Small & Poor

From the San Francisco Chronicle, 9/6/04

Software giant Microsoft took center stage last week when it began selling songs online, but another feature of its new MSN Music service is quietly raising eyebrows in the radio industry.

Microsoft is using playlists from more than 900 local radio stations around the country to create its own soundalike Internet stations -- stripped of local DJ chatter, traffic, weather and commercials.

The new MSN Radio offers Internet stations playing most of the same songs heard on over-the-air outlets like Berkeley's KBLX, "The Quiet Storm"; New York's WNEW, "The Mix 102.7"; or Chicago's WLUP, "The Loop."

"It results in a more pleasant experience because you don't have the ads or the DJs," Rob Bennett, senior director for MSN Entertainment, said during a press briefing last week.

Alt Country's red-state blues, 9/11/2004 in Canada's Globe and Mail:

by Carl Wilson

It's the bitter kind of twist you'd expect at the end of a country song, where a guy finally gets sober only to watch his wife take off with his best friend: "Alt-country" music got its biggest endorsement ever this week, but the source made the genre look as redundant as an auto worker whose job has taken a swift boat to China.

Republican image czar Mark McKinnon told The New York Times on Monday that George W. Bush's official campaign soundtrack is "heavy on alternative country ..... 'a little rockier, a little jazzier, a little funkier' than traditional country."

The news left alt-country fans in a funk of their own. After all, the particular fusion of sizzle and twang called alt-country was forged in the early-1990s recession that sank Dubya's dad. Critic David Cantwell called bands such as the Bottle Rockets, Old 97s, Son Volt and Wilco "children of Detroit City" - rust-belt kids vexed at how middle America was battered by Bush Sr.'s New World Order. They intuited that when the factory shuts, the family splits, you live in a cancer cluster and only Wal-Mart is hiring, it's not so different than when the farm goes bust in a classic country song: Hearts spring leaks and whisky stanches the wounds.

Fresher still are Gretchen Wilson's No. 1 single Redneck Woman and Big and Rich's debut album Horse of a Different Colour, which has just gone gold in Canada. Like many 1990s alt-country bands, they draw on southern-rock stalwarts like Lynyrd Skynyrd, and are more blunt and sarcastic than Nashville usually allows.

Big and Rich offer up goofy summer jams that could flow equally smoothly into classic rock, Outkast and other "dirty south" hip-hop or the latest four-square country by Tim McGraw - who toured with them this summer along with Kid Rock's DJ Uncle Kracker and six-foot-four, black rapper Cowboy Troy - in the name of "country music without prejudice" or, playfully, "expandilism."

Country and hip-hop today are both reliant on big beats, gruff machismo, sass-talking ladies, partying and wordplay, while respecting God and the old school and most of all representing where they come from - often the same, deep-southern place. Yet there persists a knee-jerk assumption that there is a Hip-Hop America and a Country America and they hate each other.

Tastemakers are comfortable with such demographic divides - black versus white or blue versus red, giving everybody someone to resent. It helps them overlook the real colour line described by Democrat John Edwards' "two Americas" - access to green.

If alt-country never caught the have-nots' ears, perhaps it wasn't eclectic *enough*. Big and Rich's success shows how many people are out there wearing Snoop Dogg shirts and Charlie Daniels caps, sipping Jack Daniels and blasting Led Zeppelin. You won't sense any of that on the first album in three years by the one-time great pop hopes of alt-country, Texas's Old 97s.

SON VOLT BACK IN STUDIO: NEW LINE-UP ANNOUNCED, ANTHOLOGY IN THE WORKS
Jay Farrar�s popular rock band persona, Son Volt, is heading back into the studio to record their fourth full-length studio album�the first new release since 1998�s Wide Swing Tremolo (Warner Bros. Records). This time around, though, fans will be seeing (and hearing) a different collection of side musicians performing with Farrar. After several months of discussions and planning with the original Son Volt players�Dave Boquist, Jim Boquist and Mike Heidorn�Farrar was unable to reach acceptable business terms with the original line-up. �Times change, and so do people, I guess,� reflected Farrar. �While I was looking forward to the reunion aspect of working with those guys, it just wasn�t meant to be. It�ll be liberating to get down to work with a different group of musicians. I had always envisioned Son Volt as a vehicle for my songwriting and expected it to evolve over the years. When I reformed the original band this year to record our track for Por Vida [the Alejandro Escovedo benefit album (Or Music)], it seemed like we might be able to extend that two-day session into two years of recording and touring--but it doesn�t look that way now.�

The Funny thing is when you kind of go away for a few weeks and observe things without comment or condemnation, things pop up to let you know that there are still enemies out there to fight. I labor under the label of "Alt Country," but, my point and argument has always been that what I hock has more to do with where it came from and where it should be going than what's at the forefront on radio and TV right now. It's time to bristle when yet another seemingly competent music writer wants to lump the parlor trick that is Big & Rich in with whatever "alt country" was and is. Nothing is ever completely pure and true, but alt country as it was and is comes from a struggle to blend the hard edges of club rock like grunge and punk into the traditional sounds of pedal steel driven country. Big & Rich is a marketing ploy designed to take advantage of and exploit some of the burgeoning aspects of hip hop and skate punk culture and try to capitalize on that by delivering a well-thought out product that gets these nouveau Frankie and Annettes to buy "Country" records, and thus listen to "Country" stations where they can get bombarded by all the advertising aimed at selling them complete and utter shit. They're about as musical as a military marching band. And, after listening to all the hard work that bands like the Gourds, Eleven Hundred Springs, the Two Dollar Pistols, and older bands like the 97's put in, seeing Big & Rich called "alt country" is like watching your buddy double down on 11, catching a 9, then seeing the dealer hit on 12 and catching a 9 himself.

Let us not forget that this dickhead:

was also one of these dickheads:

Which brings me back to the point I ALWAYS make, it's the PROCESS. When an industry whose hallmark has been utter and complete product control suddenly embraces "change," you have to stop and ask yourself, "does it look like shit? does it smell like shit?" As I finally got down to investigating this new phenomenon, the pictures of men standing on stages holding up guitars with the words "Peace" and "Love Everybody" spelled out in tape on the backs reminded me instantly of the "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" video, all flourescent and sloganed up for the many cameras that just happen to be on this "underground" movement. Don't be surprised in two years if one of these guys is racing NASCAR and the other is blowing guys at truck stops.  If it wasn't evident with Brooks & Dunn, it should be painfully obvious with Big & Rich that the kind of stupid suits who have been ruining pop and rock for years, have finally gotten around to instigating the Wham! theory into country.  Boy bands and 16 year old girls in push-up bras are next.

But, what of our little industry? Just days after getting excited by the reunion of Son Volt for a new album, retrospective, and possible tour, another press release was sent out announcing that Jay was indeed going to do some Son Volt recording, only with a whole new group of guys. Which means it's just another Jay Farrar album. I've had a few short conversations here in the Twin Cities with Dave Boquist in the past couple of years, and I've seen him play numerous times. He strikes me as both a talented and thoughtful performer, very much the same impression I have of Farrar. Also, as I detailed in a review a couple of years ago, I've gotten the feeling over the years that if there's a hole in Farrar's solo work, it's the singularity of his voice, the lack of outside influences, that picture of a man drawing sausages with no one there to tell him they don't look like horses, to borrow from Terry Allen. Knowing what I do of the Boquist brothers' recent work around here, a new collaboration with Farrar would have been a pretty exciting piece of music. As it stands, we'll have to wait and see. As a footnote, it would be cool if the Boquists formed a 3-man with Heidorn and recorded the stuff Dave's been working up around here. Just a thought.

Sadly, it may all be for naught in the long run. Maybe what old style radio, and club shows, and alt music serve is preserving the human processes of exploring music. It's no secret that Mainstream Country is mostly about marketing, that many of the major record labels are relying on number schemes and formulas for picking records and songs to release, and that satellite radio systems are selling themselves as multi-channeled pigeon holes for the attention deficit disordered population of the 21st Century. Are we better off now? Are we making the correct decisions? These are the things I continue to worry about as I enter another Fall and Winter of radio shows, new releases, and meaningless Top Ten lists.

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