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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Corporate dreck dominates the FM airwaves like never before, but hope for music lovers may finally have arrived.
Jun 19, 2002 | In May, more than 75 weeks after it first entered the Billboard charts, the soundtrack to the Coen brothers' "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" was certified by the Recording Industry Association of America as quintuple platinum. Earlier this year, it picked up Grammy awards for album of the year, best soundtrack, best male country vocal performance (Ralph Stanley), best country collaboration with vocals ("I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow") and producer of the year (T Bone Burnett). "Down From the Mountain," a live album inspired by the success of the soundtrack, was named best traditional folk album.
If this tally already wasn't impressive enough, the International Bluegrass Music Association and the Country Music Association just made "Oh Brother" their album of the year. On June 25, musicians featured on both the soundtrack and live albums will team up for Part 2 of their highly successful national concert tour.
Since they have received such laurels and currently hold the No. 2 spot on the Billboard album charts, you might think Ralph Stanley, Dan Tyminski, Alison Krauss and Norman Blake would be every bit as ubiquitous on country radio stations as, say, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain and LeAnn Rimes. But, then, if you believed that, you'd probably also assume that country radio stations routinely played the music of Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Patsy Cline, the Carter Family and Emmylou Harris, as well as Hank Williams Sr., Jr. and III. But you'd be wrong on all counts.
Because it was lip-synched by George Clooney in the movie, and, therefore, held some celebrity cachet, Tyminski's "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" received some airplay on a handful of country stations last year. Otherwise, the only place to hear cuts from the soundtrack was on NPR, college and alt-country outlets.
Plain and simple, "Oh Brother" and nearly every artist enshrined at the Hall of Fame in Nashville are too "country" for country radio. Help, however, has arrived in the form of two new satellite radio services. New York-based Sirius and XM Satellite Radio propose to fill a void created by a radio industry dominated by profit-driven conglomerates, ratings-obsessed programmers and hit-driven playlists. Fans of country music aren't the only ones suffering. Based on content and the frequency of commercial breaks, today's pre-programmed FM stations are virtually indistinguishable from the uninspired AM outlets they drove into the ground in the '70s.
But just as digital video recorders like TiVo and Replay TV are offering TV watchers a way to make television programming serve the needs of viewers, rather than the other way around, and DirecTV and EchoStar have provided an alternative to unimaginative network television programming and non-responsive cable companies, Sirius and XM are presenting listeners with real choices. Both networks now offer their subscribers crystal-clear digital reception and a surprisingly diverse menu of entertainment, talk and news options. Listeners don't, however, need to install a pizza-sized dish on the roof of their car or boat to receive them, just a small knob of an antenna.
The services are too new to definitively answer the question of whether advances in technology can permanently avoid co-optation by corporate forces determined to reduce all entertainment into mindless mush, but right now, the outlook is bright.
