(What can we learn from Country Music?)
By http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7716
Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard’s Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new.
A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I’m talking about when it comes to music is a certain ability to see the forest through the trees.
From that 30,000-foot perspective, the answer to what’s new in country turned out to be (as with most genres of popular music in the last couple of decades): not much.
Indeed, what seems odd for an old fogey like me is how much a country radio station these days sounds like a mainstream old FM rock station.
Rock music, from its emergence in the 1950s until the rise of punk in the late 1970s, was primarily an Afro-Anglo-Celtic mélange, heavy on blues and twang. The British Invaders, for example, wanted to sound like they were from http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2618 and ZZ Top of Texas were huge.In the New Wave era, though, white rockers such as Johnny Ramone started to disentangle rock from its roots in the blues and in Scotch-Irish folk, while country has happily stayed planted in this rich American soil.
Why did the 20th century see such sweeping changes in musical styles, while people in the 21st century still seem fairly satisfied with the genres that emerged in those few tumultuous decades after WWII?
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/songs_of_our_soil/