alt-country, which may well be the blandest, most conservative, most whitebread-anal-compulsive sub-genre in rock history. How come when alt-country bores stretch a little it's considered godhead, but when Nashville types, who've been doing it unabashedly for years, do it, it's considered the essence of cheese? How come rock critics never fully embraced the Dixie Chicks, who I often love (the album rocks fine until it slows down halfway in), until they retreated back into acoustic *O Brother* bluegrass? I considered voting for "Long Time Gone" as a single, but its stupid pandering line about Haggard and Cash pisses me off. You don't hear rock people whining in their songs about how modern rock music doesn't sound like Elvis and Chuck Berry, do you?
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 20:28 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 20:30 (twenty years ago) link
Ringo Starr must be the connection.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 5 December 2003 20:30 (twenty years ago) link
― chuck, Friday, 5 December 2003 20:31 (twenty years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 22 December 2003 02:28 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― youn, Monday, 22 December 2003 02:33 (twenty years ago) link
― youn, Monday, 22 December 2003 02:36 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 22 December 2003 03:09 (twenty years ago) link
Hm, I always knew I wasn't punk!
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 22 December 2003 03:11 (twenty years ago) link
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.)
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 22 December 2003 03:18 (twenty years ago) link
better than Groovski? say it ain't so. i quite enjoyed that clone defects album though.
― scott seward (scott seward), Monday, 22 December 2003 03:25 (twenty years ago) link
I'm not! :-)
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 22 December 2003 03:25 (twenty years ago) link
But anyway, there's enough interesting tension in country for it to fling itself to unexpected territory. And the rap barrier may break.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 22 December 2003 03:37 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 22 December 2003 04:32 (twenty years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Monday, 22 December 2003 04:38 (twenty years ago) link
― gary l. clarkson, Monday, 21 June 2004 21:18 (twenty years ago) link
― gary l. clarkson, Monday, 21 June 2004 21:20 (twenty years ago) link
― Daniel_Rf (Daniel_Rf), Friday, 24 March 2006 16:40 (eighteen years ago) link
― The Day The World Turned Dayglo Redd (Ken L), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:02 (eighteen years ago) link
― The Day The World Turned Dayglo Redd (Ken L), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― Sundar (sundar), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:51 (eighteen years ago) link
― timmy tannin (pompous), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dave AKA Dave (dave225.3), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:16 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:43 (eighteen years ago) link
Rolling Country 2006 Thread
― xhuxk, Friday, 24 March 2006 19:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dave AKA Dave (dave225.3), Friday, 24 March 2006 19:18 (eighteen years ago) link
― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Friday, 24 March 2006 20:24 (eighteen years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 24 March 2006 20:27 (eighteen years ago) link