Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture
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Author Description
Barbara Ching defines the features that make certain country songs and artists hard. She compares hard country music to high American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy. The artists sing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence. The songs are set apart from mainstream country music, which focuses on nostalgia, romance, and the patriotism of regular folk. Ching demonstrates that hard country's bad puns, sad stories, and unsavory characters are not as simple as we want them to be. In a style that demands both devotion and alienation from its fans, hard country ultimately seeks out the extreme and the objectionable, and in doing so, shows us the darker side of ourselves.
Menrva's Summary
THE THESIS
This book investigates the defining characteristics of 'hard' country music and its deliberate positioning within the American cultural hierarchy. Barbara Ching, an academic specializing in cultural studies, utilizes a critical framework to analyze how hard country music distinguishes itself from mainstream industry trends. By examining lyrical content and artist personas, she argues that the genre intentionally embraces failure and social marginalization to critique standard American ideals of success and affluence.
THE SCOPE MAP
What You Will Find
- Analysis of lyrical themes including failure, social deviance, and economic hardship
- Comparative study between hard country music and high-brow American cultural forms
- Examination of specific artist personas and their rejection of mainstream country tropes
- Theoretical framework regarding the cultural hierarchy of music genres
THE AUTHORITY PERSPECTIVE
Scholars and music critics recognize this work as a significant contribution to the study of country music's subgenres. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which effectively bridges the gap between popular music analysis and sociological critique.
Page Count:
0
Publication Date:
1900-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0195185994
ISBN-13:
9780195185997
Music
Sociology
Country Music
Community Tags
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