Country music, is it OK?

[Steve3007]

Yeah, I don't think it's any accident that Dolly Parton played Glastonbury last summer. It's finally all come full circle. I just thought it was pretty ironic that the press seemed to be mystified that the "sincere" people of the kinds of bands that normally play "Glasto" accepted the "fake" Dolly Parton as one of their own. I like The Smiths and Radiohead so I'm fine with pretentious posturing, teenage angst and pretending to be a tortured soul. But I don't think those normal standards of the music industry can claim to be more genuine than Dolly. I'll bet Thom Yorke didn't grow up in a one room shack in Alabama!

[Sy Borg]

Most of you are talking out of your arses. Listen to some John Prine. Good musician, good song writer, & his words are sheer poetry.

An Englishman who doesn't get irony . Of course there are good artists in all genres.

I don't listen to music for the words. The deeper beauty of music is in that it is wordless and its broader affects can be universally understood, irregardless of race or culture.

We live a sea of words that are obviously useful but they also serve to divorce us from reality, acting as a filter between us and the patterns of nature (including our own patterns). Do we need to tether something as beautiful and freeing as music with words - almost all of the time?

Popular music is increasingly heading in the direction of wordiness and/or monotony. A modern pop song starts and, musically, there is a very strong chance that it will be largely the same at the end as the beginning - leaving you with no musical journey, just a lyrical journey (of variable quality) laid on musical pavement.

Sorry, that is simply boring for me unless the lyrics are 1. performed with clear diction and 2. are outstanding (eg. the Indigo Girls' Closer To Fine or Steely Dan's The Royal Scam or Babylon Sisters).

The ever-increasingly musical philistinism and closed-mindedness of the musical public is why I gave up playing music in public. Not that my playing or music is anything special but I at least try to avoid formulaic populism - that is so often evidenced in country music.

Unless playing concerts, the moment you attempt anything remotely arty you start to lose the audience and their gnat-like attention spans (I'm taking about sit-and-listen gigs, not dance gigs). It was not always that way. There is still fairly broad acceptance of musical imagination in continental Europe and South America, but the music of the Anglosphere has been going downhill fast, lead by the economic rationalists of the music industry - and most people just follow along.

[LuckyR]

Listening to the Dan right now...

[Sy Borg]

Listening to the Dan right now...

The best of both worlds - both strong music and lyrics. Too often the former gives way to the latter.

Before the 1942-1944 musicians' strike most popular music was instrumental. Since vocalists weren't considered to be musicians they were not affected by the strike and record companies started pushing vocal music, at times a capella dues to lack of available musicians.

Thus ended the era of instrumental music in the west. We've had lurve pushed down our throats (so to speak) ever since - lurve won, lost, wanted, denied, waning, growing, changing, lusted, cheated, ad infinitum. Over and over again, tales of post-apes dealing with the trial and tribulations of mating rituals hinging on the exchange of bodily fluids - mindless, cliched, retrograde and approval-seeking.

How many people actually focus on actual music - the sounds of the instruments, their expression and their interactions? How many appreciate the passion, skill and imagination of instrumentalists without the visual stimuli of stage performance? How many will seek music that challenges them? How many listen to instrumental music other than old classical?

[Harbal]

mating rituals hinging on the exchange of bodily fluids

Do you mean like spitting at each other

Music is experienced in different ways. If you want to sit back in a comfy chair with your eyes closed and just absorb it then Britney Spears probably isn't the way to go. If you want to leap about on the dance floor, with or without the exchange of body fluids, then Bach won't be coming through the speakers. Any music that gives anybody pleasure is surely OK but, as is often the case with any general rule, there is an exception. Namely, country music. I can't be bothered to try and put into words why I think it but there's something disturbing an sinister about it.

[Rederic]

I don't know anything about John Prine but I do know that the lyrics of most country music is over sentimental and false.

Why comment from ignorance? Go to uTube & listen.

[Steve3007]

One strange thing about American country music, at least from my distant perspective, is that I tend to associate country music with jingoistic, ultra-patriotic, white-supremacist, right-wing tea-party style Republicanism and folk music with the complete opposite - socialism and workers' rights. There seems to be a strong American socialist tradition in folk music, exemplified by people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Even though both genres come from poor working class roots.

Also, I could be wrong as I'm no music historian, but American folk is clearly connected to its Celtic roots whereas country, although it has been imported back to Europe, does seem to be more uniquely American.

[Harbal]

Why comment from ignorance? Go to uTube & listen.

I'm not ignorant of country music in general. If I had to listen to every example of it before I was allowed to comment on it I would never get the time to warn people about it.

One strange thing about American country music, at least from my distant perspective, is that I tend to associate country music with jingoistic, ultra-patriotic, white-supremacist, right-wing tea-party style Republicanism and folk music with the complete opposite - socialism and workers' rights. There seems to be a strong American socialist tradition in folk music, exemplified by people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Even though both genres come from poor working class roots.

I think that comes pretty close to hitting the nail on the head.

[Steve3007]

I think I love country music in kind of the same sense that I love my elderly grandfather despite the shockingly racist, homophobic and misogynist comments that he regularly comes out with. But if you do want to find an example of a country song that exemplifies the whole right-wing Republican good-ole-boy thing, I remember going on holiday to New Orleans a few years back, not long after the invasion of Iraq, and hearing this one on the radio while driving through the southern states:

azlyrics.com/lyrics/darrylworley/haveyo ... otten.html

Fantastic stuff. I remember me and my girlfriend driving through Georgia with the top down roaring with laughter. Happy days.

I also recommend "Drop Kick me Jesus Through the Goalpost of Life".

[Sy Borg]

One strange thing about American country music, at least from my distant perspective, is that I tend to associate country music with jingoistic, ultra-patriotic, white-supremacist, right-wing tea-party style Republicanism and folk music with the complete opposite - socialism and workers' rights. There seems to be a strong American socialist tradition in folk music, exemplified by people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Even though both genres come from poor working class roots.

Also, I could be wrong as I'm no music historian, but American folk is clearly connected to its Celtic roots whereas country, although it has been imported back to Europe, does seem to be more uniquely American.

Large sums of money were sunk into to promoting country music by Henry Ford (a fascist and Nazi sympathiser) in the 20s.

Ford was disturbed by the rise of jazz, which he considered to be decadent, urban Jew music. He tried to counter the trend by funding square dances and competitions to promote what he considered to be more wholesome and traditional form - country music. Others considered jazz to be primitive black music.

The "primitive and decadent Jew and black music" soon evolved into art, while country music still largely remained mired in its conservative roots:

John Coltrane's Alabama (for background on the track: democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa ... 385x492009

For those who really can't do without lyrics, Driva Man by the Max Roach 5tet.

To be fair, country music has its moments - Johnny Cash's Mercy Seat is wonderfully powerful and dark and Hayseed Dixie's cover of Highway to Hell is great.

(These great performances are all on YouTube and I would have provided links but the BB code for YT is glitching).

[LuckyR]

Listening to the Dan right now...

The best of both worlds - both strong music and lyrics. Too often the former gives way to the latter.

Before the 1942-1944 musicians' strike most popular music was instrumental. Since vocalists weren't considered to be musicians they were not affected by the strike and record companies started pushing vocal music, at times a capella dues to lack of available musicians.

Thus ended the era of instrumental music in the west. We've had lurve pushed down our throats (so to speak) ever since - lurve won, lost, wanted, denied, waning, growing, changing, lusted, cheated, ad infinitum. Over and over again, tales of post-apes dealing with the trial and tribulations of mating rituals hinging on the exchange of bodily fluids - mindless, cliched, retrograde and approval-seeking.

How many people actually focus on actual music - the sounds of the instruments, their expression and their interactions? How many appreciate the passion, skill and imagination of instrumentalists without the visual stimuli of stage performance? How many will seek music that challenges them? How many listen to instrumental music other than old classical?

Wow, thanks for the history lesson. Kind of like he Hollywood writer's strike led to the advent of reality TV (since they don't use scripts).

I am not going to be in California for the announced spring Steely Dan concerts, still hoping they have a national tour in the summer.

[Steve3007]

Greta:

Thanks. Interesting. I had read about the extraordinary Nazi sympathies of Henry Ford and some others of his era before. There was a very entertaining book by Bill Bryson focusing on America in the summer of 1927 that talked quite a lot about him.

I still think country music has lots of moments, but I guess that's largely because I'm such a big fan of kitsch. I like the Lee Hazelwood blatantly tongue-in-cheek style of country blended with 60's psychedelia. I suspect that if I listened to modern country music that attempts to take itself too seriously I'd be turned off for the usual reasons.

[Rederic]

How many people actually focus on actual music - the sounds of the instruments, their expression and their interactions? How many appreciate the passion, skill and imagination of instrumentalists without the visual stimuli of stage performance? How many will seek music that challenges them? How many listen to instrumental music other than old classical?

Don't you think of the human voice as an instrument? To use the voice properly & learning how to breathe whilst singing takes years of practice.

-- Updated February 22nd, 2015, 11:51 am to add the following --

Ford was disturbed by the rise of jazz, which he considered to be decadent, urban Jew music. He tried to counter the trend by funding square dances and competitions to promote what he considered to be more wholesome and traditional form - country music. Others considered jazz to be primitive black music.

The "primitive and decadent Jew and black music" soon evolved into art, while country music still largely remained mired in its conservative roots:

You're doing exactly what Henry Ford did, lumping country music & the whole whole genre into some conservative right wing mass. The Dixie Chicks got into a lot of trouble for their stance on the Iraq War.

-- Updated February 22nd, 2015, 11:55 am to add the following --

I'm not ignorant of country music in general. If I had to listen to every example of it before I was allowed to comment on it I would never get the time to warn people about it.

You're doing the Henry Ford thing also!

[Steve3007]

I think I might have been guilty of doing the Henry Ford thing too.

Perhaps we're all made in the image of his Ford-ship. Oh brave new world that has such people in't!

[Sy Borg]

I am not going to be in California for the announced spring Steely Dan concerts, still hoping they have a national tour in the summer.

If you can, see them in the smallest possible venue. I saw them in Sydney's Entertainment Centre, which is a big, echoey stadium and it spoiled the gig for me. I love the Dan's jazzy textures and ideas, but nuances get lost in stadiums and it detracted. The other Dan fans I attended with felt the same.

I still think country music has lots of moments, but I guess that's largely because I'm such a big fan of kitsch.

This, I can relate to

Don't you think of the human voice as an instrument? To use the voice properly & learning how to breathe whilst singing takes years of practice.

I've been a musician on and off for 40 years and played with numerous vocalists so I may have a teensy appreciation of the that fact - along with the reality of my own horrific singing voice . I'm just tired of EVERYTHING being about the vocals and the lyrics ALL THE TIME while the musicians are largely ignored, as I said, just laying down repetitive pavement.

Do you ever listen to instrumental music (other than the old classics and soundtracks)? Bebop? Fusion. Prog. Canterbury Scene. Experimental. RIO? Avant garde?

Ford was disturbed by the rise of jazz, which he considered to be decadent, urban Jew music. He tried to counter the trend by funding square dances and competitions to promote what he considered to be more wholesome and traditional form - country music. Others considered jazz to be primitive black music.

The "primitive and decadent Jew and black music" soon evolved into art, while country music still largely remained mired in its conservative roots:

You're doing exactly what Henry Ford did, lumping country music & the whole whole genre into some conservative right wing mass. The Dixie Chicks got into a lot of trouble for their stance on the Iraq War.

Actually, I'm not, but I'd sacrificed clarity while attempting brevity. Basically, I was noting the history and the aftermath.

My point was that country music - touted by those who claimed superiority and greater sophistication - remained mired to musical conservatism and populism almost a century hence - precious little progression or variation of time signatures, tonalities, harmonies, textures and instrumentation.

Meanwhile jazz, derided as primitive at the time, grew into a wide ranging, often highly sophisticated and challenging, art music with great musical subtlety, performed with peerless mastery - from the simplicity of trad and Dixie, to swing, bop, hard bop, free, experimental, fusion, world music. Jazz moved far from its populist roots, played with a sense of adventure, passion and intellect with little consideration for money.

While parsing musical conservatism and progressiveness is often fairly straightforward, it's hard to know what "conservative" means any more in a political sense, other than a loose "tribal" affiliation. The Dixie Chicks seemed to undergo a near-Orwellian ordeal for daring to raise some obvious truths publicly in a climate of "doublethink". I was strongly opposed to the Iraq war on both moral and strategic grounds and I considered that to be the conservative view.