[PLAYING GUITAR]
So one of the places that I'm stopping on the road trip
that I'm currently on is Nashville, AKA, Music City,
because of the number of record producers and record companies
that are here.
It's also considered the home of modern country music
and has been instrumental in some way in launching
or helping the careers of no shortage of very, very
famous people.
Elvis, Taylor Swift, Roy Orbison, Miley Cyrus,
The Back Keys, they've all come through or come from Nashville.
And they've probably come through the neighborhood
that I'm walking through right now, Music Row.
So since I'm here in the birthplace of modern country,
I thought it might be fun to talk about country,
a little bit of its history, but also the crazy sort
of musical melting pot that exists
and how country is related to genres that we might not
ever normally associate with it.
So recently I was in an Uber, and it
had the thing where you can use your phone to play music
through the stereo.
And I asked the driver what he thought about it.
And he said that he loved it because it exposes him
to music that he would never normally listen to.
And I asked, like, there must be people who want
to listen to terrible music?
And he scolded me and said, there's
no such thing as terrible music.
And then he thought for a second and he
said, except country music.
Nobody ever wants to listen to country music.
And I mean, for the record, I really like country music.
Like, Toby Keith is not really for me,
but Gillian Welch, Daniel Romano, Sturgill Simpson,
I really like them.
So I think it's probably important to note upfront
while we're talking about these kinds of things that country
music, like most music genres, is not
an uncomplicated monolith.
There's a lot going on, and also I
don't think it's totally fair to say that no one wants
to listen to country music.
It was the third highest selling genre by records in 2014.
It was the second most listened to rush
hour radio genre in 2009.
I've seen stats claiming that upwards
of 75% of radio listeners and 20% of Americans in general
regularly listen to country.
But, still, I will agree that it seems
like it makes sense to say, no one listens to country music.
And I asked my Uber driver about this,
why he thought it might be.
And he said, because it is so sad.
And I think that the sadness has something to do with it,
but I don't think it's the whole story.
I think people feel OK being polemical about country
music because of its relationship
to American politics.
There have been musicians that have made it really political.
They shouldn't stand for the whole genre.
However, I totally understand the fact that they do.
I just-- I wish it wasn't the case.
But, yes, historically, country music has been sad.
It has been about the trials and tribulations
of the people singing it or the people
they want to identify with.
Writer Robert Lacy wrote about that first group
of country music listeners and fans way back when,
saying that they couldn't tell you
with any certainty who was running the show,
just that it wasn't they.
They drove the trucks, worked the sawmills
and turpentine plants.
When you get down on the bottom of life, looking up,
it can look confusing.
Everything begins to seem like a trick.
Maybe that's why their music cried out for honesty,
faithfulness, and the like.
And so in one sense, especially when
it comes to what would be called that high, lonesome sound--
SINGER: (SINGING)I am a man of constant sorrow.
---country music is an honest lamentation for a group
of people who feel adrift in the world.
But in another sense, it might also have been a big, fat joke.
In his paper "Resistance and Relief," Iain Ellis
writes about how while folk music tended
to directly confront its oppressors,
country music tended to focus on the self,
the identity of the person singing the song,
and, therefore, the people like the person singing the song.
He explains that constant lamentations
over lost lovers, pickup trucks, and a world gone mad
are self-deprecating narrative tales
of fatalistic resignation.
(SINGING) I wonder if you think of me in my misery.
Country western humor, he writes,
is loser humor, the humble reflections of the victim.
But, OK, to a certain degree, that was then, and this is now.
That sad, twangy country sound is found less and less
on country music radio and even the country charts.
And as you might suspect, economics
has something to do with the reason why.
The commercialization of country music
begins with the Grand Ole Opry here in Nashville,
which is a live and radio show, founded by an insurance company
to sell policies.
Hi to Nashville, Tennessee, and time or another big half
hour of Grand Ole Opry Live here on the Nashville Network.
Not long after that started, the CMA, or Country Music
Association, was founded to institutionalize
that commercialization and sales aspect of country music.
And they decided that in order to help that process along,
it would be best if country music distanced itself
from its hillbilly connotations because that's hard to sell.
And so over time, its sound changed
to what we would now describe as the Nashville sound,
with fewer banjos and mandolins, less twang, more guitars,
more sounding like pop records, less wailing,
and more crooning.
And so it was in this neighborhood,
over the last 60 to 70 years, that that transition
and that sound was developed.
(SINGING) Talking 'bout girls, talking 'bout trucks,
running them red dirt roads out, kicking up dust.
This leads to two really familiar paradoxes-- first,
Johnny Cash and artists like him,
who cut this figure of rugged, down-to-earth, uber-famous
megastars, and people like Taylor Swift,
whose transition to pop is confounding to say the least.
Like, to what degree was Taylor not pop at the point she
crossed over?
Importantly, though, I think we need
to realize that these things are not endemic to country music,
but to the music industry as a whole.
It's just that country music provides a great specific case
study for the modern commercialization of culture.
Country music, like so many other musics,
is sold on a kind of authenticity.
But importantly, in the process of the selling,
important questions get raised about that authenticity
and the people making claims to it.
Robert Lacy, writing about country music again,
said that the music of the underclass had finally arrived,
but in the process it had disappeared,
having been swallowed up by the great autonomic mulching
machine that is American consumer culture.
This country has genius for that, of course.
It can co-opt a counter trend quicker
than you can say Whole Earth Catalog, Volkswagen Beetle,
or granola bar, which is a thing I
had absolutely no idea was a counter-culture trend
and is frankly shocking.
They're made with 100% natural ingredients.
Not all granola bars are.
I'm gonna to just stew on that for a while.
Lacy is writing about country music,
but he could just as easily be writing
about hip hop's transition from Bronx street parties
to massive, rival, bi-coastal industries.
He could be writing about punk rock's slow subsumption
into the alternative music sphere-- anything where
a group of people's hopes or frustrations with the world
are turned into music and then that
is coerced into a massive commercial entity, which I'm
not necessarily saying is bad, especially
if we're talking about access.
But I think the big question we always
end up asking in these situations
is if the future changes the meaning of the past.
If bands like Blink 182 change the meaning of the Ramones
or Television or 1,000 other punk bands that I've never
heard of because they never played a show anywhere
other than some random basement somewhere--
does the existence of Dwight Yoakam
change the meaning of country music
that existed in the hills of Appalachia 100 years ago?
And second, does any of this music
lose claim to its intended meaning
based upon how it's made?
We talked a little bit about this in the "LEGO Movie"
episode, but for some reason in music
it seems like such a specific question.
Like, do songs about the simplicity of country living
change after you sort of know more
about the history of country music
and where and how it's made?
I don't know.
What do you guys think?
Let me know in the comments, and thank
you so much for taking a stroll around Music Row with me.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's around lunchtime.
So I have to go and eat all of the hot chicken.
I will see you guys back in New York.
I just drove in from Nashville, and boy are my--
this joke doesn't really work.
Let's see what you guys had to say about road trips.
First thing's first, I'm going to be in Phoenix for Comic-Con
on the 29th through the 31st.
So I'm going to be wandering around.
We're doing an office hours on Friday night,
and we're doing a panel on Saturday.
So we'll put information on where and when those things are
happening in the doobly doo.
I hope to see you.
I am so excited.
OK, so on to comments-- on the subreddit,
nukethewhalesagain and timpek talk
about how a drive becomes a road trip when you have
quality time with a passenger.
And this, I can totally see this,
but I have definitely gone on road trips
by myself where I have driven a long distance from point A
to point B, stopped along the way,
felt like I was passing through.
But there was no person in the passenger seat with me.
So I'd be really curious to know what other people think
about this, whether or not there's a requirement
that you have a passenger or a navigator
or someone else with you.
So much of the drive that we took
was piloted by Google telling us where to go,
and we had to decide to take the scenic route
or to go out of our way to find things to look at.
And I think, if anything, the road trip,
as defined by going out of one's way,
might actually come to an end not because of technology,
but because of the diminishing economic returns of making
something like a roadside attraction.
All of the roadside attractions that we saw on our trip
were definitely in a state of disrepair.
None of them were new.
There was nothing that seemed to be built recently.
And so I wonder if that is more what
will spell the end of what we might
describe as a classic road trip, than, say, you know, AI.
Friend of the show, Joe Hanson, from It's
OK to be Smart, talks about how though he agrees
with the idea of passing through,
he's not necessarily on board with this idea of the highway
taking you through places and says that,
to a significant degree, it actually
does take you around them.
And I would say that if you are relying solely
on the infrastructure, the signs,
to take you to places that are off the beaten trail,
you might be missing a lot of things.
And this is something we should have talked
about in the episode, actually.
The combination of high-speed roads and things
like Foursquare, Google Maps, Atlas Obscura,
and other collections of interest
that exist on the internet work as a really great team.
And that was how we managed to see a lot of the really
interesting stuff that we saw, was
by traveling quickly from place to place but every once
in awhile checking in with the sort of local geography
about what of interest was around us.
And those two things, I think, work really well in concert.
Alana D talks about how another reason for the popularity
of road trips in America has to do with the fact
that we have no high-speed rail system, which
is a regrettable truth.
Drew Gaughan, whose last name I hope
I am pronouncing correctly, sees last week's episode
as another example of American exceptionalism.
And I think it's worth pointing out
that after we were finished shooting
the episode in the car, Molly turned to me and said,
actually, it's characteristically
American for Americans to claim ownership over something
like the road trip.
And I just want to be clear that I'm not
saying that the road trip is uniquely American
or that we own it, only that for many people
there is a strong association between the United
States and road trips.
And there's got to be a reason for that.
I know it's not ours.
The first one was German.
Speaking of which, there were comments from people
all around the world talking about the way
they see their home country relating
to road trips, comments from Talia Enright, Sophie
Rose, Christian H. So we'll put links
to those in the doobly doo.
They're really, really great.
TwoGeekForNames and everybody else who
was concerned about my safety, I want
to let you know that we took all of the necessary safety
precautions when shooting the episode.
I did not do anything dangerous or out of the ordinary.
I do sometimes drive with one hand, which
you are not supposed to do.
But I am a very safe driver.
I promise.
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