The Country Music Station Plays Soft (Part Two)

There's something to be said for broadcast. I've just returned from a very long trip across many of the United States, which involved a few bouts of extended driving for the first time in nearly 10 years. The interesting thing about that wasn't the driving itself, but the fact that when you drive long distances and don't really plan ahead to bring CDs or an iPod (and the requisite cords), all you have to listen to is the radio. So this was the first time in quite a while that I got to listen to mainstream radio, particularly country music radio. Back when I was about 17 (and a cool jazz musician), you showed how hip you were by saying you liked every kind of music except country. When I was about 20, it became OK to like certain country artists, mainly just Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. But man, I've reached a point (as an old man of all of 26 years) where I really like mainstream, poppy, overproduced country music, not just the "authentic" stuff grudgingly accepted by northeastern hipsters. (By the way, who's working on researching the uneasy relationship between white northeastern hipsters and bluegrass? That topic seems like a goldmine.)

As Cath and I have often discussed, country singers are pretty much always "better" singers than rock and pop singers. A big part of this has to do with different conventions among genres. In country music (obvious exceptions notwithstanding), a division of labor between writer and singer is pretty accepted as a way of life. And this doesn't hurt at all the process of attaching authenticity in a performance. Read my old professor Aaron Fox's book Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture about how the concept of "voice" is prized in country music--not necessarily linked with notions of authorship the way it is in rock. A big part of, for example, Bob Dylan's authenticity is the fact that we know he wrote all of his songs and therefore "feels" them in a certain true way that, for example, Britney Spears does not. (I don't necessarily subscribe to these positions, by the way, I'm just repeating received wisdom. Plus, Dylan only wrote all of the songs that he didn't crib from 19th century American poets or Japanese writers. But that's another story altogether.)

So anyway. What does this mean for listening to country music? Well, it's very hard to be a good singer. And it's very hard to be a good songwriter. And it's even harder to be both of those things. (In the pop music traditions I usually deal with, who are the examples of really great songwriters who at the same time are great singers? I can think of Lennon and McCartney, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Prince, Thom Yorke. Who else am I forgetting?) So in country music, you can outsource the writing to someone who's a great writer, outsource the singing to someone who's a great singer--which you can't do in rock because of the genre's notions of authenticity. So the end result is that the songs in general are a lot more pleasant to the ear, being both interestingly written and expertly sung.

So it's nice to listen to country music sometimes. It's easy to forget that country music is one of the most popular kinds of musics not only in the U.S. but in the world. (I don't know the statistics these days, but they used to say that the two most popular musics in the world were Indian film music and American country. Hip-hop may have moved up a bit, but rock is WAY in the back.) The country music station plays soft in the northeast, perhaps. But it's out there just about everywhere else.