Why Listen to Country Music?
A Podcast to Get Started
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Malcolm Gladwell goes to Nashville to talk with Bobby Braddock, who has written more sad songs than almost anyone else. What is it about music that makes us cry? And what sets country music apart? This podcast proposes, as I do below, that the storytelling does it. (Jay McD)
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What's to Like and Not Like about Country Music
It always tells a story.When most people hear the words “country music” they draw the assumption that every song is about drinking a beer or a sappy love song, but that is far from what country music really is. It's sincere at its best.It can be explained in just one word: sincerity. When a hillbilly sings a crazy song, he feels crazy. When he sings, 'I Laid My Mother Away,' he sees her a-laying right there in the coffin. He sings more sincere than most entertainers because the hillbilly was raised rougher than most entertainers. You got to know a lot about hard work. You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly. (Hank Williams (as cited in Fall and Redemption, see button below.) I'm tired of this "white southern pride" thing.I don't like the fact that country music is so white. And even though I'm a southerner I'm getting really tired of this southern pride thing. I hope this can change. It seems to me like so often hip-hop and rap tell the stories of black friends, and country tells the stories of working class white friends. It appeals so middle class whites who like to think they are working class, when really they're not. They just want to feel "authentic." I want all of this to change. I like it when Brad Paisley and LL Cool J begin to bridge the gap. I know it was controversial: maybe too soft on the history of southern racism. But it was a start. I'm looking for more country rap.. That's my thing. (College student, 2018) |
It's about real people not perfect people.Country music expresses not only the hopes and longings of average people but also their frailties and failed dreams . . . the music is consumed with the fragility of relationships and the evanescence of life. Above all, the music breathes with the contradictions implicit in our lives. Indeed, the tension that gives country music its power and that defines the stylistic essence of such great singers of Hank Williams, Sr., George Jones, and Merle Haggard, arises from the struggle to voice the contending irresolvable impulses of the human heart. It takes you into the republic of stories.I like most all popular music, including hip hop and rap, electronic music, and metal. But I find myself turning to country music when I need to hear a story. Rhythm and Blues, too. I don't like the "bro" country music that's all about male fantasies. I like the real country music that tells me a story about somebody's life, and sometimes my own. Everything's not a number, you know. And not even a beat or a rhyme. It's a story. For a class I read a book by Arlene Goldbard called The Republic of Stories. She says that w live in a culture obsessed with data (the culture of Datastan) and that we need a culture that respects stories (the Republic of Stories.) Country music takes me into a republic of stories. (College student, 2018) I think "bro" country is infantile but really like feminist country.I can't stand Bro-Country: songs that champion "drinking Tecate, truck-tailgate parties, and girls in tied-up t-shirts. Women in Bro-Country music "are perfect Barbie dolls who are just supposed to sit there and look hot. They don't get a character or a personality in these songs." I hate this. I like Stripes by Brandy Clark and Follow Your Arrow. And I'm looking for some good black country rap, too. (College student, 2018) |
But some of it is just really, really good.
Some of it is very sophisticated musically. I'm a guitarist, so I know. It's not just about three chords and a story. Have you ever listened to Chet Atkins play guitar? He's country. Have you ever been to Nashville and listened to the thousands of musicians on the streets and in the clubs? They're country. Have you listened to Dolly Parton and felt the range of her voice? Or to John Prine? Truth is: in a time when rock is almost dead and so much contemporary music is obsessed with beat an rhythm, country music is carrying the traditions of melody and, like rap, lyrical subtlety. Despite the canned nature of top forty country, some of it is just really, really good. Give it a try. (College student, 2018). |
Meet Chet Atkins |
Give it a Try
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Philosophical Background
Beyond the Obsession with Metrics
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Metrics can be a valuable tool for analysis, but an obsession with metrics becomes an obstacle to community and creativity...The trouble is, the very quest for metrics is contaminated with ideas and assumptions borrowed from worlds that have nothing in particular to do with community and creativity. The notion that everything of value can be weighed and measured, which is one of the most grotesque artifacts of post-Enlightenment thinking, is antithetical to the deep values of community cultural development. Indeed, in this domain, the search for metrics actually harms what it seeks to help. and a conceptual mistake.The Metrics Syndrome is a manifestation of what the philosopher Friedrich Hayek sixty-oddyears ago termed “scientism.” Scientism means taking methods and ways of thinking that work very well in the physical sciences and misapplying them to highly complex human endeavors,where they don’t work at all. If you can arrive at solid truth about the behavior of minerals or fluids by weighing and measuring them, this thinking goes, you should also be able to reduce social systems or circumstances to quantitative data, and this should enable you to understand and intervene in them with equal success. As Hayek and others have pointed out, this is a huge and deeply unscientific mistake. Unlike working with a box of rocks, it is only possible to obtain quantifiable data on a few aspects of human events or situations. Researchers can devise tests and grading systems, tabulate how much time or money is spent in a certain endeavor, or even stretch to the kind of absurdity one state agency achieved in establishing a scale of “artist-client contact hours. In the domain of cultural development, the data thus obtained will always be limited, and almost never reveal the most important aspects of whatever is being studied. It forgets the fluid nature of knowledge.
It neglects the open future.When it comes to community cultural development, the Metrics Syndrome also has another fatal, intrinsic flaw: it is based on the idea that factors can be derived from past experience,isolated and applied to future actions in such a way that success is guaranteed. But one terrible byproduct of scientism is that it generates theories with absolutely no predictive power. How is it possible to force creative vitality into being? We have only to look at planned communities where the Metrics Syndrome shaped development to see that two and two don’t make community cultural development. Consider the instant villages where prefab shopping districts and common areas attempt to mimic the fabric of organic village life in the hope of reproducing organic cultural vitality. Want to live there? It neglects relationships and feelings.Everyone who works on the ground in communities knows that all kinds of unquantifiable factors affect the quality and worth of the experience: feelings, ideas, relationships, beliefs and more. In the quest for metrics, such things are dismissed or devalued precisely because they can’t be adequately demonstrated by quantitative measurement. Before long, the idea takes hold that only the factors that can be quantified are relevant and the rest—indeed, the heart and soul of the work—is just some soft stuff that has to be scraped away to get at the facts. It neglects indeterminacy and vagueness.Whitehead is a philosopher for whom vagueness is a reality, as his category of transmutation witnesses. This may seem strange from the philosopher who has necessitated one ultimate category, eight categories of existence, twenty seven categories of explanation, and nine categoreal obligations. Nevertheless, these categories are designed to accommodate (among other things) the real potentiality, the real indeterminacy, the real incompleteness, the real inherent creativity, the real relativity, the real inexactitude, the real and vague perception of causal efficacy, the real inextricable antecedents that are involved in any actual occasion. “The problem is to discriminate exactly what we know vaguely.” Thus, it is Whitehead who says” “My point is that the final outlook of philosophic thought cannot be based on the exact statements which form the basis of special sciences. The exactness is a fake.” Then Whitehead’s own exactness and precision in formulating his own philosophical system is, in part, exactness about how actuality is inexact and indeterminate and precision in stating how actualities are imprecise and vague. It is Whitehead who reminds us that: “It follows that philosophy is not a science.” In sum Whiteheadian reality including Whiteheadian time is inexact since real concrete existences are inexact experiences. Actualities have not the exactitude of ideas. It neglects the ultimacy of creativity.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. The problem is the obsession.There is no need to get rid of metrics. There are aspects of reality which are quantifiable and the very act of quantification can play a constructive role in life, not only in the professions but in daily life. We need to count things, to calculate, to design things, to develop algorithms, to compute, to manufacture. Moreover, mathematics has a special kind of beauty, akin to poetry, which adds joy to life. The problem lies in an obsession with metrics. It is immature. The need is to grow up. What to do? Here are some possibilities:Embrace multiple forms of intelligenceIn the spirit of Howard Gardner (Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education), it can help to recognize multiple forms of intelligence: verbal-linguistic, mathematical-logical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, empathic, introspective, naturalistic, and spiritual. Recognize that the various forms are blended within the life of a single human being and that each form has value relative to different contexts. Support arts education and science education.One purpose of the arts is to help us hear the stories of others. As Arlene Goldbard points out, practicing the arts can foster empathy, imagination, and a capacity for being present to the world in creative and constructive ways. See her Three Habits of the Heart and Mind to Spark Cultural Awakening. And studying art can do the same. See the video by Meg Boyles on Crystal Bridges Museum and the Dazzling Effect. In the current climate education in the sciences has a higher status than education in the arts. They should have equal status. Adopt a more organic view of the universe.The obsession with matrics is based on an epistemology of control and a metaphysics of the machine. While there is nothing wrong with machines -- and lots that is right about them -- even machines need to be rethought in light of a larger and more organic vision of reality. A vision in which all things are understood as alive and moving into an open future, connected to one another and yet independent of one another, and filled with value for themselves, for one another, and for the larger whole. Whitehead's philosophy of organism is one excellent example of such a relational metaphysics. There are others, too. Maximize the possibility of happy accidents.When we work with people in communities, one accurate way to describe what we are trying to do is to maximize the possibility of positive accidents. If those believing the right metrics can make things happen their way can be compared to builders, measuring out lumber and pounding nails to construct something to their exact specifications, community artists can be compared to farmers: preparing the soil, adding food and water, placing the seeds in their earthy nests, then letting the sun, air and microscopic life forms do their miraculous thing. Our hope is to help create the conditions, the environment in which people’s creativity can flourish and grow, each according to his or her own nature. This can never be quantified. Get over perfectionism.A preoccupation with metrics is a symptom, not only of a desire for inordinate control, but also for a type of perfectionism that cannot handle failure and mistakes: the "imperfections" in life. And yet these imperfections are typically a font for creativity and growth. Patricia Adams Farmer's article in JJB makes a strong case for the Beauty of Imperfection. Everything is not about, and does not need to be about, efficiency. There is a constructive place in life for inefficiency, error, and the freedom to fail. Make peace with vagueness.Vagueness is part of the essence of the universe. Hopes and dreams, loves and hatreds, desires and satisfactions, fears and longings -- these are part of the essence of the universe, too. They are not containable in simple formulas. They emerge out of open-ended relationships, the boundaries of which are indistinct. Even the hills and rivers, even the molecules and atoms, are filled with open-ended relationships. The wisdom of science is to discern the mathematical patterns within the relationships, and there is a beauty to what is discovered. Science is a kind of poetry in its own right. But it is not the only kind of poetry. The beauty of the imprecise and the vague has a value of its own. The spiritually mature soul has made her peace with vagueness. Welcome the republic of stories."We are in the midst of seismic cultural change. In the old paradigm, priorities are shaped by a mechanistic worldview that privileges whatever can be numbered, measured, and weighed; human beings are pressured to adapt to the terms set by their own creations. Macroeconomics, geopolitics, and capital are glorified. They form the foreground of the world depicted by powerful institutions: banks, militaries, energy corporations, major news media. People are expected to make sacrifices for profit-margin, to go to war for oil, to accept environmental damage that threatens future generations—and often, to do all this for no palpable reward beyond “improved economic indicators.” Within the old paradigm how we feel, how we connect, how we spend our time, how we make our way and come to know each other—these are all part of the scenery. |
