Maybe It's a "Big Tent" After All...

Variations on a theme on the state of country music

Music Row’s latest star, Beats By AI

I moved to Nashville and joined a Music Row law firm in 2011 because I wanted to break into the country music business. I’d had some early success in Birmingham with indie clients such as Bon Iver, Dawes, and Alabama Shakes. Those acts didn’t really care where I hung my hat - Nashville might even have been considered a negative. I had one act I considered to be more or less a country act, The Civil Wars. That’s what put me on the map in Nashville. They had a huge buzz in the emerging folk and singer/songwriter scene, with some inroads into country.

In fact, in 2011 The Civil Wars - with one successful independent release with their album Barton Hollow - were nominated for a CMA Award for Country Duo of the Year. I felt like I was on my way on The Row, until a colleague burst my bubble by informing me that my client wasn’t really a country act at all. On Music Row in 2011, “country” wasn’t a genre; it was a radio format. Since The Civil Wars weren’t worked to country radio, they weren’t country. End of discussion.

Now, 14 years later, country is becoming the “big tent” it once purported to be. Country radio and the mainstream country charts are about as diverse as they’ve ever been, which is to say not really diverse at all. A glance at the Billboard airplay chart reveals only one woman and one person of color in the Top 20. Nevertheless, all these country-adjacent genres and communities offer opportunities for more diversity in all sorts of ways: opportunities for women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc., but also classic sounds, virtuosic acoustic styles, regional styles such as Appalachian and Red Dirt, etc. etc.

I’ve been developing a few unrelated ideas on the general theme of country music, none of which merits an entire post, to wit:

Taylor’s Masters

Did you listen to the New Heights podcast? See, I don’t have to give you any more information and you know exactly what I’m talking about. Taylor’s that famous. One name famous and then some. And in 2011 she was 100% a country singer, no argument. She took a sharp turn into pop in 2012 with Red. Glad she did.

I’ve already written about Taylor twice on these pages, I don’t have much to add. I just wanted to underscore and bold and highlight the incredible service she’s done for musical artists and creative people in general by telling the story of her master ownership. She began her journey towards ownership in 2018 when she finished her deal with Big Machine. That’s also the year record deals started to get better, when ownership really fell out of favor.

To be honest, I had mixed feelings about it when my job was to try to buy masters for a private capital-funded company. She made it harder to do my job. Then I found my values and finally understood they didn’t align with the company. Now I’m on the artist side, or working with companies that care about artists and want substantive fairness. Now I’m nothing but grateful for all she’s done to turn the tide. It’s a lot.

Beats By AI

It’s such a rare and delicious experience, hearing the Next Big Thing in country. The name of the artist is Beats By AI, known for the chart-topping hits Country Girls Make Do, Sloppy Top at the Movies, Scissored in my Chevy, and Big Booty Latinas.

Beats By AI is a proud Spotify account featuring Suno (or similar)-generated mainstream country tracks with extremely pornographic lyrics. I found the account (h/t Hard Fork, once again) on a long drive from Bloomington last week. I laughed out loud several times, and I listened to at least one track twice.

It’s very funny because the AI voice, a generic Megan Moroney or Lainey Wilson, becomes the straight man. I assume the lyrics are at least partly human-composed, and the voice sings these insane, disgusting lyrics with the same tone as it would deliver lyrics about driving a pickup on a dirt road.

It’s funny because it’s completely insane; but it’s also funny because they sound exactly like hit mainstream country songs. It turns out it’s really easy for AI to make legit sounding radio country. AI can’t touch real indie rock, jazz, or alt-country, but it can make all manner of generic pop.

I went on a friend’s podcast this week, Ten Year Town, which is largely about the Nashville songwriting business. The host, Troy Cartwright (ahem, with a very good Substack), asked my opinion on AI. The conversation that followed led to a moment of insight for me. I realized the impact AI is likely to have on the songwriting community.

The hit writing process is often reverse engineering. Writers are trying to crack the code based on what has worked before. They write cliche tripe because it’s likely to get cut by less adventurous acts that are eager for a chart hit. The writers, artists, producers, and musicians are all complicit in making formulaic music.

Beats By AI is a wakeup call, because AI is already very good at formula, and as long as AI models have access to all the “training data” they can consume without restriction, they’re going to get a lot better. There’s literally no reason to use the old-fashioned methods to reverse-engineer hit formulae. AI will own that market.

The result is that the more creative songwriters - in my opinion the better songwriters - will dominate. There’s going to be an entire industry for an audience that doesn’t care if their music is made by people. Inevitably, there will be another industry where it’s all anyone cares about. So much mainstream music has been ultra-processed for decades. But think about how much popular music is viscerally human at every level. Sierra Ferrell, Billy Strings, Red Clay Strays, Turnpike Troubadours, Sturgill, on and on….these acts aren’t going to use generative AI. That is, unless it’s in some creative way that enhances their genius.

Another point I made that I find thought-provoking is the certainty that highly creative people will find ways to break AI tools, similar to how people pushed the limits of digital samplers and auto-tune. As a music fan, I look forward to hearing the amazing sounds our cherished musical geniuses will coax out of these algorithms. That is, so long as we can come to terms so that the training sets are licensed. Might as well embrace the whole thing because no matter how good the tools become, there will be plenty of room for human artistry - as long as music fans continue to care about it.

The Indie Country Explosion

brooklynvegan

A post shared by @brooklynvegan

I’m fascinated by this clip. Indie has given us a brand new genre: Indie Country. Indie Country, like Chillwave, Brostep, or Freak Folk. Even though Indie Country existed prior to this new genre, the emphasis is now on Indie over Country.

As I’ve expressed, I have a hard time with the term “indie.” I started in music as part of one of the most iconic (what’s now known as) indie scenes of all time: Boston in the 80s. We didn’t talk about “indie’ per se, because pretty much everyone was independent. We called it “college rock” because the main driver was college radio, which is where our genre became some elitist collector scum nightmare. I hated music snobbery back then, even as I was often guilty of it myself.

I’ve worked hard to root out all my music snob baggage. I’ve worked in the country/roots ecosystem for decades - although I’m thrilled that roots music is (arguably) more popular then ever and that the Internet has obliterated the Music Row stronghold, what I really want to see is a realization of the “big tent" that country used to purport to be.

This new spin on “indie country” should excite me. It references so much music adjacent to my own history. How many times does Andrew Sacher reference Dinosaur Jr. in this short clip? (3) Anyone who’s read Our Band Could Be Your Life knows that Dinosaur Jr. started out as an attempt to play some warped version of country music; but it isn’t remotely country per se.

Indie Country by this new definition is basically indie pop/rock that’s influenced by a variety of 90s/early 2000s alt-country acts (Drive By Truckers, Wilco, Silver Jews, Songs: Ohia, and of course the ultimate OG, Neil Young). I don’t think I’m over my skis in suggesting that the more country-leaning efforts by early 90s Lemonheads are a primary influence on some of these acts - particularly Lenderman and Crutchfield (who recently covered My Drug Buddy for an unreleased compilation.

The vocalist of Ratboys (which I’m looking forward to checking out) describes their music as “Post Country,” i.e, indie music that’s influenced by alt country rather than alt country in and of itself.” Post-country being a reference to post-rock, yet another indie subgenre invented by journalists.

I have to ask myself why this annoys me. I got my start in the music business representing critics’ darlings such as Bon Iver, of Montreal, and Toro y Moi, all the way back in the fabled aughts. Even though music critics revered those acts, they were drunk on power as music criticism profoundly impacted an artist’s audience. A “Best New Music” designation in Pitchfork meant a shot at six-figure album sales, while a single bad review could destroy an artist’s confidence and career. Those MFs owe some apologies, especially after they weakened their hand by revising scores years later.

I love great music writing and I’m truly sad that the content industry has made it difficult for smart, insightful artists to make a living. I miss reading Pitchfork and other similar publications in their glory days. But part of me is thrilled that music critics don’t wield the power they once did. They were dicks about it and they know it. Even in the Indie Country piece posted above, you don’t sense the same smugness that would permeate a similar piece 20 years ago.

Why does this annoy me? Because roots music is already Balkanized, and this is a further fragmentation that ill-serves the roots music community and audience. Former Pitchfork writer Steven Hyden recently published a newsletter griping about the term “Americana” in a review of Tyler Childers’ new album. He thinks it’s hokey; he even mentions Cracker Barrel. Well, Childers shares his distaste for the term albeit with considerably more anger, as articulated in his “No Part of Nothin’” speech at the 2018 Americana awards that shocked the roots community. Childers didn’t like the concept of Americana because he’s a country artist and he felt it marginalized him. His speech was at least as much a criticism of the mainstream country business as Americana.

I served on the board of the Americana Music Association for 6 years. The mission of Americana is to create a big tent. It’s a space that welcomes marginalized artists and actively pursues diversity. The idea is to bring all these disparate groups together in one tent to serve the interests of artists and audiences alike. It’s intended to be the opposite of the monolithic, reactionary, conformist mainstream culture. Mainstream country will almost certainly ignore all these “indie country” acts, no matter how popular they might become. Meanwhile, Americana has embraced Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman, with multiple award nominations.

Regrettably, I commented on the Brooklyn Vegan post, noting that it’s interesting that nobody in the Nashville country and roots business would recognize those acts as country. I was instantly attacked by anon accounts saying Nashville is irrelevant and who cares what anyone else thinks is country. Without giving any oxygen to these bad vibe posters, to me that’s the issue. I think people defining this new country music genre should care how it fits into a larger ecosystem, if only to grow the audience. To me, Lenderman and Childers are in the same genre, even if their music doesn’t sound identical. I don’t want to force anyone to call it Americana or whatever, but I do think there’s a benefit to creating a Big Tent to counter the 1,000,000 tiny niches roots music is becoming.

I’ll say it again: genre categories - especially micro genres - don’t really serve the interests of artists. It’s amazing that a niche artist like Billy Strings can play stadiums with most of the world having no idea who he is. The superstar niche artist is a consequence of the consumption business. Maybe “indie country” serves to expand what we’ve come to know as indie, which historically is my home turf even more than country or Americana. I know that elitism is the greatest sin of indie, and this entire f*ck Nashville/f*ck Americana etc. feels elitist to me.