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Hey, guys. Today I’m going to talk about country music. As somebody who comes from the country, it’s a genre that will always be near and dear to me, but as a young liberal in the city, I've found that quite a few of my peers are put off by it. If there’s one genre that many young people reject, on the whole, it’s Country music. And I understand that, if you’ve only been exposed to the largely conservative and heavily commercialized songs that make up mainstream country, it might leave a negative impression.
However, the alternative music community has become increasingly country-fied as of late, and it’s starting to turn heads. Whether it’s Big Thief, Mitski, or MJ Lenderman, it seems like slide guitars and twangy voices are popping up everywhere. While alternative music has always taken some influence from Country, this influence has become incredibly prevalent over the past couple of years.
(Cowboy Junkies, photo from IMDb)
First, let’s talk about history. Country music, at its core, was always outsider music. It’s a genre pioneered by Black Americans, and which has historically represented the working class. Country’s image as a white, conservative, and normalizing force didn’t truly take hold until the early 2000s, as it became swept up in the wave of patriotism that followed 9/11. There’s a lot more to be said here, but quite frankly I don’t have the time. I’d absolutely recommend doing your own research, though, because the subject is fascinating.
The heart of Country is the very landscape from which it takes its name: the hundred-mile stretches of green and yellow, rolling hills and serene quiet, where the land meets the sky with nothing in between. The music is there to capture some of this beauty.
Some Country music, especially in the 1960s and 70s, took influence from the American Southern Gothic literary tradition. Writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor had their counterparts in the dark, succinct tales of Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt, among others. Rural storytellers felt a need to preserve the light left by the lonely, lost, and outcast, many of them gone from the world, unable to connect to the communities into which they were born. Their spirit was carried into the 1990’s by Mazzy Star and Cowboy Junkies.
Alternately, there were the hippies who found peace in the countryside; who left behind the busy, divided cities in search of inner harmony, a place where the soul could see itself clearly. Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, and many more made their music and left their mark on Wilco and Gillian Welch, as well as the rest of the Alt-Country scene of the early 2000s.
(Lucinda Williams, photo from Britannica)
There’s a great deal more, from the beautiful dreariness of Lucinda Williams to Conor Oberst’s lonely folk trips, as well as Nancy Sinatra’s wildly dissonant “Lightning's Girl” (Nancy Sinatra invented heavy metal btw, but that’s a topic for another time). If you’re a fan of alternative music who’s looking to get into Country, I’ve attached below a very short playlist to help you get started.
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