Alt-Country vs. Mainstream Country?!
Question: I see a strange and disturbing similarity between the book "Brave New World" and modern music. It's all the same, repetitive crap, nothing new, nothing inspiring, it makes me sick when I hear this stuff. It's almost like they are trying to kill any music taste. What gives?
Answers: I see a strange and disturbing similarity between the book "Brave New World" and modern music. It's all the same, repetitive crap, nothing new, nothing inspiring, it makes me sick when I hear this stuff. It's almost like they are trying to kill any music taste. What gives?
I couldn't agree with your thinking and sentiments on this same subject more!
Touche! Right to the heart of the point!
It's been like this in Nashville and Country Music recording circles for years!
I mean, in the mid-1950's, with the advent of what became known as Rock 'n' Roll music, taking country music off the radio waves all over America; Country Music execs and producers Chet Atkins, Don Law and Owen Bradley got together and decided to see how they could tailor country music recordings to sound like the pop-stuff that was coming out at the time, and still not change the music so much it was no longer Country Music. They were just trying to sell records and keep Country Music alive back then! I don't fault them at all for this action taken!
So, they came up with the Country Pop up-town "Nashville Sound" Country Music that did real well, and kept Country Music alive when Country most definitely was NOT "cool!".
The first few years of the Nashville Sound in Country Music was fine, there was all sorts of different styles of country music represented on any one album! Everything from Big Band covers, to Latin covers, to pop or whatever! They tried all sorts of different sounds and threw them up against the radio wall, to see which would sell, which would stick. Then, the next time they'd try the same approach on a couple songs on the next album, maybe fine-tune the arrangements a bit more, try something a little different. It was all good, because there was freedom to try whatever sold, during those early years of the Nashville Sound!
But, after about 10 years, after this Nashville Sound pop-country had ran its course and pushed the envelope of Country Music about as far as it could be stretched, the execs in the business end of Country were making so much money on the Nashville Sound, that they forced all artists who wanted to record hit songs in Nashville, into that same mold!
Twenty years later, they were still churning out the same Nashville Sound music off the Nashville assembly lines, that they'd created back in 1957-58!
Frankly, I loved the Nashville Sound Country Music!
But, I also loved Bluegrass and traditional, simple country music and real Honky-tonk country too! Thank God we still had Buck Owens leading the charge with pure honky-tonk country emanating out of Bakersfield, churning out #1 hit after #1 hit for Buck, during all these same years!
These other forms of country music had been pushed by the wayside for years, by the Nashville Sound entrenched country music recording industry. All the songs out of Nashville during those years, with very few exceptions, had that same Nashville Sound,...sound!
It took Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson to take the bull by its horns and demand they get a chance to record their songs they way they heard them, Not in the Nashville Sound formula mold. That started the big hits in the Outlaw movement about 1974.
By 1994 Nashville was still beating that Outlaw Music horse to death! Did the same thing to outlaw country music as they'd done with the Nashville Sound country music!
By now its the Alt-Country, vs Mainstream, and mainstream is so far left of simple traditional real COUNTRY music, it's pathetic!
All the songs sound the same, same predictable progressions, same rock beats, same old-same old, year in- year out!
I'm so sick of that sound I could puke it!
That horse was beat plumb to death, flat dead by the mid 1980's! So why and WHAT are they still cranking this crap out today for? You know? Go figure!
How do you tell the difference between alternate or mainstream Country Music of today and pop or rock? Sounds just about the same diff, to me!
They've beat this Outlaw/Southern Fried Rock/Alt /mainstream crap, plumb down under the ground, right into its grave! I just wish they'd wake-up and see its in the grave and leave it there to die!
It's time to move on folks! That's how I see it!
That's why I gravitate to artists like George Strait or Ricky Skaggs, Allison Krauss, who stick more to traditional country roots and sounds with their music!
I stay with Merle Haggard, Alan Jackson, Randy Travis and George Jones to keep in the center of that simple, raw traditional country sound I so long to hear on the airwaves again!
I think this is happening to country today, because the execs in New York and the East Coast or in Hollywood, whom know nothing about real country music, have choke-hold control of the country music recording industry in Nashville! They are all a bunch of young folks, or a bunch of old rock music hippie hold-outs and they keep all the old traditional country music and the Nashville Sound country music off the airwaves.
If our current crop of young country artists can't hear the pioneers music, that set the course and paved the way for them, then how are they going to know what REAL country music IS?
We've lost touch with our past, our musical country roots and true heritage. Once we've lost our roots, we quickly loose our way and the slide from the fuel, right into the flames in the hottest part of the fire, is very fast!
It's like the country label execs and some of their artists are purposly trying to blur the lines between real traditional Country music and all other kinds of music, by keeping choke-hold control of the radio airwaves and album sales in the same move! Its like they purposely want there to be no boundaries between any genres of music, so you can just record anything!
Problem is, they are in Nashville, country music recording capitol of the world! The country they call country, ain't country music at all anymore!
In my mind, we need it ALL broadcast all the time, so all country artists of any age, can record new music the way they hear it, they way they wrote it, and get radio airtime nationwide!
That way, all those country music pioneers that have passed on before the rest of us; DJ's today can still spin thier recordings and the young artists in country music can hear a whole bunch of new writing styles to work from, than being stuck in this Alt or mainstream rocked-up crap rut, they've been relegated into by thier record labels!
Maybe the millions of us older country music fans out here whom long to turn on the high watt FM Country Music radio stations; maybe we want to hear a fav Patsy Cline hit, or a Jim Reeves hit, just the way it sounded when we first heard it on the radio years ago! You know?
IF we find we can't hear any of the older country music anymore, maybe we ought to boycott listening to Country radio, keep our country music radios shut off! Stop buying this rocked-up crap they call mainstream country music today, and let the voice of millions of us older Country music fans be heard enmasse!
Maybe we need to go in, take the CEO jobs at the major record labels and fire a whole raft of producers and people whom pump out this endless, mindless raft of rocked-up crap out of Nashville every day!
Man...I just don't get it! Just because you put a rock fiddler into the mix or a phase-shifted Steel Guitar mixed in so that you can't really tell its a steel guitar playing, don't make the song a true COUNTRY song! Who do these cats in Nashville running things, think they're fooling?
Well, I don't know what good there is, with anything I've written herein. But, I surely agree with you completely on this issue!
Thank you for your question, which gave me a good way to vent some of the frustration I've had about modern country music for some long many years now!
Sincerely,
Jazzme 109
Commercially popular music has ALWAYS appealed to the lowest common denominator. The instances when popular music and quality music have converged are the exception rather than the rule. That being said, quality music that covneys an artistic expression has always been available, but you have to look for it. There are lots of great country (since this is the country forum) records recorded every year. Many of them are now classified as Americana, Roots, etc. since they don't conform to the current image/definition of country music, which is POP music with a twang and a pair of Tony Lamas. Dwight Yoakum still records country music, as do the Flatlanders, Dale Watson, Jim Lauderdale, and many others.