Alt-genres have always been ‘safe spaces’ for white people

[dee dee]

I read this article,http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/so-no ... alt-right/, and got sucked into click bait hell.

Further, the fan base is overwhelmingly white. Considering Americana’s implicit mission to move music culture forward by acknowledging and respecting the past in a dynamic way that appeals to current listeners, this is a seriously dissonant chord. As a longtime stan of Drive-By Truckers, who are getting backslaps for how American Band acknowledges the horrific realities of black and immigrant life in 2016, I can’t help but mutter, “When are the rest of y’all gonna get your liberal heads out of your asses?” (Save your whitesplaining about long-suffering, righteous cranks like Todd Snider and James McMurtry.) Since Nashville crassly sexes up nostalgic, rural clichés by superficially nodding to hip-hop and polyglot pop – welcome, white millennials! – it’d be nice if the Americana caucus was less full of shit on this issue, especially as we enter the Trump epoch.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with Americana, I’ll make it explicit. No matter the genre’s origin story, its smartly marketed roots clearly lead back to Southern rock, which celebrated the tangle of African-American styles that constituted rock and roll – blues, gospel, jazz, R&B, boogie-woogie, and country – while being almost exclusively peopled by white musicians. The Drive-By Truckers’ 2001 double album Southern Rock Opera lunged at this legacy, but few others in their genre have gone there. Which is a shame, because Southern rock produced truckloads of stunning music along with its rowdy denial, and it’s a pity that jam-band blowhards are left to pick through it for scraps.

http://www.mtv.com/news/2961941/america ... reckoning/

As unfair as I felt the previous article was, I found "Not just Nazis: Alt-genres have always been ‘safe spaces’ for white people" far worse.

“Alt-country,” another fantastically diffuse genre, defined itself along less overtly racial lines, in part because it sprung out of dissatisfaction with chart-toppers who were already pasty (if also kinda lame). Depending on who you ask, the genre is either a punk-inflected brand of country or a throwback to the genre’s Depression-era origins or something more reminiscent of the Delta Blues. But as the music historian Diane Pecknold notes, as hokey, supposedly “effeminate” country music topped the charts in the ‘90s and hip-hop mainstreamed:

Hip urbanites embraced alt-country as a counterculture, looking to older country roots as a way to express their mainstream popular music of all sorts and reconfigure burlesque abjection into a familiar, deeply nostalgic form of white guy cool-supremacy in the process.

http://fusion.net/story/374373/richard- ... ium=social

[Iowan]

I have no idea what those idiots are trying to say.

Pretty sure I'm about as far from a "hip urbanite" as it gets.

[Smitty]

Wow...just wow.

There is a conversation to be had about diversity and what should fall under the Americana umbrella, but those articles are shit.

Steve Earle, the alt right icon. Gimme a fucking break.

[Swamp]

For some reason this type of thinking no longer surprises me

[jimmyjack]

Liberals Shaming and Alienating Other Liberals, or "How Trump Won," pt. 3,997 in a series

[blueridgehiker]

Liberals Shaming and Alienating Other Liberals, or "How Trump Won," pt. 3,997 in a series

With a splash of millennial vilification thrown in for good measure!

[Tequila Cowboy]

Liberals Shaming and Alienating Other Liberals, or "How Trump Won," pt. 3,997 in a series

Bingo.

[bathmalts]

I'm a pretty frequent visitor of SCM so I saw this pretty much right when it was written, and it made me pretty upset. I'm no liberal, but I hate getting stereotyped because of the music I listen to by people who don't know shit about the music.

[whatwouldcooleydo?]

reading those articles, I had two thoughts:

(1) who writes this shit?

(2) Save the speeches for Malcolm X, I just want to get laid (a legendary quote from the classic film Heathers, in which Winona Ryder was as fine as fine can be)