What IS Country ?

[rick]

Here in L.A. Taylor just finished six nights at SoFi Stadium performing to about 70,000 attendees each night.

Just now got home from sitting in a coffee shop. Four men who were probably in their 40s were talking about country music shows, going out to Stagecoach, etc.

One of the men said about 18 years ago, which would have been about the start of Taylor Swift’s career, he took his daughter out to San Bernardino, CA, to a Taylor Swift concert. The man said he believes he paid $13 per ticket. He said Taylor Swift doesn’t really have much of a singing voice, but she knew how to play to fans. He said he and his daughter waited in line after the concert to see Taylor. They told Taylor that one of the daughter’s friends wanted to attend with them but the young girl’s mother wouldn’t let her go out on a school night. Taylor asked the man if he could call the daughter’s friend and he did and Taylor called and talked with her to say how sorry she was that the girl couldn’t be there. That kind of connection / personal touch stays with a person.

I really don’t know Taylor Swift’s music but the snippets I’ve heard on TV, she really doesn’t have an interesting voice to my ears the way Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and others do where I want to hear the next notes they sing.

So, is Taylor Swift “country” music? What is country music nowadays? Some male singer does TV commercials for the California Milk Advisory Board and he’s got on a cowboy hat, jeans, etc. and it starts out sounding like a generic country song but then it moves into more hip-hop. Weird.

[erik]

Some stuff to unpack here...and the following are strictly my opinions:

If by "country" we mean actual rural life--that of small towns, mountain villages, ranches, farms, authentic honky-tonk establishments)--I'm afraid that kind of music is all but dead. Linda herself seems to think it is, if her "mall crawler music" comments about "modern" country music are any indication. And she should know, having listened to so much of it growing up in the actual country, on the last ten acres of her family's ranch, and listening to it on her best friend The Radio. Granted there are exceptions, a lot of them being provided by the womenfolk who have been influenced by Linda (even though they have been constricted by male country radio station programmers). But in general, the genre that gave us Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and many others does not really exist any longer, at least not in the way so many of us, Linda most especially, used to know it.

Linda herself may have foreseen the sea change, when the Grand Ole Opry moved out of the Ryman Auditorium and out to what became Opryland all the way back in 1974, which was right about the time that her career was starting to catch on. It was the start of country music going from being about a way of life, to a lifestyle, to an industry, to the very cold-blooded business behemoth it has been since the 1990's.

As for Taylor Swift...well, where to begin? (Full disclosure: I'm 53 years old).

I have said a lot of critical things about Ms. Swift from the time she put out her first album in 2006. I think at first it had to be acknowledged that she was someone in her teens, singing about teenage things and high school crushes and heartbreaks; I got that. I also get the attraction that her fans, many of them young girls who are themselves either in high school or college now, have towards her. Whether she is "country" or not is up to the individual listener; some of it could, with a little bit of finagling, fit into an acoustic folk/country format ("Betty"; "Back To September"; "Begin Again"). If she followed in that style, which she did in a way with Folklore, it could open up another audience for her.

That said, however, not only has her songwriting not ventured much farther from where it was when she started (with the three exceptions I mentioned), her voice hasn't exactly gotten much better either. I don't know if the rumors were true that she used a lot of Autotune or Pro-Tools; but if they were, that was an indication to me that she was extremely deficient in the area where it counts, and it is in The Voice. I know that it's a fool's errand to expect Taylor (or any other female singer for that matter) to be another Linda Ronstadt; that is never going to happen. But just from the standpoint of being objective, in the end Taylor has to really up her game in both songwriting and singing, and sing more stuff that is appropriate to her age (in case anyone's noticed, she's not going to stay young forever). I want to be wrong about this, but I am not at all sure she has the capacity or the audacity to do it

[MokyWI]

I’m not fan, her music does not move me. I am also 58 yrs. old. I think she is talented and don’t feel the need to bash her. She stands behind the LGBTQ community. I thank her and respect her for that.

Now when it comes to bashing the redneck, pretend country male artists of today with their cowboy hats that are a must in their minds, small minds at that, I will bash away with the best of them. THOSE are the ones that get under my skin. The ones always waving their American flags and pointing their guns. They THINK they are projecting masculinity, trying way too hard it’s obvious. THOSE I can bash till the cows come home! That crap, IS NOT COUNTRY MUSIC, it’s what Erik calls “mall crawler music” which is exactly what it is. You know it when you hear the tinny electric guitars roaring away way too loud but you can still hear their put-on country accent trying to sound SO southern you can’t make out what they singing half the time. It all sounds exactly the same. It reminds me of G.I. Joes and Barbie Dolls.

[Partridge]

Whatever deficiencies she may have, she seems to be well on her way to being the most popular female singer ever. Apparently the Voice is the not the most important, as I don't think Madonna, the best selling female vocalist ever, really doesn't have much of a Voice either.


(You know what I mean with that garbled grammar.)

[alyn]

Yeah, I think advanced in years means we just watch the musical world go by and thank our lucky stars we were around when it was so good.
I guess it's best not to get irritated by it and keep saying how mundane and awful it is, although I find that a constant temptation.
Like my father before me who despaired of any pop music and tried his utmost to get me to understand Big Band music which I couldn't but I came to realise how brilliant it was decades after his death.
I'm still happy to go backwards and find music from the 50s 60s and 70s that I didn't know before and cherish it as 'new'...that satisfies me.
Them young whippersnappers can keep their modern mush and if it pleases them, so be it. We know better :-)

[Partridge]

I too find new music to appreciate from the past. A lot of music I disliked when I was young I can appreciate now. I used to hate Supertramp and would change the station every time I heard those whiny vocals. Now I enjoy hearing them. And I never paid much attention to Donna Summer but I enjoy hearing her on the radio now.

[alyn]

...and the other thing is, I could comment on What Is Country Music but I feel I am underqualified, being from England, it is fundamentally an American thing, as is Soul and Blues...as much as I like Soul and Blues I think they are not deep down in an English person's soul. We can probably stake a claim on 'our' pop and rock (and folk music)  in our own way, but - and maybe it's just me and my opinion - I'd never be able to pinpoint and make grand statements on any of the styles of music that are fundamentally American.

[rick]

I think my initial post in this thread was very poorly written. I don’t feel the points that I overheard in that conversation were well conveyed by me.
It really was not meant to hone in on Taylor Swift’s deficits, if any. It was more about how that man was making the point of how savvy she was with her fans. Mr. Partridge brought up Madonna. I think she, too, was very savvy in terms of promoting her brand.
Also, I was fortunate to have had parents who listened to a lot of music from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s while my siblings were exposing me to The British Invasion, R&B/Motown, pop/folk of the 1960s.
I, too, still seek out music from earlier eras.
As for “What IS Country?” I guess I was asking the question generally, not with regard to Ms. Swift. I find the ACM and CMA shows unwatchable now. But these shows aren’t produced/aimed at an old codger like me.

[Dianna]

Music changes and evolves, I get that.. but when the core of it becomes so unrecognizable it almost relinquishes itself into some other alien form. I think Country Artists have been doing pop cross over songs since way back ..There was a song in the late 60's by Country Artist Roy Clark, "Yesterday, When I was young," which IMO, did not sound country .. it was more folksy and what was current in pop music at that time.. yet he still kept his integrity of being country artist who crossed over.
perhaps at the time to some purists he abandoned his roots.

[sliderocker]

Country, as I knew it, like Linda had known it, is dead. In the same way that country had taken the western swing music genre and eviscerated it out of existence so that country-western, the genre to which country was tagged up with, was simply referred to as country. The artists came primarily from the southeast parts of the United States and Nashville was their capitol. And Nashville wanted no part of western swing or artists from other parts of the United States or from other countries. The artists had to be authentic, had to come from the truly rural parts of the country. The west of western swing wasn't really rural, not in tthe same way the southeast of country was rural.

In all honesty, the two genres didn't share all that much in common, except maybe a steel guitar. In western swing, you could find electric guitars, drums and saxophones and even electric basses, when those came along. One could make the argument that western swing and rock and roll had way more in common than country had in common with rock and roll. But, the country establishment was a jealous group of individuals.

When Elvis came along, they hated him with a passion even though he embraced country music. But, Elvis was the death knell for country music as it had been. The genre had to evolve or die on the vine. Some country performers found Elvis and his music liberating, meaning they no longer had to keep singing songs that sounded like they were out of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Country could at last be modern and many people liked it. Old country artists would keep plugging away with their old country music, hoping the genre would make a return, much like Tony Bennett hoped record buyers of the 1950s and 1960s would return to buying his kind of music. Country and Bennett (and the pop crooners who were Bennett's peers) failed to recognize that rock and roll's audience wasn't their audience and that rock and roll's audience didn't really like the music of country artists or pop crooners.

Country evolved after Elvis but the problem was they wanted to stay where they were. They didn't want to evolve again. But, they had to because the Beatles and the British Invasion came along. And country had to evolve again, just to keep up, just as rock in the US had to evolve to keep up. And it's always been that way. It had to evolve to remain current, even if such evolving meant kicking, screaming and having a temper tantrum about it.

When I was a teen, I didn't especially like country. It was a genre I would have to grow older to appreciate. What I thought about country music was that it was a genre that was going to eventually die as we edged closer to the 21st century. I wasn't even sure rock and roll would survive into the 21st century. I shared much of what Linda believed, including that country was becoming that mall crawler genre. But, I have to wonder what she thinks in hindsight? The country music of the 1970s wasn't really the mall crawler kind she may have been thinking of then. The artists were still primarily from the southeastern part of the US although the music did blend elements from other musical genres, including rock.

Country started dying when the powers that be started trying to recognize the next change coming along before it happened, or started believing they could create the next big thing. It was then that country truly died and it's been dead for a long time, a long time before Taylor Swift ever came along. Taylor isn't country. She's not even from the same kind of upbringing that many country artists of old had. She came from wealth, from what I have read and while I don't know the truth of that claim, it's not a reason to disqualify her and dismiss her music. John Lennon didn't come from a poor background. Neither did Paul McCartney or George Harrison or Mick Jagger, and no one has ever said a word about their upbringing being a musical disqualifiers.

But, have we ever examined the financial side of the musical artists before they became famous? Linda didn't come from a poor background. Michael Nesmith came from a poor background until his mother created Mistake Out, the invention that would become White Out and a family fortune.The Beach Boys?I suspect a lot of 60s and 70s rockers had middle class upbringings and maybe some even came from wealthy families and were as far removed from many of the poor rock performers of the 1950s. And I'm betting the same was true for the artists in all other musical genres. And if Taylor's family's wealth affected her music, it's only fair to ask the same question of all the other artists who are her peers and those who came before.

We ask for authenticity, yet if a performer comes from a wealthy background, does that make them any less respectable than someone who came from a poor background? And is it fair to blame the artists who are considered country today for what it is not, anymore than it was fair to blame the country artists before then whose music contributed to the next generation that would come along and influence them in making what they consider country? Linda influenced a lot of female country artists that would come along. Has to make you wonder how many female country artists who were around when she was around and selling in the millions, hated her because she was selling millions and influencing millions of young girls who wanted to be her. And some of them would go on to have country music careers. Linda was probably hated in the same way Elvis was hated in the 50s. She was encroaching on their territory and many probably resented her, along with their fans.

Personal note: I only meant to write a few words on the subject and I wrote an essay. Sorry about that! :-)

[erik]

It's important to note that the first time Linda made that "mall crawler" statement was in an interview when she gave to (the now defunct) Country Music Magazine in February 2003, stating that she thought the genre no longer respected the traditional sounds of its past, nor did it respect the progressive and respectful approach that those of her generation took to how they did country. This really isn't anything new coming from her; and certainly her outspokenness on things that get her fired up personally and intellectually is the stuff of legend now. You may disagree with what she says and/or how she says it, but it is what it is.

I realize that Linda has often repeated that she couldn't sing anything authentically unless she had heard it on the radio by the time she was ten years old. But as I have frequently said, this really doesn't quite tell the whole story, when one looks at how well Linda recorded what she recorded in her time. When we talk about country music, her particular focus on stuff that was heard on the radio from 1948 (when she was two years old) to 1961 (when she was fifteen)--basically the span from Hank Williams' recording of "Lovesick Blues" (which actually began life in the 1920's as a Tin Pan Alley song!) to Patsy Cline ("I Fall To Pieces"; "Crazy"), plus hearing both the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, thanks to those big radio transmitters situated on the other side of the border. And there was also the revival of traditional mountain music and bluegrass that came about as a result of the late 1950's/early 1960's folk music revival (or "scare"). All of that constituted what Linda knew about country music. It's true that she didn't come from a low-income background (it was far closer to middle-class at the very least), but she grew up in the country, in a rural environment, albeit one that was broiling hot during the summer, so she knew the genre all the same, and took an approach that was both respectful of tradition and understanding how the genre's traditions could be moved forward and made relevant to her generation. True, her approach also included the influence of rock and roll; but that entire musical mash-up was what made up her musical palette--"eclecticmania", to use her term.

These days, however, country radio playlists are so constricted, dictated more by a focus-group mentality that favors the kind of male macho rage posturing over the womenfolk by a wide margin (almost no country radio stations play two songs in a row done by female artists)--the whole "Tomatogate" thing that happened in 2015, when some Nashville hack named Keith Hill declared that "men are the salad of country music, while women are the tomatoes". It's that kind of mentality and constricted playlists that allow s*** like Jason Aldean's "Try That In A Small Town" or, back just after 9/11, Toby Keith's infamous "Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)" to escape into the public ether. Margo Price, who is one of Linda's many female fans in the genre these days, responded with a T-shirt that said, and I quote, "YOU SAY 'TOMATO', I SAY 'F**K YOU!'".

One thing that should be noted is that Linda does have a soft spot and a warm heart for people like Trisha Yearwood and Carrie Underwood, so it isn't like she is so totally dismissive of the genre as a whole. She would almost certainly agree not only with Margo's sentiments but with the way she expressed it as well.

But while we do have younger artists keeping the flames alive for country music, many of them womenfolk, once all the veterans are gone (and I include Willie Nelson in this), and unless radio station programmers and operators wake up and realize what kind of damage a corporate mindset has done to that genre, then it will be dead, if it isn't already (IMHO).

[sliderocker]

It's important to note that the first time Linda made that "mall crawler" statement was in an interview when she gave to (the now defunct) Country Music Magazine in February 2003, stating that she thought the genre no longer respected the traditional sounds of its past, nor did it respect the progressive and respectful approach that those of her generation took to how they did country. This really isn't anything new coming from her; and certainly her outspokenness on things that get her fired up personally and intellectually is the stuff of legend now. You may disagree with what she says and/or how she says it, but it is what it is.

I was thinking Linda's mall crawler comment was from the late 70s to early 80s and didn't realize that at February 2003 (at time of publication), it was much, much later when she said it. I don't disagree with her. I rarely disagree with anything she says, (except for what she thinks about her own singing and claiming Elvis never grew as an artist) and think she is truly spot on most of the time. Given how sharp she still is, I sometimes think her doctors misdiagnosed her all way around. I just wish that was the case.

I realize that Linda has often repeated that she couldn't sing anything authentically unless she had heard it on the radio by the time she was ten years old. But as I have frequently said, this really doesn't quite tell the whole story, when one looks at how well Linda recorded what she recorded in her time. When we talk about country music, her particular focus on stuff that was heard on the radio from 1948 (when she was two years old) to 1961 (when she was fifteen)--basically the span from Hank Williams' recording of "Lovesick Blues" (which actually began life in the 1920's as a Tin Pan Alley song!) to Patsy Cline ("I Fall To Pieces"; "Crazy"), plus hearing both the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, thanks to those big radio transmitters situated on the other side of the border. And there was also the revival of traditional mountain music and bluegrass that came about as a result of the late 1950's/early 1960's folk music revival (or "scare"). All of that constituted what Linda knew about country music. It's true that she didn't come from a low-income background (it was far closer to middle-class at the very least), but she grew up in the country, in a rural environment, albeit one that was broiling hot during the summer, so she knew the genre all the same, and took an approach that was both respectful of tradition and understanding how the genre's traditions could be moved forward and made relevant to her generation. True, her approach also included the influence of rock and roll; but that entire musical mash-up was what made up her musical palette--"eclecticmania", to use her term.

Excellent points, Erik. I'd love to hear you interviewing Linda on her musical past, because I'm pretty sure you could spark her memory and get her to open up about her musical past. Truth is, I think Linda listened to a lot of music in her time. I recall her talking about how she and J.D. listened to George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and that despite Linda's criticism about Tammy's Stand By Your Man, she was in fact a fan of Tammy's. To me, Linda was a representative of her generation. That generation being the first generation of rock but also being a generation that also came up on other generations and genres of music and artists. Some of those below the first generation of rock wanted nothing but rock and while that was fine, it was also limiting in what they heard and telling in what they missed. Linda was, first and foremost, a rock artist and that was how she referred to herself in her younger days, even when she was singing country. Little wonder Capitol knew how to market her properly.

As she grew older, she started moving away from her rock label, which I think was a mistake and started embracing the other genres, which I think did in fact cost her some of her fan base. I know there were some fans who didn't care for her standards and Broadway forays and then the forays into the Mexican music, even though she acquired a whole new group of fans as a result. But, when she moved back to the rock/pop/country genre she was well known for, most of her fan base that had been there with her in the 60s and 70s and early 80s, were nowhere to be found.

Like I've always said, it would've been advisable if she had kept her feet wet in the rock/pop/country genres by releasing pop albums at the same time as the standards and Spanish-language albums. It would've been a risky gamble but no less a risky gamble than what Shania Twain did when releasing her albums with the same tunes as both country and pop/rock genres. For Linda, the standards and Mexican-Spanish language recordings were a labor of love, so I don't think she would've cared if they sold a million copies of 250,000 copies. One of the main rules for artists is your fan base are the ones who are going to keep the money coming in once you have made it. Don't alienate them for any reason. But, Linda was on record as not caring what her fans thought, she was going to do what pleased her. And that cost her.

These days, however, country radio playlists are so constricted, dictated more by a focus-group mentality that favors the kind of male macho rage posturing over the womenfolk by a wide margin (almost no country radio stations play two songs in a row done by female artists)--the whole "Tomatogate" thing that happened in 2015, when some Nashville hack named Keith Hill declared that "men are the salad of country music, while women are the tomatoes". It's that kind of mentality and constricted playlists that allow s*** like Jason Aldean's "Try That In A Small Town" or, back just after 9/11, Toby Keith's infamous "Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)" to escape into the public ether. Margo Price, who is one of Linda's many female fans in the genre these days, responded with a T-shirt that said, and I quote, "YOU SAY 'TOMATO', I SAY 'F**K YOU!'".

More evidence the country genre as many of us knew it, is not only dead, but it's long dead. What it is now, I can't say. There are artists in the genre who should be classed as and marketed as rock artists, not country artists. I like Margo Price's T-shirt quote. Think I'd like to get a T-shirt with the same quote printed on it.

One thing that should be noted is that Linda does have a soft spot and a warm heart for people like Trisha Yearwood and Carrie Underwood, so it isn't like she is so totally dismissive of the genre as a whole. She would almost certainly agree not only with Margo's sentiments but with the way she expressed it as well.

I know Linda has spoken of listening to certain artists, even now, but I think she has to have someone assist her in the listening of that music, whether it's through vinyl, CD or through YouTube. Many artists at the beginning of the 2000s used to do webcasts with their fans where fans could ask questions and chat with their favorite celebrities.It's something I wished Linda had done and could do, even now. All she would need is a moderator who could help conduct the webcast. Michael Nesmith, before his death, held webcasts where he both performed for the fans and chatted with the fans. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, he did one on one chats with the fans and they could ask him anything. He was very accessible. That is something I believe could help keep Linda active, although she probably doesn't want to be doing anything now.

I still have a million questions I would love to ask Linda but I'm not hopeful that will ever happen. Actually, not a million questions, just not the same questions she seemed to get asked on her "book" tour. Reminded me of when the Bee Gees did the very first Live By Request, wherein the fans who made up the audience and fans who were lucky enough to call in could request any song they had written or performed. And before the Bee Gees even did the show, their fan base were discussing what songs they wanted to hear. And someone in the Gibb brothers camp had been monitoring the fan discussions and the brothers rehersed tunes they had never performed in concert. And what did the fans on the phones and in the audience request? The hits! I managed to catch a glimpse of a friend of mine who was in the audience, but they didn't call on her. I tried calling in by phone but the lines were all swamped. It was kind of a disappointing show.

And with Linda's "book" tour being a show where the same questions were always asked (seemingly), it made me wonder if those in the audience were plants, people who would keep asking the same questions? Or just a strange coincidence? One would think there would've been some different questions come up that wasn't covered in Simple Dreams. Something that was missed because someone didn't jog Linda's memory.

But while we do have younger artists keeping the flames alive for country music, many of them womenfolk, once all the veterans are gone (and I include Willie Nelson in this), and unless radio station programmers and operators wake up and realize what kind of damage a corporate mindset has done to that genre, then it will be dead, if it isn't already (IMHO).

The country genre, as I knew it, is indeed dead as many contemporaries of Willie and Dolly, Emmylou and Linda are long dead and gone. I have a young lady friend who refers to an artist she likes, as a superstar, but all of his sales are in streams or downloads. And it's not the same as artists who put out vinyl records on 45s and 33 1/3rds, or even on old 78s and who sold in the millions. Massive millions. Elvis has sold over one billion recordings, possibly two billion. His streams or downloads don't seem like that much, but one of his streams was listed at 711 million listens, which I think was for Can't Help Falling In Love. But, the thing is you can't equate streams to actual sales. Downloads, yes but not in the same format a recording may have been released earlier. My friend's favorite artist has quite a few downloads but it's still not comparable to those from the past.

And it's the same for country artists today. They are not truly country compared to the artists of the past. And their sales, while some might be incredible, may only be for individual tracks and not entire albums. Music for the fair weather fans. Some do have album sales but I don't know how the RIAA is tracking the album sales, whether by an actual CD or by download sales or a combination of the two. Most stores that I have been in that have CDs don't have a large number of CDs in their inventories. And there isn't a lot of record stores these days where I live. And what general merchandise stores have in their inventories are certain artists with their latest album and the usual greatest hits compilation for the fair weather fan. To be honest, I have to wonder about the other musical genres in addition to country when it comes to sales. But, what passes for country these days isn't country.

And now, I'm also hearing hip hop is being celebrated for having been a viable genre for 50 years. But, I don't remember hearing hip hop in 1973. I don't remember that genre even being on my musical radar until the late 80s. Country is dead, you have rock artists claiming to be country and hip hop is 50 years old. Did I wake up in a parallel world or something?

[erik]

If Linda has anyone helping her keep up with contemporary music in any way, it may be her daughter Mary Clementine, who is there to assist her in the day-to-day things that Linda herself is not as able to do so well as she used to because of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. It may also be that her daughter tried (successfully) to get her to listen to Taylor Swift, and why Linda isn't as critical of Taylor as the vast majority of us might be (this, and some of the things many critics gratuitously nail Taylor for are similar to what Linda got called to the carpet for in the 1970's). In terms of podcasts, I guess that if Linda were in better health and mind this would be a huge opportunity for her that she might actually have been willing to take. But at this point, I think it would be too much for her.

I'll probably never be able to wrap my head around streaming services or downloads of artists and their songs, especially since I am exceptionally dubious as to whether someone like Linda, who, if sales back in the day were any indication, should have had far more than just one #1 pop hit (I think five is more like it), was undersold by Billboard (and we need not get started on Elvis, either). I too just don't know how one can equate streaming and downloads to any real tangible sales, regardless of whether it's Linda or Elvis or The Beatles, or any of the thousands of "sensations" out there now. One would have thought that, judging by streaming and downloads, both Linda's 2019 Live In Hollywood album and "Long Long Time" being used in a late January episode of HBO's The Last Of Us would have given her a lot more attention than they did. It's all just one confusing blur after another.

In terms of what is and isn't country, one other artist who wasn't too impressed with "today's country" was the late Tom Petty, who thought it to be "bad 80's rock with a fiddle". He had a point, to put it mildly; he had ideas about C&W growing up down in Florida, and also listening to Buck Owens' rough 1960's honky-tonk style known as The Bakersfield Sound, so, like Linda, he knew whereof he spoke.

It's a little too early, incidentally, to know what either the news of Selena Gomez being in line to portray Linda in a cinematic biopic or Tanya Tucker paying homage to Linda in her song "Letter To Linda" will do for Linda in terms of prominence or attention, because the public's and the media's attention span is immeasurably short. We'll just have to see.

As for Rap celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year--well, historical context is important. It likely started in the ghettos of New York and L.A. back in 1973 as an extended form of protest among the people of those near-poverty communities. Remember, it was the starting point; the jumping-off point, as I understand it, seemed to begin in the final days of disco at the end of the 1970's and the start of the 1980's. By the late 1980's it had started gaining popular traction on a national level. However, one could make the case that earlier records like Chuck Berry's 1956 song "Too Much Monkey Business", Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", Elvis' "U.S. Male", and Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" count as "early Rap" records.

[RobGNYC]

According to The NY Times yesterday: “This 50th anniversary [of hip-hop] dates to the night, in the Bronx, in August 1973, that Kool Herc stood over a set of turntables and combined two records to form one continuous breakbeat. Doesn’t sound too seismic when you put it that way. But this was it: the Big Bang, a mythical event.”