Media Curmudgeon

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February 06, 2005

Country Music

"Country Tops the Billboard Crop" was the headline in the "Arts, Briefly" column of The New York Times Thursday, February 3, The Arts section. The item read "Even without a supporting single, the introspective collection of beach tunes 'Be as You Are (Songs From an Old Blue Chair),' written and sung by country star Kenney Chesney...was the top selling pop album last week. With opening-week sales of 311,000, Mr. Chesney's album, on the BNA label, surpassed 'The Documentary' (Interscope) by the Los Angeles rapper, The Game, which finished No. 2 after dominating the previous week."

Could this be trend? Could Country Music be gaining in popularity and rap decreasing in popularity? Unfortunately, I don't think rap is declining much, but I do hope Country Music is increasing in popularity. Country Music is the music of the heartland and of Bush's Texas, and you have to wonder if Country Music's popularity has anything to do with a shift in musical taste that follows America's expression of more traditional, heartland values in its voting in the last election.

At any rate, good for Kenny Chesney. Falling on the heels of two monster albums by Norah Jones, perhaps the success of Chesney's pop-country album and Norah Jones's pop-jazz-country albums reflect a shift away from hard rock to softer, more listenable, less angry music. Again, let's hope.

But I think that Jones's and Chesney's success (Chesney's might be a lot briefer than Jones's) is as much a matter of rock's decline as of the excellence of Jones's and Chesney's music. Angry, rebellious, male teenagers, who are the main fans of hard rock, are switching to video games to relieve their testosterone rushes and are downloading their heavy metal to iPods and MP3 players, which is hurting both rock album sales and listening to rock radio stations. When Howard Stern switches to Sirius saltellite radio at the beginning of next year, terrestrial radio listening will decline further, especially if the big radio conglomerates such as Clear Channel can't come up with more innovative and intriguing formats than the cookie-cutter ones they have now.

Teenage girls are also downloading music, which is hurting listening to pop radio stations--better to buy and download from iTunes a Norah Jones album and listen to it on an iPod or MP3 player than listen to overcommercialized, boring, silly, rap-dominated radio.

About every decade Country Music seems to make a comeback--remember John Travolta's Urban Cowboy and the ensuing surge in Country Music's popularity? Maybe it's happening again; so dust off your Stetson hat and cowboy boots (the newest New York fashion trend for women). Wouldn't it be an ironic hoot if hip, liberal, fashion-conscious New Yorkers started listening to Country Music and wearing cowboy boots--a trend started by George Bush, a square, conservative, unfashionable Texan?

Posted by Charles Warner at February 6, 2005 11:14 AM

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Aron Levinson at February 10, 2005 09:03 PM writes:

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