Morning reading: The rise of New Country

In his book The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman points out that Reservoir Dogs was a crime film with a fake crime at its center, the Unabomber was unmasked when his brother used the internet for the first time, and that country music became more popular as rock became progressive…

Rock, despite its supremacy, was ideologically moving away from itself. The idea of chasing fame and trying to look sexy was suddenly embarrassing. Grunge musicians openly disdained the posturing of longhaired arena rock, most notably its relationship masculinity. […] But the public appetite for those qualities was still there, and country artists increasingly encroached upon the classic tropes of classic rock. […] The things casual consumers liked about “new country” were the same things casual consumers liked about “old rock.” The music itself was important, but secondary to the experience it offered and the lifestyle it valued. It proudly embraced what was no longer progressive. Cobain had grown up loving groups like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, made music in the same genre, and named one of his songs “Aero Zeppelin.” Yet someone like Cobain still came to believe that Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin were degrading.* [Billy Ray] Cyrus did not. His music sounded nothing like Led Zeppelin, but it had the same goal: universality, devoid of any reflection about what that meant or symbolized. Rock artists were becoming less willing to provide that sensibility, so country artists took it over.

* “Although I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain said in 1993. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex.”