Chet Flippo's recent Nashville Skyline column, that is...
...I know the very whisper of Taylor's name brings out the extreme country wingnut crowd in an absolute frenzy, eliciting the howling, dogmatic mob that knows everything and is very willing to tell you so. I love the fact that most people in the world -- except me -- know exactly what country music is and what it is not. They know with certainty. I only know what I know. And I know what the accepted country definitions over the years have come to be -- that it is primarily a storytelling peer group music.
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Country music has also, since its early days in the 1920s, been a commercial music. Therefore, for current purposes, I'm proposing that we go by the venerable standard of the Billboard charts. If Billboard lists a group or artist or song or album as country, so be it. It's country. Case closed. The soundtrack album for Hannah Montana is the No. 1 country album this week in Billboard? Yes, sir. I personally don't agree that it's necessarily country, but I won't argue because the Billboard chart right now is the official arbiter -- and history will be the ultimate judge.
To the wingnuts: Taylor Swift is country -- every bit as country as Rascal Flatts or Keith Urban or Kenny Chesney or any of the other current country pop acts on country radio and on the Billboard charts.
Oh, yes. Billboard listed it, I believe it, that settles it. Sorry, but that is ever so much bullshit, as is Mr. Flippo's epithet-hurling. Wingnut? So just because I am not even close to convinced the success of Taylor Swift, Rascal Flatts, Kenny Chesney and their ilk is good for the long-term prospects of country music (precisely because it's so, well, NOT country), he's more or less implying that I am an intolerant, sister-humping hick who strings up all the darkies I can catch in my spare time? Never mind the reality of the situation, of course, which is that you're as likely to find me listening to Pantera as you are George Strait these days, and that my political beliefs could better be classified as small-L libertarian, many of which those who fit his typecast would vehemently disagree with. I guess I should be honored that such a flaming asshole would cast people like me as he did, but I still find it profoundly offensive. Methinks he's just teed off at the rise of the Texas-red dirt country calling into question the contention that the Nashville music machine is the supreme arbiter of what's country and what isn't. Maybe I'd be mad too if I was a Nashville denizen, but no matter what he was way out of line. You could even say Chet, um, Flippoed out...
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