In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Tom Petty had a few things to say about the state of contemporary country music, and on Monday, blogger Peter Cooper took Petty to task for his remarks.
I'm going to come to Petty's defense on this one. Cooper seems to have missed the part of the interview in which Petty said, "I'm sure there are people playing country that are doing it well, but they're just not getting the attention that the $#!+tier stuff gets." That is, in a nutshell, the same issue that Cooper seems to be pointing out: that country, as a genre, is not the problem. It's the Nashville Machine that is the problem. There are great country singers and songwriters everywhere, including within The Machine. However, within The Machine, songwriters write in committees and in cubicles and on a schedule, churning out sometimes hundreds of songs in a year, deliberately trying to stumble upon the formula for a hit. Most of these professional songwriters have probably never lifted a shovel in their
lives, but they can pull trite blue-collar bromides off of their bromide-a-day
calendars, string them together with a rhyming dictionary, and generate something that may appeal to the people who actually do lift shovels for a living. Singers rarely sing their own songs in The Machine, or if they do, they sing songs that were co-written with professional songwriters. The Machine records and produces songs amazingly quickly-- they have to, because studios in Nashville are so frickin' expensive. The Machine uses the same studio musicians who play on every other hit Nashville record-- also a product of valuing expediency over uniqueness and creativity. The Machine AutoTunes the crap out of the singer's voice, in part because it saves them the trouble of actually producing it the right way. The Machine packages up the song and ships it off to Clear Channel, who owns the lion's share of major-market FM contemporary country stations in the nation.
I was raised on country radio, so I can testify to the fact that it wasn't always like that. I first started becoming really aware of popular country in the early 80's, when artists like Barbara Mandrell and Willie and Waylon and Michael Martin Murphey and Dolly Parton ruled the airwaves. There were a lot of singers back then who didn't write their own songs, but there were also a lot of them who did, and the ones who didn't would pull from the catalogs of singer/songwriters like Rodney Crowell or Sonny Throckmorton.
In the late 90's, Mutt Lange brought the same over-production techniques that had made juggernauts out of Def Leppard, The Cars, Billy Ocean, and Bryan Adams into country music, via Shania Twain. It's hard to believe that, when Shania's first album that he produced ("The Woman in Me") was released, Nashville didn't know what to make of it. I remember it being somewhat controversial at the time that she had released an album without scheduling any live performances. All of the small-town radio trolls made up rumors that Shania couldn't really sing and that Mutt had used his "Hollywood production techniques" to hide that fact. Since AutoTune didn't even exist at the time, one struggles to imagine how even Mutt Lange could have pulled that off, but it's ironic that, nearly 20 years later, Nashville is now employing those same "Hollywood production techniques" that it so vilified in 1995. Their use of AutoTune has become so egregious that you can't even tell the character of the singer's voice anymore. It's not that popular country singers aren't talented. It's that The Machine no longer lets them be talented.
If the purpose of performing arts is, per Shakespeare, to "hold a
mirror up to nature" (including human nature), The Machine is doing
exactly the opposite. They are not holding up a mirror so much as they
are holding up a Norman Rockwell-esque painting of a small town in the 50's, a
small town in which shiny happy white people stroll along the avenue
oblivious to any problems in the world. In this painting, there are no racial tensions or meth
labs or poverty or teen pregnancy, and if there is war, it must be a
good war, because America would never attack anyone for no reason, would they?
But of course, as I can attest from having grown up in a small town,
all of those problems do exist, and none of them will ever be solved as long as we sweep them under the rug.
There have always been some artists who kowtowed to the small-town conservative mindset. Merle Haggard, for instance, scored some agri-baiting hits with "Okie from Muskogee", "The Fightin' Side of Me", and "Are the Good Times Really Over." However, those songs were not what defined him as an artist, and they're a pretty far cry from the over-the-top jingoism of Toby Keith. The rise of Clear Channel has created a feedback loop with the Nashville Machine, such that pander-ball is the only game in town these days. From Clear Channel's point of view, they know that everything they're getting from Nashville will be "safe", and from Nashville's point of view, they know that as long as they keep everything "safe", they'll be able to get airplay via Clear Channel. However, when something is deliberately designed to be safe, that also means that it will never break any new ground, nor will it likely be very memorable. I mean, what are the songs you remember most from your teenage years? Probably the ones that your parents didn't want you to listen to. The Baptist church who handed me a flyer proclaiming that David Bowie, AC/DC, and KISS were the tools of Satan did a really good job of introducing me to the music of David Bowie, AC/DC, and KISS.
Cooper is spot-on when he says that streaming radio is where "real" country music lives these days, as well as in the bars and clubs that have served as its traditional home. Good country music is still being made in Nashville, just largely not within The Machine. There's also quite a lot of it being produced in Austin, or at least in areas surrounding Austin, but since artists like Robert Earl Keen and Ray Wylie Hubbard aren't "safe" by Nashville standards, you will never hear them on a Clear Channel country station. Personally, I look forward to the day when every vehicle on the road in America is able to stream Internet radio as seamlessly as they can stream FM or XM, for that will be the day that The Machine implodes.
