WCS 28: How Country Are You?

On a scale of one to 10

Years ago, I asked my grandmother what she was listening to, as a young teen in World War II-era West Virginia. She gave me a confused look.

“The radio.”

“Naw. I mean format. Jazz? Blues? Country?”

“We listened to the radio,” she repeated, as if I were a child with hearing or cognitive deficiencies.

And my grandmother was right to do that. After so many years of writing about popular music, I still had not fully grasped how the 20th century’s mass media explosion impacted human listening habits. A 15-year-old girl in a West Virginia holler circa 1944 knew nothing of playlists and genre. Country music was just the music, back then.

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Cruz retires a Mariner

For Opening Day only, Seattle signed all-time slugger Nelson Cruz to a deal, so that he could retire a Mariner.

Cruz’s PED dealer, however, was not granted a ceremonial contract.

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Since the mid-century world war, American ears have known nothing but the imposition of format. That’s kept us survivors of slavery at an arm’s length from country. Understand: It’s challenging enough that the music inherently takes you back to Southern crime scenes—part of the appeal for many non-Black fans—but rural Americana has often also been the soundtrack to present-tense hateful attacks. Allowing a wall to come up between us and our invention almost makes a kind of protective sense.

But as my colleague Carl Wilson wrote in Slate, “the boundaries between all these cultural zones seem to be growing ever more breachable.” This weekend Black people who wouldn’t have been caught dead championing country product were broadcasting Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. Not one time did I well-actually them when they protested that the record hadn’t been named Cowgirl Carter.

(“Cowboy” was originally the racial diminution of “cowpoke,” which is what the white ones were called. There’s a nod being given here to the historically erased.)

It’s not just Bey, but Lana Del Rey and Ed Sheeran and other pop stars with no thing as bona fide as “Daddy’s Girl” on their resumes are now working on albums in this category. Country music fame is a numbers game. Last year saw an international spike in sales that, to me, runs analogous to the populist political movements sweeping the planet. Country—little sister to the blues—has become the music of our time, what we’re all listening to.

And here are 10 notables from the last seven-day span:

10 SBF’s story begins and ends @ a small home near Stanford

Down the peninsula from San Francisco, a couple of brilliant lawyers cultivated their strange and gifted child in a painfully Stanford milieu.

They hadn’t thought prison prep would be any part of the parenting equation.
The New Yorker

• The socially-conscious family was all-in on SBF’s rocket ride to multi-billionaire success, including living at the fabulous properties the son had procured.

• The Bankman-Frieds have petitioned the court to have Samuel imprisoned in Mendota—near Fresno—in order to be close to him.

Lil Hit

• Exactly what does the cancellation of SF’s 420 Festival says about the state of legal weed?
  KQED

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9 Gonzaga, Utah teams stung by March Madness racism

The Gonzaga men’s hoops team got off easy when an ignorant Michigan state legislator Tweeted his suspicions that they were foreign invaders who ought to be investigated.

They could have been the Utah women ballers, who experienced what their stunned coach characterized as a hate crime.
CNN/Young Turks