It is exciting to observe genre formation as a style of music is being consolidated. Think, for example, of going back to 1916 and seeing the early developments in the music we now know as jazz, to witness the consolidation of country music in 1950, or rock in 1954. What now, with the aid of hindsight, seem to have been clear changes in the world of music, then seemed to be confusion according to the contemporary accounts of those times (Neil; Peterson; Ennis). Smaller changes in the fabric of popular music, such as the consolidation of disco, punk, rap, rave, etc. take place regularly, and a degree of confusion is inevitable. Only in the moment of creation is it possible, however, to look at the process of genre formation free of the blinders of collective memory that come to surround it.
The process of genre formation is unique in each case but can be said to include the following six linked processes. There is a contest over naming the music, and there is a parallel struggle over identifying which styles of music are included under the umbrella term, and which are excluded. There are numerous experiments to find the appropriate image of the artist. The target audience becomes clarified, and the Zeitgeist of the canonical lyric emerges. Finally the distinctive means of reaching the audience becomes routinized as a business. Each of these will be touched here as they apply to the formation of alternative country music.
Naming the Beast: Not from Nashville
A major controversy has surrounded what to call this emerging music. Candidates have included Americana, Country Rock, Roots Revival, Grange Rock, Hillbilly Noir, Insurgent Country, New Old-Time, No Depression, Torch and Twang, Twangcore, and Roots Rock. Each has the advantage of accenting the aspect of the movement its advocates see as focal, but none suggests the range of the musics included in alternative country. In speech, "alternative country" is often shortened to "alt country," and in print it is often spelled "alt.country" echoing the common transmission of information about the music, artists, and venues via the internet.
Like the term Postmodernism, a banner under which diverse and even contradictory interests can unite, alternative country has the advantage of being an empty term starting with no limiting connotation. As important, both these terms highlight what it is defined in opposition to. Most people associated with alternative country see their music and their career goals as profoundly different from those of contemporary commercial country music artists, as currently exemplified by Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks, and Garth Brooks. In alternative country circles, Brooks is often referred to as the "Anti-Hank," Hank Williams being the defining icon of "real" country music, and the term "Nashville country music" is a code denoting manufactured and insincere.
As defined by alternative country devotees, the contrasts with Nashville-made music are stark. While alternative country is down home, unblinking, heart-felt, and a personal authentic expression, Nashville country is a plastic product. While alternative country artists are self-reflective and consciously link themselves to tradition, commercial country artists are perceived as unreflective clones of those who have been commercially successful in the recent past. While alternative artists present themselves as they are, warts and all, Nashville artists are contrived and act the squeaky-clean tight-jeans dance-floor cowgirl and -boy part. And while alternative performers live the troubadour life full of great personal sacrifice, commercial country artists surrender to the star-making machine knowing that they must, in the words of Lisa Gubernick "get hot or go home" to the double-wide trailer. In reply to this characterization of contemporary Nashville country music, a major commercial country promoter says that the scruffy alternative artists just don't have the talent or the drive to make it in commercial country music.
The realities of music and career-making are more complex than either of these characterizations and much more interesting as well. Those involved in alternative country generally come from middle-class backgrounds and romantically embrace the bygone ways of the impoverished, villainous, and defiant. Commercial country artists generally come from working-class backgrounds and exemplify the contemporary dilemmas of economic wealth, unrootedness, and moral dis-ease. A systematic study of the college majors of the artists would be telling. Our guess is that many in alternative country pursued majors in the humanities, while those in commercial country, like Garth Brooks, majored in finance or education at state schools.
No Depression, the valuable bimonthly magazine of alternative country news and reviews is leery of defining its subject, simply placing below its logo "An Introduction to Alternative Country Music (Whatever that is." David Goodman's Modern Twang: An Alternative Country Music Guide and Directory is far and away the single best guide to artists, bands, organizations, magazines, and internet sources relevant to the world of alternative country. According to David Goodman, alternative country music is "the representation and enactment of traditional country music styles, themes, and images by incorporating a variety of modern musical and non-musical influences." This characterization applies equally well to the other term that is increasingly used, "roots revival."
The Myth of Origin
The music had its beginning, so the story goes, in the late 1980s when a group of high school friends in the tiny town of Belleville, Illinois formed a Black Flag-type punk band which came to have the name Uncle Tupelo. According to Goodman (309), the band retained its punk elements and increasingly "combined these with a long tradition of country music from old-time through honky-tonk, the Bakersfield sound, and Gram Parsons, Neil Young, and Doug Sahm country rock."
The mix of influences is suggested by the title of Uncle Tupelo's first CD, No Depression, released by Rockville Records in 1990, which reflects the message of an A. P. Carter song, "No Depression in Heaven," but like a mirror, the band reverses the image. While Carter looked forward in anticipation to a glorious time after death, alternative country artists typically look back nostalgically to an imagined small-town life of the 1940s. The sound was consolidated in their Rockville LPs of 1991 and 1992, Still Feel Gone and March 16-20, 1992. As noted by David Goodman, the "No Depression" sound is an alternation between or a joining of grinding punk, country rock, and acoustic country; a focus on the darker side of small town life; and a heightened social/political consciousness" (Goodman 309).
Like the mythic founders of the past, the group Uncle Tupelo did not live to enjoy the fruits of its creation. After touring widely in the U.S. and Europe, in 1994 the band broke into two groups, Wilco and Son Volt. Each of these in turn has built on the original inspiration and has, in turn, spawned a number of similarly inspired groups. As stated on Postcard2 (P2) the leading List Serve devoted to the genre, alternative country consists primarily of "those groups that have followed the pioneering insurgent-country band, Uncle Tupelo, by mixing indie-rock aggression with country twang, include the Tupelo offshoots Son Volt and Wilco, along with others such as Blue Mountain, Old 97s, Whiskeytown, the Schramms, Jolene, Freakwater, Cheri Knight, 16 Horsepower and the Waco Brothers." Echoes of this story are found in many of the review articles published in the magazine No Depression. See for example Alden and Blackstock.
This myth of origin has appeal beyond its simplicity and linear development because it mirrors the taste trajectory of many of alternative country's devotees. Nurtured as teens in the protest and despair of punk and grunge, they gravitated with ease to the "no depression" escape from contemporary urban problems through embracing the supposedly simpler problems and joys of imagined past small town and rural ways of life.
Not everyone has been content with this story focusing, as it does, on how one 1990s set of mid-west grunge rock artists blended rock with the country music of the small town America where they lived. Some trace the roots back along a line in country music from Waylon Jennings and the other Nashville outlaws, to Johnny Cash, the rockabillies, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and all those hard-core country artists over the years who have rebelled against the popular soft-shell country music of their time (Tosches; Peterson).
