Jon sez:
"even leaving aside the question of whether it's really a criticism to say
that a stylistic change includes a commercial motivation (in my book, it
ain't), from my perspective there's a healthy-sized difference between the
two characterizations."
I agree, Jon, but in the minds of someone like Tweedy and the rock
critics who interview him too much - generally reared in varying
countercultures with self-styled anticommercial posturings - the
"accusation" of commercial motivation is going to be read as a
sell-out slam, and nuances are likely to be ignored.
In a way I brought this up to show the double-bind involved: It's
plainly fact that it's hard to make a living doing twangy music that
doesn't pander to commercial country radio (not that all radio
country's bad, I hasten to say, but I think we can agree its demands
are fairly rigid). Rock audiences, for their part, are wary of twangy
sounds, the more fool them, and rock labels even more so. So the
artist's under all this pressure from "above" to make other sorts of
music, and if you're Jeff Tweedy, you might say, "Well, actually,
that's what I'm interested in doing at this point anyway." Yet you
feel the reverse pressure from "below" -- the weird segment of the
rock audience/press that thrives on twangy sounds & sneers at pop (as
if country were in itself a non-pop form - note second internal
paradox).
Yet in cases where label-and-money concerns are a bigger factor than
natural development, the artist might feel their own regrets about
leaving country inflections behind (not in Tweedy's case, I think, but
I wonder about the Old 97s) and be extra defensive - perhaps
projecting their own ambivalence onto a somewhat mythically
constituted "alt-country" audience (esp. when critics are suddenly
happy to help you do so).
It's all, as Chris Isaks (sp?) might say, a twisted game. Makes me
envy the pro musicians out there a bit less.
carl w
