Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music

Edited by Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, December 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0472070534, $70.00; paper: ISBN 9780472050536, $26.95. 296 pages.

Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin

Musical genres are famously difficult to definitively define apart from, or even with, their expressed parameters and limits within the marketplace and para-market spaces – television, radio, print and internet. Statements by musicians and fans are often contradictory, simultaneously playing on the local and the global, popular appeal and artistic indifference, ecstasy and depression, isolation and network. Most often, the experience of both the musicians and fans of any genre lies somewhere in between the poles and boundaries that are used to define what is inside and outside of any genre. The fences that are meant to secure the borders are frequently porous and easily traversed through cracks, tunnels, and well-placed leaps. The art of existing in a genre may actually lie in the use of the bypasses—are they well-worn or newly conceived and constructed? Are they arduously dug, or nonchalantly strolled through? Have they been manufactured according to a plan or are they spontaneous and magical? The game of defining the genre more often than not lies in experience: you’ll know it when you hear (or see, or buy) it.

Enter alt.country, a genre born of opposition – to the growing dominance of stadium rock and AOR-infused Nashville and pop-country radio, to their discursive forgetting of “roots” and loss of “authenticity” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alt.country and its performers have captivated millions from the small clubs in cities like Austin to Chicago and Seattle to Minneapolis, to college and internet radio, and music festivals around the world. Drawn together by a cosmopolitan love for old-time music of the Carter Family, hard-country icons Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, and an emotional investment in the spit-in-your-face aggressive attitude and sound of punk-rock, the musical parameters of alt.country are virtually non-existent as a unifying force. A truly post-modern genre, perhaps the only thing that holds alt.country artists together is that they are talked about and bought together, by fans, musicians and writers. The constant “outside” quality of the genre in some ways prevents them from being marketed together.

Grappling with the urge to say something substantial about a genre that is meaningful to so many but very, very slippery, Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching’s Old Roots, New Routes takes on alt.country in one of its primary concerns: cultural politics. How are the politics of authenticity generative and operational in this genre? How do these myths and realities clash upon examination? How do these discourses blend and clash with their counterparts in country and bluegrass? How do they impact performance practice and audience reception? While Fox and Ching’s introduction provides a historical and theoretical overview of the conflict between authenticity and selling out, the entries in the book deal with individual or small groups of artists who are seminal as proponents or progenitors of the genre. Case studies are given of Neko Case, Justin Trevino, Gram Parsons, Jay Farrar (of Uncle Tupelo and Sun Volt), Gillian Welch and Freakwater and three alt.country acts from Austin in the 1990s. There is also a masterful analysis of two “alt.country” films – Songcatcher and O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Barbara Ching.

This format, which provides in-depth analyses of artists within the genre, both demonstrates the complexity and contradiction inherent in the definition and opens up further lines of inquiry into specific questions about the construction of emerging forms of music, marketing and sound as well as the role of literature and film in both defining a genre and acting as heuristic tools. No doubt, this was the only way to comprehend such a pastiche of sounds and stories—through grasping at parts, rather than the elusive whole. The theoretical backbone of most of these essays is surprisingly coherent, swirling around Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Although they are far from the only theorists represented, it seems as though their interests in the City/Country dichotomy with its attendant theories on traditional culture, structures of feeling, and taste loom large over all of the essays, as does the urge to represent not oppositional, but co-occurring transformations, desires and developments. In this sense, one can take away a great amount about applying specific aspects of a body of theory to case studies by attending to the nuances used in each of the case studies.

Of note are essays by Diane Pecknold, Jon Smith, Aaron Fox, and Barbara Ching, as well as Fox and Ching’s “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic—Towards a Theory and Critique of Alt.Country Music.” Tying a book this diverse together is never easy or logical, but the Introduction does an excellent job of laying the theoretical ground on which all of the essays tread, pre-exposing the ready contradictions and simultaneities of the genre, taste, audience, and market to which the ensuing essays will put a microscope. The summaries and applications of theories of taste and tradition, and the antagonisms and meddling of capital in alt.country, serve as both illuminations of the texts as well as an effective summary of several lines of interrogation into alt.country as a genre and practice.

Following up on these theories, Pecknold’s historicist “Selling Out or Buying In?” traces the development of alt.country as a genre along the lines of its grassroots and institutional developments (particularly the Gavin chart and the Americana Association), arguing that both public taste and market institutions that function as arbiters and sellers of commodities grew up together. She cites earlier (pre-Uncle Tupelo) experimenters in the fusion of country and punk and the discourses around the effect of the utilization of technology, and the grassroots and mainstream institutions that impacted the development of alt.country as a genre and a community.

Smith’s “Growing Up and Out of Alt.Country” stands out as both a close reading of Neko Case, one of the darlings of the genre, as well as an artful reading of so-called “Generation X” literature into an understanding of the development of a career, a style, and a genre. He artfully argues that the legacy of the angst of Generation X was the lineage of alt.country. That generation was searching for new ground in the authenticities lost to the hippie-turned-yuppie upwardly-mobile baby boomers. He then traces Case’s development from punk through mimetic alt.country to her current work as a liberatory trajectory that moves away from feigning authenticity and revels in artistic spirit, musical creation, and being safe within its own artistic self, without channeling the ghosts of artists past in token musical gesture.

Fox’s “Beyond Austin’s City Limits,” an exegesis and reflection on the current career of South Texas journeyman Justin Trivino, asks questions about the nature of “alternative” in alt.country, especially in light of Austin’s position in that scene, and of the sound of country. Fox expands on the materiality of class conflicts that surround country as well as those that the actors within them carve out for themselves. He argues that artists like Trivino are both kept outside as well as keep themselves outside by their decisions—alliances to communities outside of the mainstream and the sound of their recordings.

Finally, Ching’s “Meeting in the Marketplace” offers insight into the role that film has in the makings of a genre and its communities as well as film as a heuristic tool for music. In both O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Songcatcher (2000), she analyses the protagonists’ relationship to the market, as both pursue their own ends via hillbilly music. In the finales of both movies, she finds a comfortable location for new, rootsy music in the market. The market offers the characters a way out of their older, less successful lives, and points to a way forward with music as the engine.

What is most compelling about this book is the way it diverges from previous models of analysis on alternate or resistant culture. Rather than homogenizing the culturally hegemonic and setting the resistant against it, many of the essays portray both as gears that turn simultaneously, both exerting their own forces. Although there is still room to look seriously at the impact of 1990s Nashville with its attendant artists and businesses as actors, not as a monolith, there is ample reflection in Old Roots, New Routes to say that it does point towards ways to successfully analyze a music that is constantly emerging.