Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Tue, 28 Jul 1992 17:25:43 EDT
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      Warning: contains blatant overgeneralizations.

From:         gmgettie@THAMA1.APGEA.ARMY.MIL
Subject:      re: re: Re: Country Music

> Imagine that...there IS someone who hates country music as much as me. I too
> can listen to anything BUT country music. It is boring and depressing and ALL
> that I have heard sounds the same.

I'm not too crazy about it myself. I do try not to make blanket condemnations
by genre (except for Fender guitars :-), but country is just *so* conservative,
it sets my teeth on edge. It celebrates everything wrong with this country and
its citizens: kneejerk self-righteousness, redneckism, whining in one's beer,
fecklessness, and overindulging in metabolic toxins like alcohol.

> Maybe it's all that Metallica we've been listening to, eh Bob?

Whatever turned me off the stuff, it sure wasn't Metallica. I'm older than
Dave Mustaine (and crankier).

From:         David Malbuff <SPGDAM@UCCVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      RE: re: Re: crazy thought

> Well, who do you like in country music? Is it just these newcomers like
> Garth Brooks and this Billy Ray clone, or do you go for the old stuff,
> too? Here's some names: Merle Haggard, Ernest Tubb, Patsy Cline, Hank
> Williams (SENIOR, PLEASE!), Bill Monroe, Bob Wills. What do you think
> about them?

Merle Haggard: what a great American-- NOT! The Youngbloods used to do a parody
of "Okie from Muskogee," touting the virtues of tolerant cooperative lifestyles
and plenty of marijuana, and one of their cuter lines was, "We still take in
strangers if they're Haggard."

Hank Williams: and they think today's teen idols take too many drugs. That's
another thing about country, the entrenched hypocrisy of it. Remember Elvis
getting deputized by Nixon into the DEA, when he was wired to the very gills?

Bill Monroe: bluegrass is not country. Bluegrass is a highly structured form
that contains some elements of country, mixed with old-timey rhythms, gospel
type harmonies, and what happened to British Isles folk fiddling after getting
off the boat in the Melting Pot (tm). What it shares with country is a cloying
sentimentality. Fortunately, it parts company over the issue of pedal steel
guitars, which don't sound like cattle, they sound like sheep or chickens.

> Echoing Leonard's post, here's some other country musicians to consider:
> John Lee Hooker, Johnny Shines, Bukka White, and Charley Patton.
> Patton's entire catalog has just been re-issued on Yazoo Records.

The blues ain't country neither. Blues is a genuine folk art form, limited
though it may be by the varying literacy rates of its practitioners. Country
is a business, where urban semi-sophisticates from Nashville dumb down to the
consumer in the trailer park.

From:         Rick <MMLRICK@UBVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Country Music

> In the Learning to Like It Dept.:
>
> Now, I've spent most of my life ridiculing country music. As a recovering
> musical elitist I'm attempting to reopen my mind toward the forms of music I
> used to refuse to listen to except under threat of torture or death, including
> country music, polka music, Strauss waltzes and Sinatra.

Watch out, it's cool to like polkas now, they're World Beat. (They really are
the indigenous folk dance of Poland. The Irish play some hot ones too, and let
us not forget Brave Combo.)

> As I grit my teeth and turn on the country FM station, I find some of the
music
> fun to listen to, some of it politically reactionary, much of it more like pop
> than traditional country (ultra-slick), some of it lyrically clever, but so
far
> I'm not moved either 1) to cry in my beer, 2) to do the achy breaky dance.

Aficionados call the ultra-slick stuff "Countrypolitan," a wonderful epithet.

> ps. I still feel kinda bad about that guy a month ago who left in a huff
> 'cause he felt noone shared his love of '50's rock 'n' roll. Granted, he was
> judgmental and closedminded about other types of music, but his flame burns
> were a bit too severe, I think.

Nuts. He charged in and said his stuff was the only music in the world worth
listening to. Even Tim and I don't do that! Plus his notion of how to listen--
"cruising," i.e. driving up and down the street aimlessly, with the car radio
cranked. The acoustics of car radio speakers are pathetic! How can you call
that listening?

From:         "The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny"
              <ALEVIN@RCNVMS.RCN.MASS.EDU>
Subject:      CD SplurgeFest VIII

> John Zorn/Naked City:
> 	When I was in Tower I saw two Naked City discs. One was an American
> release (the one I picked up) with a picture of a guy lying in the street
> with his face blown away. The other one which was an import had a topless
> Asian woman on the cover. Are these the same? If they are, it says something
> about censorship. It's not ok to show someone nude, but it's ok to show
> someone with his face shot off. BUT ANYWAYS...

Not the same record. The one with the topless Asian woman (brandishing a whip,
did you notice? This cover was banned in England) is a second recording called
_Torture Garden_, and is even more in the vein of "Speedball" and the short
blitzkrieg tunes. This material was supposed to come out on a CD, with some of
Naked City's classical covers (Scriabin, Debussy, Messiaen, and Brian Wilson),
under the title _Grand Guignol_, but apparently Nonesuch got cold feet...

> Sun Ra: Blue Delight
> 	Cut out bin madness! I picked up this CD for 6.99 in the cut out
> jazz section. I've never heard Sun Ra before but I've heard talk of him on
> here, so I decided this would be a cheap first investment. I was expecting
> something weird after seeing the picture of him on the cover wearing his
> "distinctive" attire. Surprise! It's all traditional jazz with covers of
> songs like "Days of Wine and Roses." I think I like his own compositions on
> here the best. The title tune is incredible. So where's this wierd guy
> everyone's been talking about?

The apogee of Ra's orbit was probably the '60s (seems like everyone was pretty
far out in that time frame). Look for some old Impulse albums like _The Magic
City_, _Angels and Demons at Play_, uh, the live Montreux set on BASF called
_It's After the End of the World_, the old ESP records called _The Heliocentric
Worlds of Sun Ra, Volumes I and II_... haven't listened to this stuff in many
moons, so I am, so to speak, spacing out on the titles.

> Fish: Internal Exile
> 	The ex-Marillion vocalist/writer's latest solo album. I don't like
> this quite as much as the stuff he did with Marillion. I think his band is
> trying to get the Marillion sound, but I feel something missing. Low point
> is the cover of "Something's In the Air" with it's sampled dance beat. High
> point is the lyrics.

High point is the bagpipes, on the title track. Carol said so.

From:         Coleen Gallagher <coleeng@PILOT.NJIN.NET>
Subject:      Re: The new censationship

> Seb,
>   I argree with you 100%.  I'm just wondering what your views are on what
> is exposed to the children of today's society.  Should we allow them to see
> all the violence and others things that people feel need to be censored?

Interesting choice of words. Have you noticed how few of these busybodies get
around to advocating any restrictions on violent content or imagery? You can't
see an actual snuff film, but outside of that, it seems like anything goes. It
has been calculated that the average American vidiot child has seen some 10,000
murders by the time he's old enough to vote. But it's okay for him to watch all
that carnage, whereas it's not okay for him to watch the act of love? What in
the name of Christ are we afraid of?

From:         Robert Kaplan <ST802174@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Any listeners of Hendrix or Dolphy?

> In addition, there appears to be a new film about Dolphy called "Last Date"
(or
> something like that).  I haven't seen it-just read a blurb in the NYT.  He
> died on stage, so that has something to do with the title of the film
,although
>  I'm not quite sure what that means.

There's a Dolphy album called _Last Date_, from that ill-fated European tour.
I don't think it was the actual last concert-- might be the last one he walked
away from :-(

The story as I heard it was that Dolphy had diabetes, and hadn't been eating
properly on tour (shitty road food). He collapsed on stage, and they rolled up
his sleeves and saw needle marks and said, Aha, he's a junkie, we can revive
him with a shot of glucose. Bad move-- what he needed was his insulin, not
more blood sugar, so it killed him.

My favorite Dolphy is _Out to Lunch_. It's real abstract, totally brilliant.
Superb band too: Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard pre-fusion, Ron Carter, a real young
Tony Williams, and a vibes player as the chordal instrument-- Walt Dickerson?
Another one called _Out There_ has almost the same lineup, but piano instead
of vibes. There's another story that Dolphy had arranged to start composition
lessons with Edgard Varese upon returning from that tour. (But they tell the
same story about Charlie Parker too, so it may be an urban legend.)

> Comments:     <Parser> W: Invalid RFC822 field -- ">While I am on the subject
>               of Country Music let me say that I thought this was:". Rest of
>               header flushed.

Yeah, right.
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