At 11/13/15 12:03 PM, JBK wrote:
Im a fan of folk/blues which influences music referred to as alternative country which I usually like.
Stop right there. Blues is not country, country is not blues. Bluesmen are explicitly banned from country music. This is a hard and fast rule. And yes, it's totally 100% about race, racial identity, systematic racism, and other racey type race stuff. The blues has a lot to do with civil rights. The blues song "I'm a man" is mainly about how being black does not inherently imply illiteracy, and not only can Bo Diddley demand his rights as a man, but he can also spell it, read it, and write it. This song was later stolen and white washed by Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds during the British Invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_a_Man_%28Bo_Diddley_song%29
The Blues is about being sad because you live in a world that discriminates against you. No person who has not suffered terribly is capable of making real blues. Same thing with "folk" and blues. Folk music is european, blues is indigenous american with heavy african influence, and never the twain shall meet. White people playing the blues is rock and roll, black people playing country is rock and roll. You can't strip the politics out of it, it doesn't work that way. The politics define the genre.
I enjoy a lot more country than Id think I would.
I very much doubt what you are being sold as "country" actually is. Western swing, for example, is often presented as country when it is in fact a subgenre of jazz. A lot of smooth jazz is passed off as "country" these days. It's like watching a rape victim be raped by the judge at her rape trial and forced to raise the rape baby who then grows up to rape and murder her.
Other than a few random old country songs, Im not a fan of pop radio country. New country is really not country at all not that I was ever really a fan of any country. It just snuck its way into my tastes through blues and punk.
Blues=>Rock and Roll=>Punk are all the same thing, just in time periods performed by different races. In the 70's the politics of rock and roll became dangerous because it caused the collapse of the economic structure of the Jim Crowe south and lucrative share cropping cotton agriculture, so racists rebranded Rock and Roll as "punk" and claimed it's origins were in British (british invasion ring a bell?) folk music, which is a bald faced lie designed to re-segregate music culturally.
If you notice the British Invasion and the concept of "punk" music coincides directly with the end of the Civil Rights Era and the assassination of Martin Luther King. It's one of the greatest scandals in history.
For example, Harry Belafonte used proceeds from his musical career to fund MLK and the NAACP. At the time Harry Belafonte was considered a pioneer in the folk traditions of traditional american music, but now no one would ever consider Calypso or Rhumba to be traditional indigenous american music, despite the fact that this is historically true. After MLK's assassination, Belafonte was black listed and white washed from the history of american music.
It's a huge hairy deal, and if you are passionate about music, you should be very angry about it.
