Hacienda Brothers’ Chris Gaffney Succumbed to Liver Cancer

The piece on Martina McBride is a bit ill-conceived. He mentions two artists (Gretchen Wilson & Miranda Lambert) as a wave of raucous, redneck women. Gretchen Wilson’s success died and Miranda only recently got a taste of radio success, while singers like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift seem to be garnering the most success. If anything, Martina fits better in that crowd. Unless there’s something obvious I’m missing…

The Ryan Adams comments just prove what a farce Alt.country is.

But, Matt, everyone isn’t like Ryan Adams!

Loved the clip about Toby talking about Willie. Thanks!

Linda, if you live in an urban area like NYC, even if you like country, you still must say ‘I hate it’ to friends. It’s sad but true. Hell, I lived the exact farce before just saying ‘what the hell, it’s what I like and where I want to work.’

Good Records in Dallas has a great lineup of talent from Denton and Dallas on Saturday. All day, all genres. It will be great!

Martina rode her particular wave until it hit the shore. I’ve always regarded Martina as better than her material, probably good enough to handle more traditional country music, had she so desired. Unfortunately, she went for the slick pop productions and the “screeching diva” route. Don’t shed any tears for her, though. She’s raked in plenty of loot

There isn’t a single “raucous redneck woman” getting significant airplay in country music right now.

Actually, the only three women who are getting consistent airplay are Carrie, Taylor and Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland.

Martina’s problem is radio is incapable of finding room for more than three female artists at a time, one of the main reasons country radio’s a bore and a chore to listen to.

So, Ben do you think that Lady Antebellum is worse than Rascal Flatts? Better? The same? Not “country music?”

Well Matt B., I haven’t listened to their whole cd or anything, but from their single they are certainly not country music and therefore whether they or Rascal Flatts sits undeservingly atop the country music heap, it’s a loss for country music.

Mike Parker, if you want to hear the latest gaffes from RF, check out “Bob That Head” and “It’s Not Supposed To Go Like That.” And I’m still trying to figure out how the video they came up with for their latest single, “Every Day,” actually fits the song.

Brady, I think I’ll pass… but thanks all the same.

By the way, I noticed LadyA’s CD is up at CMT’s Music Leak or whatever they’re calling it now. I’m through a couple songs and my opinion of them isn’t getting any better.

Lady Antebellum overtaking Rascal Flatts? I thought Trick Pony had it all over everyone in the contemporary group category. Then Heidi had throat problems and it all seemed things went into the $hitcan from there. Time will tell with LA if they can rise to the top.

“Country music” does not have a single definition. It will constantly grow and evolve.

We can’t, on one hand, complain about the state of country music, while, on the other, we dismiss it altogether.

Those of us who truly care about country music should be good stewards of it. And that means not only protecting its traditions but protecting its future.

We can’t do that if we’re not willing to accept change.

The change train is coming whether we’re on board or not. And if we fail to recognize that the genre is expanding (all genres are expanding, by the way), we’re going to find ourselves relegated to a very small, fringe circle. And we’re going to find that we’ve ceded the genre in its entirety to the corporate entities and the low-information fans.

I think we should be VERY careful about declaring that an artist “is not country.”

Lady Antebellum may not sound like what you’re used to, but musically, their record can only be called country. If you wanted to give it a different label, you would literally have to go out an create a new genre and re-draw musical boundaries.

To just say, “that’s not country” is to define the term within a very narrow framework, and based on an arbitrary reference point.

If you start with Hank Sr., you could easily claim that Waylon isn’t country. If you start at Waylon, you could easily dismiss Hank Sr. as more of a folk singer, a hillbilly icon.

Both Waylon and Hank exist (in their prime) within very different cultural environments. They sound different, look different, and sing about different things. But they are both country, and what makes them so is only partially about the music they make. It is, at least equally, about how that music is perceived within the society, and what it means to its audience.

If we were going on pure sonic principles alone, we’d have to be willing to include every folk singer since Jimmie Rodgers under the guise of “country music” and I just don’t think we’re willing to do that.

That, of course, begs the question of what makes a folk singer a folk singer, as opposed to a country singer. You could, after all, have Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard both sitting on stage, playing only thier acoustic guitar, each singing a song about the plight of the working man, and the two would sound (voices aside) rather similar in so many ways.

Society has changed since their time. Is Lady A country? Every way you look at their record, the answer is that you have to classify them there, even if you don’t want to.

No, it’s not the same as Waylon.

But what we have to remember is that we don’t have to give up the past to embrace the future. We should be working to bring together these elements of the broader country music genre, not fragment them by splitting off into groups that think the genre is absolutely one way or absolutely another.

Jim,

Well put and right on the money.

LadyA is definitely country. As sure as the Eagles are country- even though I wonder if the Eagles would classify themselves that way…

I am disgusted by Ryan Adams’ comment. I didn’t know anything about him, just heard a few songs, and I never realized he was such a jerk. If he simply meant, as someone suggested, that he hated country music in its current form, he could have very easily have said as much. In fact, if that’s what he meant, he would be required to make that point clear. Otherwise, to me, there’s no other way to take his words, but at face value.

Brady,

Interesting point. But I think the corporate entities are all that really have the power at this point. They’re the ones who put the CD in the rack, so to speak. I think personally, we all have our own definitions of what kind of country music we like, but in the end it’s entities like Clear Channel that make the broad distinctions.

I think the classifications within the genres are more important and definable. Americana, Alt-Country, Folk, Bluegrass, Pop-Country, etc. are all valid sub-categories of country music. In a broad sense, I couldn’t care less about pop-country- but that doesn’t mean it isn’t country.

Also, these aren’t either/or type distinctions. The Bon Jovi album, while supposed to be country, really wasn’t. Shouldn’t it be considered pop-country AND pop-rock AND giant piece of crap?

With electronic distribution, I’m hoping the genre shoe-horning can die a little. Just type in an artist and there it is. Many artists I expect to find under country come up under rock. If I was still walking around the Tower Records, there’d be a ton of good country music I’d be missing out on.

Y’know all of this ‘is it or isn’t it’ stuff that I seemingly got started w/r/t Lady Antebellum, I just realized, I hate genre labels.

The whole genre stuff was created by corporations.

Amoeba validates though, and are you really going to go to Amoeba and not buy anything?

“Jim, so when something can’t be placed in another genre, it should be called country?”

Now Brady–first of all, don’t straw-man me, because that is not what I said.

That makes it sound like I’m implying that the genre is a dumping ground for “everything else,” which isn’t the case at all.

But I think I know where you’re going with this line of argument–that “country music” has specific boundaries, and that music which exists outside of those boundaries cannot possibly, by definition, be country music, without fundamentally re-evaluating the term.

I don’t entirely disagree with that train of thought. I do admit that every genre has certain boundaries and constraints. But I would offer that those boundaries and constraints are not static.

(At this point, I’m wondering how long ’till we see a comment saying that I’m over thinking all of this.)

Honestly, the best example I can give here is to cite physics.

As beings of mass, every particle that is “us,” must occupy some portion of space. That is a constant.

If genres are space, and musical compositions are individual collections of mass, each composition must then fall within a genre (or multiple genres). This is the same constant.

In that sense, we are dealing, in every case, with a process of elimination. It is, in fact, the only way we can ever accurately assign a genre tag.

Why don’t we call a country song a rap song? We look at the country song and we see that it does not contain elements which we associate with rap. So we dismiss that tag from the equation and move on to the next, until we have a label that reflects the composition’s make-up.

Of course, at times a composition will call from various genres. In those cases, we can either use multiple tags (e.g. “Rap-Rock”) to indicate the crossover, or simply label the music based on that which is most fundamentally prominent.

We do the later all the time. A country record might have elements of Southern Rock, but we don’t define that record’s artist as exclusively a “Southern Rock/Country” artist.

If we were going to try to label every album based on every influence we were able to find, we would end up with:

A) REALLY long genre tags, and
B) Genre tags that are so specific that they no longer serve a purpose.

Country music as we know it (no matter how we define it) would cease to exist. Willie Nelson and Waylon wouldn’t be in the same genre. Neither would Chris LeDoux and Garth Brooks. Neither would Lee Ann Womack and LeAnn Rimes.

And this is why I brought up the idea of the arbitrary reference point. Because it’s easy to say that something “isn’t country” when you get to define where country music begins. But that just isn’t accurate. Everyone in the world would say that Hank Sr. is country, and everyone in the world (ok, everyone in the world relevant to this discussion) would say that Waylon is country.

If we look at a record and it isn’t pop, and it isn’t rock, and it isn’t soul, etc, we keep going until it finds a home. It has to. A musical composition can not NOT have a genre, any more than a human being cannot occupy a portion of space. It’s impossible.

The question is only how specific we want to be when determining what that genre is.

And how do we make that determination? It is a process of elimination which is based on various criteria. Sonic properties is one criteria. Social context is another (and, I would offer, more important) criteria. We look at whether or not the artist considers herself country. We look at where the music fits in a historical context and in a contemporary context. There are many things that factor, most at a subconscious or societal level, in to our evaluation.

“That’s basically stating that we should continue to let the corporate entities define the genre for us.”

That would only be true if you were willing to say that the corporate entities in question have driven the music in a certain, concrete, and absolute direction.

Despite our knee-jerk reaction, I just am not sure it’s that simple. We could say that pop-country radio breeds pop-country artists, but then we have to answer the question of why “pop-country” came about in the first place.

I’m not willing to take so much from decades of artists as to say that they didn’t make choices based primarily on musical motives. I believe that music evolves organically, partially to meet the needs and demands of society (which, in turn, will translate to commercial viability).

If country music had never evolved, we would not have much of an audience. For one thing, the music would have long ago turned stale and boring, and for another, we don’t live the same way we did in 1925, think the same way we did in 1925, or believe the same things we believed in 1925.

So why in the hell should our music sound the same as it did in 1925?

Lady Antebellum, and every other contemporary country artist, is a product of convergence, both inside the genre and in culture-at-large.

My comment about not ceding to corporate entities is about realizing that what was and what is can co-exist. I love Hank Sr.. There are many more like me. As a community we have the ability to make sure that his legacy is respected, and that his music remains a part of the broader genre. But if we abandon that broader genre, we’re just starting a schism that can never be undone.

We should not be so narrowly focused that we think the old and the new cannot co-exist. In fact, it’s our duty to make sure that they do so.

“That’s not necessarily so. To declare Bon Jovi’s record as not country doesn’t narrowly define the framework.”

But the litmus test is different for Bon Jovi than it is for Lady A. Musically (just musically), BJ’s record is more country than a lot of “country” records I’ve heard this year. But the band has an entire career as a rock act. They know they aren’t country, and they even said that it isn’t a country record. Their fans aren’t country, and probably don’t like country in most of its styles.

Many pundits tried to make the album more interesting by saying that it was country, but that’s just a tough sell.

As far as Sugarland, it’s tough, man. You’re not going to find a more country song than “Stay”–but if you go back and listen to Jennifer Nettles (solo), you’ll see she’s really not that country oriented.

It’s a good (and fair) question. I don’t know the answer right now.

All members from Sugarland were NOT country prior to their group forming and what they created collectively fitting the country audience. Many would say the same thing for Lady A and any other act that ‘blurs’ genre boundaries

I want Matt C. to expound upon his comment that alt-country is a farce. Ryan may be a poseur (who occasionally makes some great tunes), but he doesn’t represent the loosely nit “genre.”

God Bless Chris Gaffney and Family. Our thoughts & prayers down in Texas are with you.

Jim, I think the physics correlation overly complicates the issue and it doesn’t really hold up. Space more directly correlates to music in general, whereas genres are an arbitrary classification that can expand and contract and can morph into something different.

I understand what you’re getting at, though, and it’d probably be better pictured as one big circle called “Music” and a bunch of concentric circles representing the genres, each with loosely definable properties.

A musical composition can not NOT have a genre, any more than a human being cannot occupy a portion of space. It’s impossible.

Why isn’t it possible for a musical composition to not have a genre? It’s an arbitrary classification, not natural law. All the genres we have today didn’t exist before 1900. As the circles that define country, pop, and rock overlap more and more, how are we going to continue to define the music? The boundaries are going to blur until genres are synonmyous with each other.

I believe that music evolves organically, partially to meet the needs and demands of society (which, in turn, will translate to commercial viability).

That statement seems to ignore the existence of focus groups and the fact that labels are corporations that must turn a profit. If the focus groups and marketing data says the money is in slicked up pop, then what’s to keep country and pop from becoming one and the same? If an artist in another genre sees that country music is the most profitable, why not crossover and bring their sound with them and call themselves country? There are plenty of singers greedy for fame who will deliver whatever the record labels, and in turn, the target demographic, want. Is that organic? Perhaps in a business sense, but not in an artistic sense.

what he said.

Brady Wrote: Why isn’t it possible for a musical composition to not have a genre? It’s an arbitrary classification,

But it’s an arbitrary classification that facilitates a social function. I mean, a similar argument to the one you’re making is the argument that gender is an arbitrary classification.

Technically, gender doesn’t exist. It is not defined by sex but by a role within a culture.

Technically, “country music” doesn’t exist. It cannot be defined solely by its parts, just as a person with male genitalia cannot necessarily be defined as a “man”.

Anyway, the point is that we all have a gender. and even if we were to try to reject the concept of gender, the culture would force a label upon us. It’s the same with genres. Every song must have a genre because that is how we perceive music. Without that system of order the musical universe no longer makes sense to us.

Brady Wrote: That statement seems to ignore the existence of focus groups and the fact that labels are corporations that must turn a profit. If the focus groups and marketing data says the money is in slicked up pop, then what’s to keep country and pop from becoming one and the same?

What focus groups can do is narrow down the field of potential artists based on the demands of the market. That’s all.

Bray Wrote: If an artist in another genre sees that country music is the most profitable, why not crossover and bring their sound with them and call themselves country?

It will not work. You will get intermittent success. Max.

Brady Wrote: There are plenty of singers greedy for fame who will deliver whatever the record labels, and in turn, the target demographic, want. Is that organic? Perhaps in a business sense, but not in an artistic sense.

But that doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t work. Kid Rock has been trying to get played on country radio for three or four years. There are countless examples.

I guarantee you that no one at Mercury sat down with Sugarland and said, “hey, you should make a record that sounds like Juice Newton meets R.E.M..” If you go back and listen to Jennifer Nettle’s pre-Sugarland work, it’s LESS country than the first two albums.

Jason Aldean (example) is a product of the music environment he grew up in. Has he been influenced by his label? Of course. But you don’t get a horse from a chicken egg.

Edit: I posted this on the wrong article, oops.

Anyway, the point is that we all have a gender. and even if we were to try to reject the concept of gender, the culture would force a label upon us. It’s the same with genres. Every song must have a genre because that is how we perceive music. Without that system of order the musical universe no longer makes sense to us.

All I know is a man is born with a tallywacker and the most common definition of gender equates it with sex which isn’t exactly arbitrary.

Before the existence of recording equipment, throughout history, how was music classified? What doesn’t make sense to me is when albums like Raising Sand are classified as country. Texas Music/Red Dirt/OKOM isn’t necessarily classifiable at the moment other than it comes from a certain region, yet it continues to exist.

What focus groups can do is narrow down the field of potential artists based on the demands of the market. That’s all.

They narrow potential artists based on a set of criteria that isn’t even related to music (looks for one) and target a particular demographic that isn’t representative of the entire “market.” Focus groups demonstrate the pursuit of profit, not organic artistic evolution.

But that doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t work.

So every artist is doing things the way they want to? I believe it was your Joanna Cotten article that you mentioned that her label wanted her to compromise her sound. She didn’t do it, but you don’t think there are artists who haven’t?