| Re: Country Music [message #67696 is a reply to message #67680] |
Tue, 17 May 2011 00:22   |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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I like exactly two country songs, both were released right around 1990 or close to it. Both were crossover hits on both country and adult contemporary stations, or maybe just because I lived in the south they played it on both.
Country music has really been pop music since the late 80's. It was just marketed to a complete different sector, which gave the illusion of autonomy as a genre. They had their own music TV station, their own awards, and basically everything you could to maintain the appearance that they were something much different than pop music. This was largely political obviously.
As I said in another thread, somewhere in the mid 90's, pop fans were buying country records if they liked them, but country fans were not buying pop records. Once Country eclipsed Adult Contemporary in sales and pop became less instrument centric anyway because dance pop was popular concurrently, the session musicians and producers switched virtually overnight to wanting to make hit country records.
I don't know exactly what it was. It was like one day all the black musicians suddenly were exclusively making music for the "slow jams" market and mainstream R&B disappeared. Adult contemporary disappeared in favor of more alternative acts. A lot of pop acts wanted to make dance music for some reason too.
Basically everyone was doing everything possible to avoid making the kind of pop records that would have been released in 1992. As a direct result, Country pretty took over as the default genre that would be preferred by suburban white people because it was very very close songwriting wise. The difference is that it had a squeaky clean image, seemingly none of the pretensions of "perfect" singers singing "perfect" songs, and it was viewed with a certain amount of class and cultural identity.
To make a long story short, Shania Twain could outsell Celine Dion 10-1 with the same song arranged only slightly different. For some reason, men especially will buy a Garth Brooks album no matter how pop oriented it is, but wouldn't even consider a Michael Bolton album, that is why Country won. There has always been something unquestionably masculine about the perception of Country it seems no matter what and always something perceived suspiciously fruity about Male pop singers. A lot of men seem to actually think they should question their sexuality when confronted with an enjoyable Whitney Houston song. It is baffling, but People couldn't identify with these slick LA musicians.
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