Out of the Country
fiddle: toy: manipulate manually or in one's mind or imagination.
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I have just started reading In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music, a series of travelogues and biographies about the people and places that originate and sustain "authentic" country music.
Talking about Garth Brooks, an artist held up to represent the New or Hot or Real country music of the time, the author says, "This is, after all, someone who claims he reads all his fan mail and who writes music that, well, sounds like it." *turns knife*
According to author Dawidoff, most contemporary country music is at best a nostalgic, privileged, innocuous nod to the older stuff. At worst, it is mass-produced candy to rot your head. He isn't simply nostalgicizing the past because he admits a number of contemporary performers, mostly outside the Nashville glitter industry, that carry on the tradition of a purer country -- for example, Iris Dement. He alludes to the fact that earlier artists had rougher, working class lives to draw their inspiration from; the music wasn't just a passtime but was urgent. The lyrics were both more personal and distinctive, not hallmarkish or simply cutesy.
I wonder: Is Dawidoff's observation about country -- and music in general -- true? If so, does the fault belong to an industry of star vehicles and consumable singles where once there were more developed artists and fully conceived albums? Is it that music is now more often about entertainment and escape than it is about experience and the individual?
Is it that we are primarily judging music as a whole by what is most readily commercially available and that we should be looking at the fringes of musical production for the stuff of equal value? And even if that is so, have our more traditional genres mutated utterly? It's so hard to find music that matters, maybe, but whose fault is that?
And is it possible that the kind of gritty, folksy integrity of the country legends that Dawidoff applauds is just not relevant any more? Or does the more fundamental question involve a cultural eclipse of a more rural or more working class perspective at all?
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I have just started reading In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music, a series of travelogues and biographies about the people and places that originate and sustain "authentic" country music.
Talking about Garth Brooks, an artist held up to represent the New or Hot or Real country music of the time, the author says, "This is, after all, someone who claims he reads all his fan mail and who writes music that, well, sounds like it." *turns knife*
According to author Dawidoff, most contemporary country music is at best a nostalgic, privileged, innocuous nod to the older stuff. At worst, it is mass-produced candy to rot your head. He isn't simply nostalgicizing the past because he admits a number of contemporary performers, mostly outside the Nashville glitter industry, that carry on the tradition of a purer country -- for example, Iris Dement. He alludes to the fact that earlier artists had rougher, working class lives to draw their inspiration from; the music wasn't just a passtime but was urgent. The lyrics were both more personal and distinctive, not hallmarkish or simply cutesy.
I wonder: Is Dawidoff's observation about country -- and music in general -- true? If so, does the fault belong to an industry of star vehicles and consumable singles where once there were more developed artists and fully conceived albums? Is it that music is now more often about entertainment and escape than it is about experience and the individual?
Is it that we are primarily judging music as a whole by what is most readily commercially available and that we should be looking at the fringes of musical production for the stuff of equal value? And even if that is so, have our more traditional genres mutated utterly? It's so hard to find music that matters, maybe, but whose fault is that?
And is it possible that the kind of gritty, folksy integrity of the country legends that Dawidoff applauds is just not relevant any more? Or does the more fundamental question involve a cultural eclipse of a more rural or more working class perspective at all?