Week 25: Lucero - 1372 Overton Park (2009)

Country music, as evidenced by the classic cliché, “I listen to everything, except country and rap,” is one of the most regularly dismissed genres of popular music. Like rap, country music is also one of the most stereotyped, calling up images of White cowboys with shit-kicker heels and an NRA membership just as reliably as hip-hop brings to mind Black men with knee-height pants, big sunglasses, and an uncomfortable lust for “bitches”. Needless to say, both of those images are rarely accurate.

The reason why both rap and country music so easily fall into clichés and stereotypes is their focus on story and personality. Unlike the other lyrically focused mainstream genre, rock, both rap and country focus more on narrative than on raw emotion; while this can make the songs more interesting, it also means they often take more time to make their point. A rock song can often summarize their point in one chorus, while some country songs take a few full verses to get interesting; ditto with classic rap music, which required the listener to pay close enough attention to decipher the rapid-fire lyrics.

When rap crossed over to the mainstream for good, it did so by slowing the tempo and putting an emphasis on hooks. Hooks are the choruses of modern rap music, providing something to get stuck in a person’s head and make them stop the dial when surfing the radio. Eminem arguably mastered the trick, using it to embed “My Name Is” so far into the popular consciousness that it essentially guaranteed his future career. Similarly, “In Da Club” turned 50 Cent from an underground hero to a superstar by keeping him from rapping at all.

Week 12: Petrolz - EVE2009 (2009)

Broadly put, there are two basic ways to listen to music: critically and naively. A critical perspective, the one I’ve adopted on this blog for example, attempts to connect the music in question to other topics or examples. This can range from analyses of cultural and historical background to simple comparisons of the discussed music to other artists or genres. In other words, a critical perspective is anything that attempts to make explanations of a musical piece.

The other way to discuss music is naively. That word isn’t meant as a pejorative; a naïve perspective is simply one in which only the music in question is being discussed. Nothing else is brought into the conversation, and for that reason such discussion is often limited to stating facts (“That keyboard is a Melotron set to imitate a flute.” [A fabulous no-prize to anyone who guesses that one]) or opinions (“I like this song.”). Understandably, such a perspective often gets short shrift.

One of the things music snobs like me lose is the ability to listen to music in a naïve way, at least not without expending some minor effort. My past few years of greedily devouring as much music as I could afford (often considerably more than that, to be honest) means that anytime I listen to a new song, I instinctively compare it to something else. I suspect this is what prevents, along with many others, from enjoying bland radio pap; when I hear something like Shinedown’s “Second Chance”, my mind parses it with a library of other similar songs and finds that one woefully lacking. I’m fundamentally incapable of making it past “Well I just say Hailey’s Comet, she waved/Said why you always running in place?” without vomiting up a stream of dismissal, critique, and violent sarcasm. The song deserves it, no doubt about it, but I’d hardly call that a typical response.

As far as I can tell from casual observation, the typical response to such music is to pay as little attention to it as possible. Most people, in my experience, do not pay close attention to what’s playing on the radio when they’re in the office, the club, or even their own car. It’s just noise to work along to, dance along to, or drive along to; a superior alternative to silence and little more.