What’s Real About Country Music?

Moving up the country radio charts is James Wesley’s “Real”, built on the notion that “reality TV” shows have nothing to do with the real lives of working-class Americans. What’s “real” isn’t The Amazing Race, Survivor, The Bachelor or the Real Housewives of (Fill in the blank) shows, the song tells us. “Real” is weddings, anniversaries, and death. “Real” is a farm being foreclosed on and factory jobs moving to another country. Specific farm-life references to droughts and weevils make the song read as first-hand reporting or memoir. Knowing that Wesley was born in Mound Valley, Kansas (population 418), not far from the Kansas-Oklahoma border, may add to that impression, though of course Wesley didn’t write the song. Two other established country songwriters, Neal Coty and Jimmy Melton, did.

“Real” tells us that putting people in manufactured dramatic situations is less real than actual dramatic situations; kind of a no-brainer. The implication is that some forms of entertainment are more real than others, and country music is the most real. Brad Paisley states this more explicitly in another song on the charts, “This Is Country Music”, an advertisement for the genre that references country classics from the past while arguing that other genres are more afraid to sing about real life. Real life in this case means that country singers will sing about cancer, will proclaim that Jesus is their savoir, and will admit their love for America. Of course, other genres say these things too, or they say different things on the same topics. Is it more real to proclaim America’s greatness than to criticize America? To praise Jesus versus to praise Allah? Paisley sings, “This is real / this is your life in a song”. The logical response to that is, whose life? If the worldview of a particular song doesn’t match my own, does that make me less real? Or not a real country fan, at least?

In that way, the song is crowd control, reinforcing the idea that country fans share one concrete, simple view of the world. It’s as if he’s trying to will into existence an easily managed audience. Country singers often seem to want to do that, so maybe this is country music in 2011. A singer will tell us “how country boys roll”, implying that listeners relate, because of course they roll the same way. Meanwhile, as country remains one of the strongest genres in terms of sales, the audience continues to be less rural, not that it has ever been exclusively so. When Paisley tells us that country music is “real” because it’s our life, it seems a cover for the fact that country audiences don’t all share the same life, a fact that when admitted could make the fabric of so many country songs, based on monolithic notions of the lives of country artists and fans, unravel.

The word “real” is thrown around often within the genre. For example, if country music is especially real, which type of country music is most real? That conversation never ends, and never will. Do an Internet search for “real country” and you get many aspiring stars proclaiming that they play “real country”, unlike the other guys. Songs like Dale Watson’s “A Real Country Song” express a wish that the radio was still playing Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn instead of contemporary artists. There are websites like TakinTheCountryBack.com and SavingCountryMusic.com. There’s a satellite radio format called Real Country (whose main competitor is True Country, according to Wikipedia). In all of these cases, “real” means closest in sound to music at the roots of country, or more accurately at the start of country’s growth as a commercial music genre. So “real country” might be the ‘50s and ‘60s music that made Nashville the industry it is now, or the Bakersfield sound, the so-called “outlaw country” of the ‘70s, Western swing perhaps. And it definitely includes all musicians who try hard to make their music sound exactly like all of that music.

It’s a line of thinking that breeds an us-versus-them mentality. We listen to “real” country. They listen to the pop music that’s dressed up as country, foisted on us not by “real” people but by record executives somewhere. Anything that smacks of commercialism or pop, or deviates from a well-worn country playbook, is definitely not “real”. SavingCountryMusic.com is suspicious of not just pop stars but anyone who might be a pop star in disguise; Jamey Johnson, for example. Read the site’s blog posts Jamey Johnson – Real Deal or Patsy and “Jamey Johnson Is Pop Country’s ‘Black Friend'”, and the related comments, and you’re observing heads exploding at the very notion that someone who writes Waylon Jennings-inspired hard-luck songs can also have co-written Trace Adkins’ “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”.

“Real country” is, therefore, the style of country that today is accepted as the most authentic, the closest to what right now is thought of as the essence of country. When it comes to contemporary singers trying to emulate past country legends, “real” in its literal sense seems a strange word. A Xerox copy of a visual artwork would be considered less “real” than the original. Does “real” really mean stuck in time? Is the “real country” the country music least open to change? “Real” is a conservative word in this use. Country music will stay “real” only if it never changes. But change it always has, and it will always continue to. It’s not just in the pop-music arena where change happens. What’s considered the purest, realest country music will inevitably change as well, even among those trying hard to believe it can, and must, not.

Is Sadness More Real than Happiness?

However, as Wesley’s song “Real” points out, country music historically has been the chronicler of hardship. We tend to think of tragic events as being more “real” than happy events — or at least of extreme events (the saddest and happiest) as more real than brushing your teeth, even though the latter is more likely to happen on any given day (and surely more common to most everyone’s experience). A more interesting conversation about the “real”-ness of country might be whether a genre built on tragedy has taken a turn for comedy, dramatically speaking. Country radio still has plenty of heartbreak and cheating songs, but also an ever-increasing slew of summer-vacation songs, motivational self-help songs, and isn’t-life-great songs. The #1 song of this week (March 5, 2011) is Blake Shelton’s “Who Are You When I’m Not Looking?” In it, our breathless narrator isn’t imagining his lover sneaking around when he’s not looking, but taking a bubble bath, eating chocolates, and calling her mom. Another song on the rise is Thompson Square’s “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not?” The answer, of course, is yes, they are definitely going to kiss each other, often and cutely. Is the balance of mood in the genre shifting towards the happy? Is country less “real” these days because it’s less sad? And is sadness truly any more real than happiness, or just more of an essential trait of the genre?

All musicians like to talk about how “real” their music is. “Real” as a descriptor or categorizer isn’t just used in country, of course. Similar arguments about purity and authenticity play out in hip-hop, heavy metal, jazz, and most other genres. Within country music, it also isn’t used just by retro revivalists or “traditionalists”. It’s as likely to be used by the multiplatinum, pop-country megastars that purists rail against. TheBoot.com quoted Keith Urban at this year’s Grammys on why people like his music: “It’s about authenticity, that’s all. I record songs that come from a real place. I have real things happening in my life so I don’t have to imagine writing about them.” Hillary Scott of country-pop stars Lady Antebellum was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch saying something similar: “It’s very personal for us. We write from our own experience”.

Does writing from your own experiences make a song more “real”? In some literal sense maybe it does, but a song doesn’t necessarily feel more genuine to listeners just because it was autobiographical. The songwriting structure of country music, like much pop music historically, complicates this too. The reality of the songwriting industry contradicts the notion that a song is more successful, has more artistic integrity, or will feel more genuine to listeners when the singer alone wrote the song, about his or her life. More important than the reality is the impression. If a song feels like a heartfelt expression of the singer’s emotions, or like the singer understands your life, then it’s real to you.

Scott also said, about their hit single “Need You Now”, “we really wanted to be the pages in people’s diaries that they were afraid to write.” Keith Urban and Lady Antebellum might not be “real country”, but it’s clear they think of their music as “real” in the way Paisley sang about, as listeners’ lives in a song. That’s true even when they didn’t write the songs themselves; a web headline reads, “Keith Urban Says ‘Without You’ Is His ‘Life Story’”. When he sings the song, it’s about his wife and daughter, he says, even though it was written by other songwriters (Dave Pahanish and Joe West), without him or his family in mind. What’s more, in that article Urban describes it as a song he would have written if he felt brave enough to admit these feelings. “It’s an amazing song, and I would have never allowed myself to write it,” he said. Urban isn’t just admitting that a song written by others can resonate with his own life; he floats the idea that other songwriters might know his life better than he does. He’s putting himself in the same boat as us; a song feels “real” when it says something we recognize as true. That might not make it more real in any objective sense, outside that moment of connection between a listener and a piece of music.

Is “real country” the music that felt most genuine to the singers in the moment? Or is it the songs that seem to most resemble what we imagine to be the lives of the artists themselves? This notion of “real” must carry within it that question, “real to whom?” Is what matters most that the song seems “real” to the genre itself (consistent with the genre), that the song grew out of the songwriters’ actual lives, that the song felt genuine to the singer at the moment the song was recorded? Or does the state of being “real” only exist in the minds of listeners?

Any way you look at it, Darius Rucker’s 2009 love ballad “History in the Making” isn’t most people’s definition of “real country”. He wrote it with two songwriters, Frank Rogers and Clay Mills, who have written many country hits for others. Rucker himself went from a ’90s top 40 pop singer (and butt of many “Hootie” jokes) to a successful country singer by hanging with a different crowd and slightly altering his sound. His pop-first approach to country doesn’t fit the notion of artists sprouting from nowhere, untainted by commercial concerns. “History in the Making” is a commercial song, designed for impacting the most people possible. Yet, every single time I hear the song I get goose-bumps, without fail. They’re the kind of goose bumps you get when the emotions of a song ring true for you, when somewhere inside, the song makes you want to cry. I try to analyze why, in a logical way, but I can’t ever get there. It has something to do with the notion of life changing forever, of history being made, in one small moment: a first kiss, for example. But that’s a completely conventional sentiment, a cliché. It’s a picture painted by so many Hallmark cards, jewelry ads, and bad romantic comedies. Why in this case does it affect me so?

That’s the essential mystery of music. What seems real to one listener is a matter of chemistry, of temperament, of coincidence, of time, of taste, of experience. The way a song hits you couldn’t be realer to you, but that doesn’t make the song itself any more real. It was put together for various reasons you don’t know, by someone who you most likely haven’t met, and exists as an intangible, temporal entity. Everything about music is manufactured for effect. To talk about country music as particularly real is to evade the fact that music itself is not real.