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March 15, 2007
Rae Wear has an article in the Brisbane Institute's online journal Brisbane Line entitled Australian Country Music’s Political Message that links into this earlier post. Wear says:
At the broadest level, country music's subject is the pain of loss. It is 'losing and hurting' music, telling stories of lost loves, lost farms, lost identities, lost lives. Its symbolic roots are rural, wherever it is recorded or performed. The values underpinning life on the land are presented as basic and real, untainted by pretension or falseness. Lyrics emphasise the lives of ordinary people and their struggles: against alcoholism, a cheating partner, fate, or their own worst selves.
Unfortunately no musicians are mentioned. Nor are the different strands in country music explored, nor the innovations in the musical tradition spelt out. The politics is developed from the content not from the sedimentated musical form.
Wear goes on to say that:
Like populism, country music presents a black and white world: good women and bad; authentic and fake, city and country. In country music, city and country people are portrayed as inhabiting fundamentally different worlds. While country boys and girls may be seduced by city partners, these romances invariably fail and the prodigals return, with relief, to their country homes. Alternatively, they remain permanent exiles, pining for country homes and family. The Australia of the imagination that they dream of is monocultural, not significantly different from the country described by the bush balladists at the turn of the last century, or the one that Pauline Hanson wanted to retrieve.
For Wear country music's impact comes from its narrative strength as this is what distinguishes it from other commercially popular styles. Its musical form is interpreted in terms of musical predictability allows listeners to focus on the words and makes copying simple for amateur musicians.
Is the musical form as conservative and hidebound as Wear assumes? Surely there has been crossover with rock music? Surely there is innovative country music or alternative country music?
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I read Wear's "article" a while back (it was also on Online Opinion) and was deeply unimpressed. As you say, she mentions no examples and writes in such an abstracted generalised way. I'm afraid if the only actual human being you mention in an article about Australian country music is Pauline Hanson I switch off a bit and am not inclined to put much effort into engaging.