Geff King writes:
>You know, working on the fringes of the environmental industry as I do,
>the term 'sustainable development' comes up a lot. Makes me think
>of 'Americana' as perhaps a sustainable form of music - just enough
>popularity and acclaim to let artists make a living without having to buy
>the farm or sell the soul?
Hey, there's a catchy new name for the genre: Sustainable Country. Okay,
maybe not...
But it's true that there are countless musicians out there in a number of
genres (including our own) who are making apparently adequate livings from
their music and getting their music heard by an apparently adequate number
of people, and maybe, realistically, that's the best we can hope for for
alt-country/Americana. For a variety of reasons, some of which have already
been mentioned here, I don't think a massive breakthrough is likely for
either the "Tupelo Rock" (what an atrocious term) side of alt-country or
the more countryish side, the folks like Dale Watson, Sara Evans, Kelly
Willis, et al. who are playing music that's "too country for country
radio".
(And FWIW, I don't see any reason that the latter is a vastly better
candidate for such a breakthrough than the former, as John Riedie and
others have suggested. The Americana stuff clearly has a better shot at a
breakthrough on country radio, but the country-rock stuff has a better
chance of breaking through on AAA and rock radio; regardless of the size of
the teenage (or 18-24, in marketing terms) component of country audiences,
which I think has always been considerable in many parts of the country,
Son Volt and Whiskeytown are still more likely to appeal to the vastly
larger 18-24 audience for rock radio, who are the folks who most often
create the sort of Nirvana-sized breakthroughs that we're talking about
here. But I digress.)
But like Bob Soron, I don't think it's inconceivable, either, that some
alt-country/Americana artist might achieve a big breakthrough that would
catapult the whole genre to the mainstream, leading to big sales, millions
of signings of acts with even the vaguest alt-country connection, and
eventually, an alt-country fashion section at K-Mart (and from there, a
rapid fall from grace for the genre, followed by snide references to it by
late-night talk show hosts and a vague sense of embarrassment among those
who jumped on the trend and then abandoned it--"geez, remember that
alt-country phase we went through?"). What I can't conceive of is why
anybody thinks this would be a good thing. Another Nirvana? Yeah, all that
success worked out wonderfully for Kurt Cobain, didn't it? Not to mention
for people like Mark Lanegan and others who had the megawatt spotlight of
supertrendiness trained on them for a fleeting moment. And it's worth
remembering that the grunge movement, such as it was, featured, to a great
extent, bands who were either riding the coattails of the movement, and it
came way too late for bands like the Replacements who'd laid the groundwork
for bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. An Americana breakthrough would
likely feature a lot of the same thing, and might well leave the real
pioneers in the dirt.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those who hopes that my favorite bands
remain cult faves, eking out meager livings and being dropped by label
after label just so my friends and I can feel all avant-garde for knowing
about them. I'd like all the musicians I admire to make tons of money, or
at least to make as much money as they want to make. I just think that
there are ways that this can happen without forcing them into
flash-in-the-pan status.
--Amy, really enjoying this thread, which is one of the more substantive
ones we've had in a while
