Tera wrote:
>- alt.country seems to be music for we aging baby boomers as opposed to
>alt.rock or new country which seems to target the teen to twenties crowd.
Just a quick note as I gather breath to respond to Jake's epic
call'n'response from yesterday -
I think if you look at the P2 Survey you'll see the untruth of this. I'm
convinced that alt-country is a (as Monsieur London puts it) "tailbust" and
"gen-x" phenomenon. A glance around the audience at any alt-country show
I've attended shows it skewing way to folks in their late-20s to mid-30s,
with a smattering of younger and older. The punk connection of the
"insurgent" side in particular makes the demographics fairly easy to track.
Refer back to the Wilson-London chronicles for various bafflingly vague
descriptions of the broader implications of this general pattern.
I do think it's important that alt-country has a Gen-X connection (and as
Jake noted, even a few years difference in age has some important
implications for where in musical-cultural history you'll stand). And I'd
also assert New Country is much more boomer-oriented than is alt-country -
thus HNC takes its rock influences from Billy Joel, not from the Clash.
Carl W.
