Rednecks and Bluenecks
Apr. 28th, 2007 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutWillman's book about politics and country music is perhaps the most enjoyable non-fiction I've read since _The United States of Arugula_. Just amazing. Like USA, _Rednecks and Bluenecks_ covers an area I enjoy (country music), expands my knowledge of it a lot (really not up on the alt country, despite my politics; yes, I know, wacky) and interprets both what I already knew and what I learned in some very interesting ways.
Like my favorite non-fiction in general, Willman is wandering about interviewing people, dragging the reader along with him as he explores (in this case) the intersection between Red States, Blue States, mainstream country music and alt country. The interviews were conducted around the 2004 presidential election and I bought the book in 2005. Reading it now (after the 2006 election, and after the release of Taking The Long Way and its sweep of the Grammys) is interesting, to say the least. Even in late 2004, the mainstream country music's appetite for boot-in-your-ass propaganda music had significantly dropped. By now, it's clear that the Chicks transition to pop is relatively complete, and while they aren't getting airplay on country stations they are still selling to a chunk of their old country audience (by no means all of it). It's fun to see that all the people -- on both sides of the political divide -- predicting the demise of the Chicks career turned out to be rather thoroughly wrong.
The author, given a distinct left coast/liberal bias, is remarkably even handed in his interviews and got a lot of people to talk to him quite candidly. I have not encountered any discussion of recent politics that got such a wide array of people to talk so openly about their work, politics and religion. In combination with my experience of radio while driving across country over the years leading up to when these interviews were done, it is enlightening. It can be hard for a highly connected person on either of the coasts -- in or out of a city -- to really understand how tightly controlled all the available information is in the middle of the country. And the repercussions, while predictable, are chilling when heard in the voices of so many well meaning, basically good people.
I don't know if it's possible to over-recommend this book. I think it would be interesting even to someone who knows absolutely nothing about the artists interviewed (I don't know much about the majority of the alt country people interviewed, and those were really interesting to read about), altho it helped that I knew a lot of the songs he referred to in the mainstream country section. But it really was a pivotal time in the culture wars -- those months when the pendulum had already started swinging back down towards the middle, but was still moving slowly, and the recent savagery of the attack on the Chicks still chilling discussion and debate.
I think it'll be out in paperback later this year, altho it was absolutely worth buying hardcover:
http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1509
Like my favorite non-fiction in general, Willman is wandering about interviewing people, dragging the reader along with him as he explores (in this case) the intersection between Red States, Blue States, mainstream country music and alt country. The interviews were conducted around the 2004 presidential election and I bought the book in 2005. Reading it now (after the 2006 election, and after the release of Taking The Long Way and its sweep of the Grammys) is interesting, to say the least. Even in late 2004, the mainstream country music's appetite for boot-in-your-ass propaganda music had significantly dropped. By now, it's clear that the Chicks transition to pop is relatively complete, and while they aren't getting airplay on country stations they are still selling to a chunk of their old country audience (by no means all of it). It's fun to see that all the people -- on both sides of the political divide -- predicting the demise of the Chicks career turned out to be rather thoroughly wrong.
The author, given a distinct left coast/liberal bias, is remarkably even handed in his interviews and got a lot of people to talk to him quite candidly. I have not encountered any discussion of recent politics that got such a wide array of people to talk so openly about their work, politics and religion. In combination with my experience of radio while driving across country over the years leading up to when these interviews were done, it is enlightening. It can be hard for a highly connected person on either of the coasts -- in or out of a city -- to really understand how tightly controlled all the available information is in the middle of the country. And the repercussions, while predictable, are chilling when heard in the voices of so many well meaning, basically good people.
I don't know if it's possible to over-recommend this book. I think it would be interesting even to someone who knows absolutely nothing about the artists interviewed (I don't know much about the majority of the alt country people interviewed, and those were really interesting to read about), altho it helped that I knew a lot of the songs he referred to in the mainstream country section. But it really was a pivotal time in the culture wars -- those months when the pendulum had already started swinging back down towards the middle, but was still moving slowly, and the recent savagery of the attack on the Chicks still chilling discussion and debate.
I think it'll be out in paperback later this year, altho it was absolutely worth buying hardcover:
http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1509
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 01:16 am (UTC)Since I am now living there, I would be interested if you could elaborate.
*backing away quickly from a generalization*
Date: 2007-04-30 03:02 am (UTC)But there are plenty of small towns and rural areas, particularly not on the coasts, where internet access is a relatively recent phenomenon, cable is non-existent (altho satellite TV increasingly common) and the nearest college is hundreds of miles away. I remember sections of the country I drove through (on interstates!) where there was no NPR station (heck, as of my last trip through South Dakota, there wasn't even cell coverage for hundreds of miles along I-90). On my first cross country trip, my traveling partner picked up the local paper whenever we stopped. An awful lot of those papers covered local arrests, the performance of the school's sports teams and very, very little else. They didn't even carry many wire stories. Bookstores were rare to nonexistent. Local instances of Books-a-Million or whatever tended to have displays devoted to a perspective on politics that was not what I was accustomed to, if there were any political books at all. If there was a movie theatre, it was playing only nth run mainstream Hollywood flicks, and of those, nothing controversial.
Which left, basically, USA Today, local TV and whatever network news you could get, one or more country radio stations and whatever news they carried, and possibly talk radio as well.
More insidious is the coffee shop problem. Depending on where in Seattle one gets one's coffee, one will overhear different kinds of conversations -- that's true everywhere. But in a place like Seattle, there are lots of neighborhoods, lots of places to buy coffee and strike up a conversation with a random stranger. Those conversations open windows into that massive amount of available information and ideas that can otherwise be an amorphous and impenetrable mass. It's noticeably harder here in Brookline (and online only gets me so far!). I have only visited in the middle, not lived there, but what I did experience was very different (basing this primarily on extended stays in Clayton and Cornelius, both in NC, where I was staying with friends and family).
There's a legitimate argument to be made that on the coasts, information is equally tightly controlled. We don't tend to talk about church going or the details of one's personal salvation. It's virtually impossible to find a good country station in a lot of urban markets on the coasts. It isn't pretty what happens when someone speaks out against gay marriage or in favor of widespread ownership of guns or restrictions on abortion. And the details of what a lot of people in the middle of the country believe about what goes on on the coasts are absolutely invisible to us -- the reverse much less so, altho there's a huge distortion that occurs as those ideas travel through entertainment and news channels which have agendas of their own.
additional source
Date: 2007-04-30 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 06:01 pm (UTC)Rebuild America First
Date: 2007-05-01 01:45 am (UTC)The book does an interesting job of covering CMT's position in the country music universe, compared to country radio and Great American Country (GAC, the other cable country music channel). CMT did not blacklist the Chicks, which tells you a lot right there.
We were looking at the Digital lineup we get the other day because I'd discovered we got Sundance and I wanted to know what else I hadn't been checking that I should have been (and Bloomberg!). When we got to FUSE, I asked R. what that was and he said, The Fuse. Duh. What's The Fuse? They actually play music videos. Aha!
I have not watched it myself.