Brad Paisley and Keith Urban Win Early ACM Awards

Any reason for early awards ceremony given to BP?? Me thinkst thou industry had allowed King BP to accept on an early release statement of “you da bomb”. Any opposers???

Will there be any ACM Awards left to give out by Sunday?

Does it really matter?

Stoked for the new Dale Watson!!

Since Carrie was brought up in this newsbite, I just drove back from Kansas after visiting my daughter and SIL, which means I traveled Missouri, Illinois, Indiana but getting back to Kentucky. I would scan constantly for country radio stations for the long drive. Everytime, I heard “I Told You So”, it was not the Carrie version but the Carrie and Randy Travis version with the DJ saying this duet was racing up the charts. Thought I’d share that for it’s surprised me each time.

It’s either a tip of the cap to ol Dale Watson or it’s an April Fools joke, but either way, I dig the “Ameripolitan” tag on the logo at the top of the page!

Even though I was there, that Chuck Mead video is good stuff. Can’t wait for that release in May.

The Dale Watson album is definitely good stuff as well. I like Watson’s voice in the trucker context more than Aaron Tippin’s and there are some great originals on it rather than a collection of covers.

We’re back to “boring” country music today, but we might have to revisit Ameripolitan for the Dale Watson trucker album release.

Boy, it really bothers you that country music is broader than you wish it were, eh, Kelly?

I was sent the MP3 from Dale and can’t wait to hear the rest of the album either.

Jon, I am bothered by bad music as I see it, regardless of its genre or lame sub-genre. If you were to see my Ipod, you would see that I have a great appreciation for many artists who inhabit various points under the “Country Umbrella”. Isnt there another commenter that you can pester?

Kelly, if the issue is that you’re bothered by bad music as you see it, why frame your comments not in those terms but in terms of what is and ain’t country? I couldn’t care less about what you think rocks or sucks; it’s those comments and notions that I disagree with, like here, where you set up a dandy little straw man to complain about.

Ben, if you think that agreeing with some not very informed and not very well expressed notion of what country music is is the only criterion for evaluating whether country music matters to someone, you’re wrong. It’s exactly because country music matters to me that I don’t like to see a cramped, crippled version of it served up as the whole thing, regardless of who does it. Equating the whole of country music with only the parts you like. Treating only the parts of country music that you happen to like as the whole thing is a bad idea.

Jon: Its not a matter of merely good or bad. It is also a matter of country or not country.

Matt: Here is the thing. I don’t like Lady GaGa, and she is not country. I do like Bruce Springsteen, but no matter how many times CMT plays him, he’s not country.

Who’s Lady GaGa?

The point isn’t that it’s all relative, it’s that a good deal of it is; that’s why I called the “any act can play just about any kind of music and call it a type of country” line a straw man. These arguments don’t arise over Beyonce or Karlheinz Stockhausen or Li’l Wayne or Mei Han’s Red Chamber. They arise over artists who work in the country music context (from where their material originates to where it’s recorded to who it’s recorded for to where it’s performed to where it’s aired to who writes about it and where), and who are widely considered to be country, but whose music violates someone’s personal sense of what the boundaries of country music ought to be. (More often than not, it’s also music that the person in question doesn’t like; folks generally seem to be a little more flexible when it comes to music that they do like.) And I just think that the history of country music, with its broad range of sounds and styles and its constant incorporation of new ones, says that if you’re going to argue against that contextual consensus, you ought to bring something with more meat than you get in “well, I guess you think you can call anything country” or “it doesn’t sound country to me.”

No one considers Lady GaGa country–that’s the point. If I don’t have to debate that Lady GaGa is not country, why should I have to debate that Bruce Springsteen is not country?