#yeeyeenation

Using methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as “country boys.” In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric—in this case, that something or someone “is not racist”—even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith’s success, particularly since he is best known for his “redneck” alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.

A Different Country?

The chapter focuses on Lil Nas X and his record-breaking hit “Old Town Road” (2018), which combines stylistic elements from country and trap music. The song received immense attention in early 2019 after Billboard discreetly removed it from its Hot Country Songs chart, a decision that was interpreted by some as racially motivated. The chapter investigates how Lil Nas X’s musical eclecticism and queer cowboy iconography raises questions pertaining to the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the country and hip hop genres. First, it critiques the popular narrative that his widespread success following the Billboard incident is indicative of the declining authority of the music industry in the face of the democratizing effects of digital technologies. Then, it turns its attention to the official movie, Old Town Road, in which Lil Nas X is joined by guest artist Billy Ray Cyrus. Particular focus is devoted to the intersectional aspects of masculinity, which are elucidated through a discussion of how certain sounds and vocal characteristics become constructed and experienced as racially coded. Finally, drawing on perspectives from queer of color critique, the chapter explores the idea that Lil Nas X’s queer tactics both stand as a corrective to accounts of the past that bypass the contributions of black musicians in the development of country music (and black cowboys’ participation in the Old West) and introduces new ways of moving past dominant social constraints.

Effects of Auditory Stimuli on Beat-Synchronized Long Distance Walking: Part A - Energize on Country Music

In well documented studies, walking and music have independently shown substantial medical, health, productivity, and other human benefits. When music is combined with walking, and especially when the walking is done in synchrony to the beat, the music can stimulate faster walking without apparent awareness, the “velocity effect”. Some studies have reported that music that is either familiar, more enjoyable, and/or has higher “groove” tends to be more stimulating, and that some music can actually be sedating resulting in a slower speed relative to that of walking to a metronome at the same cadence. Research illuminating the velocity effect has mostly been conducted over relatively short stepping distances in a laboratory or similar outdoor setting. The current study examines walking on a real-world long distance outdoor track with a single genre of music that was at least somewhat familiar and somewhat enjoyable to the test subject. In this study, the test subject stepped in self-instructed synchrony with confirmed high accuracy to two types of auditory stimuli – either to the beat of a metronome (a presumed neutral source or what might be considered a most rudimentary form of music), or to the beat of a broad-spectrum of country music continuously over a 2-mile course. Nine metronome tempos and twenty-one country music tempos were examined in a walkable range of 90 to 130 beats per minute (BPM), and the effects of the music and metronome on walking performance were examined and quantified. Overall, the mix of country music was significantly more energizing than the metronome providing a relatively consistent 10% increase in step length and a resulting 10% increase in speed over the entire tempo/cadence range. Speed as a function of tempo was essentially linear in the beat range for both auditory stimuli with an apparent increase in speed relative to the trendlines occurring near 120 BPM, a preferred human response frequency reported in some prior investigations.

"Sometimes I Live in the Country, Sometimes I Live in Town”: Discourses of Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rural/Urban Dichotomy in Alternative Country Music

<p>Alternative country (or alt.country) offers to its listeners a complex juxtaposition of punk and country aesthetics and sentiments, rendering music that is considered to be a heartfelt, rustic, and authentic alternative to mainstream popular music. This suggests an expansive genre style, with ever-shifting musical parameters, as well as potential for negotiation regarding the genre’s seminal artists. Thus, alt.country is primarily understood and organised in relation to the lofty concept of authenticity, usually prior to musical or lyrical considerations. The genre therefore offers an illuminating approach to considering the socially constructed and negotiated demarcations of genre. Although genre is often perceived to be unmovable and absolute, every announcement of a genre and its associated performance works to change the fabric of the genre itself. Despite this, genre facilitates common expectations between audience members, offering a shortcut to understanding particular musical events and their relation to one another. The appearance of authenticity is a cornerstone of the alt.country genre. Genuine characteristics, lived experience, and emotion are highly valued within the alt.country subculture. Authenticity too is dependent on changing social conceptions of the term and what it actually means to be ‘authentic’. Attempts by No Depression, the genre’s coalescing magazine, to guide the audience’s perceptions of authenticity are frequent, but not always successful, supporting the assertion that individuals have their own socially-informed and nuanced understanding of the concept. Notions of authenticity contribute to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. Alt.country possesses its own world view, characteristics and knowledge which are valuable and exchangeable within this setting. There too exists a visible hierarchy. Within the genre, a knowledge of a wide array of music (country or otherwise), dressing in the right clothes and generally appearing unkempt, unpolished and unprofessional all results in high amounts of cultural capital. Musicians and the audience alike must play into and contribute to these values to be given the right to be part of this community. Traditionally within popular music, the critic has acted as an intermediary, between the music and the listener, communicating the specifities of cultural capital and the music’s value (or otherwise). Their vast and superior musical knowledge (capital) places them in this respected position. No Depression’s critics though must put this traditional dynamic aside, instead adopting a self-effacing, unprofessional tone, thus contributing to the genre’s characteristics to subsequently retain respect and continue to have authority within this subculture. Alt.country functions as a self-knowing community. The music maintains a preoccupation with both American ruralities, and the vices and people that bind them to everyday urban life. Rural geographies and the glorious escape to the country is portrayed as an absolute point of freedom, offering what they currently lack. This ignores the often harsh realities of rural sustenance. The appeal of this music to the audience is similarly located. Physical escape to the country is not practical (and often not wanted), so these desires are played out as a fantasy within alt.country and its lyrical tropes. It offers emotional resonance for its audience, making the genre highly affective, despite both the audience’s and musicians’ urban realities. These contradictions suggest the underlying complexities of making ironic yet emotionally connected music in the postmodern age. It is acknowledged that authenticity is produced and constructed, yet alt.country can still provide a sense of comfort, solace, and escape.</p>

"Sometimes I Live in the Country, Sometimes I Live in Town”: Discourses of Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rural/Urban Dichotomy in Alternative Country Music

<p>Alternative country (or alt.country) offers to its listeners a complex juxtaposition of punk and country aesthetics and sentiments, rendering music that is considered to be a heartfelt, rustic, and authentic alternative to mainstream popular music. This suggests an expansive genre style, with ever-shifting musical parameters, as well as potential for negotiation regarding the genre’s seminal artists. Thus, alt.country is primarily understood and organised in relation to the lofty concept of authenticity, usually prior to musical or lyrical considerations. The genre therefore offers an illuminating approach to considering the socially constructed and negotiated demarcations of genre. Although genre is often perceived to be unmovable and absolute, every announcement of a genre and its associated performance works to change the fabric of the genre itself. Despite this, genre facilitates common expectations between audience members, offering a shortcut to understanding particular musical events and their relation to one another. The appearance of authenticity is a cornerstone of the alt.country genre. Genuine characteristics, lived experience, and emotion are highly valued within the alt.country subculture. Authenticity too is dependent on changing social conceptions of the term and what it actually means to be ‘authentic’. Attempts by No Depression, the genre’s coalescing magazine, to guide the audience’s perceptions of authenticity are frequent, but not always successful, supporting the assertion that individuals have their own socially-informed and nuanced understanding of the concept. Notions of authenticity contribute to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. Alt.country possesses its own world view, characteristics and knowledge which are valuable and exchangeable within this setting. There too exists a visible hierarchy. Within the genre, a knowledge of a wide array of music (country or otherwise), dressing in the right clothes and generally appearing unkempt, unpolished and unprofessional all results in high amounts of cultural capital. Musicians and the audience alike must play into and contribute to these values to be given the right to be part of this community. Traditionally within popular music, the critic has acted as an intermediary, between the music and the listener, communicating the specifities of cultural capital and the music’s value (or otherwise). Their vast and superior musical knowledge (capital) places them in this respected position. No Depression’s critics though must put this traditional dynamic aside, instead adopting a self-effacing, unprofessional tone, thus contributing to the genre’s characteristics to subsequently retain respect and continue to have authority within this subculture. Alt.country functions as a self-knowing community. The music maintains a preoccupation with both American ruralities, and the vices and people that bind them to everyday urban life. Rural geographies and the glorious escape to the country is portrayed as an absolute point of freedom, offering what they currently lack. This ignores the often harsh realities of rural sustenance. The appeal of this music to the audience is similarly located. Physical escape to the country is not practical (and often not wanted), so these desires are played out as a fantasy within alt.country and its lyrical tropes. It offers emotional resonance for its audience, making the genre highly affective, despite both the audience’s and musicians’ urban realities. These contradictions suggest the underlying complexities of making ironic yet emotionally connected music in the postmodern age. It is acknowledged that authenticity is produced and constructed, yet alt.country can still provide a sense of comfort, solace, and escape.</p>

Music is a Place: Oprys and the Rural Working-Class Constitution of Public Space

Abstract“Oprys” are public musicking events found in Appalachia and beyond. They facilitate regular embodied sociality between strangers and friends in a region often characterized by the social fallout of neoliberal economic trends. Drawing on ethnographic research in Tennessee and elsewhere, I show that oprys constitute rural working-class public space where participants negotiate a precarious cultural order through the affordances of live country music performance. But political discourse in these spaces is articulated primarily through embodied, performative, and aesthetic realms which are not captured in a delimited and classed notion of discourse as primarily text or talk. As such, oprys offer a corrective to our understanding of what counts as discursive contestation. I foreground two particular cultural imperatives that structure oprys: participation and accommodation. These imperatives produce a socio-cultural event that characteristically refuses the monetization of space and privileges dialogic sociality over the production of artistic sound. Approaching oprys through the frame of “counterpublic” reveals a different way of imagining public space, public music making and sociality, and the terrain of political discourse.

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Jayne makes the quickie B- and C-films The Fat Spy and Las Vegas Hillbillys. She continues to tour in summer stock and dinner theater, appears at New York's Latin Quarter, and disastrously hosts the stage revue Country Music Spectacular. Her fifth and last child, Antonio "Tony" Cimber, is born on October 18, 1965.

“The desert’s no home for a rose”: Filipinx childhood and music as aesthetic experience

This article examines Diane Paragas’ film Yellow Rose (2019) for its capacity to offer important insights into the reparative utility of music for a child separated from a parent due to deportation. While the film depicts the brutality of contemporary U.S. migration policies, Yellow Rose is also a story about the role of aesthetic expression in childhood’s diasporic imaginaries. The film teaches us about the agentic potential of music as a mode of dealing with the trauma of forced separation. In particular, the genre of American country music is affectively instrumentalized by the film’s young, Filipinx protagonist. In deepening my argument, I work with the film to explain that the kinship between Rose and a genre of music that is hegemonically associated with whiteness produces a “queer sonic” that serves as conduit for the emergence of contingent networks of care and methods of survival. I propose that queer sonic expression, or the unassimilable qualities of sound and genre, is a site where we can broaden racialized imaginings of Filipinx childhood, as it offers an opportunity for reparation.

THE IDEA OF MUSIC BUSINESS

This paper captured the need to include ‘Music Business’ as a course of study in Music Departments and Business Schools across Higher Institutions in Nigeria. This call was necessitated by the growing zeal and number of students, youths, entrepreneurs, businessmen and women, music enthusiasts and investors who are enthusiastic about engaging in the music entertainment industry across the country in the face of rising unemployment indices in the country. Music educators have also awakened to the realization that some of the courses and music specialties offered students are insufficient and inadequate in meeting with the demands of the economic hardship and burgeoning business world around them. Definitely not all students have flairs or interest in music composition, music teaching, or music performance; some have flairs for music business where they can excel in packaging and managing music for events. Unarguably, music features in virtually all social engagements around the world and the Nigerian society such as meetings, weddings, rallies, religious gatherings, ceremonies, funerals, seminars and conferences, banquets, etc., and it is appropriate therefore that such endeavor be given adequate attention in scholarship to ascertain its functionalism and pragmatic ways of sustaining, improving, and promoting the art. The paper therefore recommends that Departments of Music and Business schools across the country should recognize the imperatives of ‘Music Business’ as part of their curriculum of studies to the end of fostering functional education among the youths.