Just want to throw this out there, everytime I hear Darius Rucker mentioned as a country artist, I cringe at the notion. That is all, carry on.
Sure, but lots of style of music bleed over into one another. I don't listen to country radio, but I'd be willing to bet they don't play much Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. The stuff that sucks -- the music I can't stand and that the initial youtube vid mocks -- is the stuff played by the people who are paid salaries to play "country" music.
He's about as "country" of an artist as there is out there right now. Let's jut not get into the great Wagon Wheel debate please.
Maybe more so the basics and or roots of a lot of music are really close to country. I still stick with my assembly line song writing and the 40 year old office lady as the reasons for most of it. That and I guess bleed over of the TRL factor.
The assembly line songwriting and production is the definitely the reason for it. I'm not sure whether said assembly line system exists because of the 40 year old office lady or another demographic. But there has to be a market driving it, or it wouldn't continue churning out terrible songs.
Of artists that have started in the last 5 years, name 5 that are more country than him. He's got a classic rock voice which translates into a country voice without much effort.
I've spent more time that I ever want to admit thinking about this. That's where I am at with it, but my mind could be changed. It just seems to me the catchy songs that they are going to play mid day somehow also double over into songs the rednecks at CMA Fest go ga ga over. When I lived in Nashville I went to church with a guy who wrote a top 10 song for Alan Jackson. It was his first one and shortly thereafter he was absorbed into one of the assembly lines. I was more shocked that it was his goal to get into one of these because that is the only way to make it in the writing business now. I've also got a really good friend who is trying to break in now and can't because he refuses to go to the current crap model. And he's a damn good writer too.
Randy Houser, Lee Brice, Easton Corbin, Eric Church, Chris Young. I'm sure I'm missing some along the way.
And of those 5, I wish 4 would go away with church being the lone exception. They wing the same crap, just with a twang. Not as bad and Florida Georgia line, but I'm still not a fan.
Eric Church is country's Bill Simmons. The big label darling posing as some different outsider. Go namedrop and sing your songs dude.
Does he make his own music, or just write lyrics? If the latter, I got nothing. Country music is the only genre where the majority of the artists aren't the ones who wrote the songs, and so yeah I guess the machine calls the shots. If the former, then tell him to stay away from the machine. If it weren't for the influx of really good "indie" artists in rock and pop music -- who just made great music on their own terms and without regard (at least initially) to how much they were gonna get paid -- we might be living in a world where the airwaves were monopolized by the Creeds and Nickelbacks and Three Doors Downs of the world, and where people weren't fully cognizant of how comprehensively atrocious said bands really were. But this is the cycle of music. Genres can get stuck in a rut. Hell, Master P almost single-handedly ruined the most musically innovative genre of a generation. Fortunately Outkast, Eminem and a few others came on the scene and saved the day. I think country could be saved if some groundbreaking artists came on the scene and the played the role of Nirvana to the Warrant and Winger of contemporary country music. Or maybe not. Mainstream country music has been really bad and completely devoid of creativity for a good long while now.
