Country Music Essay

Music is one of the essential components of our daily lives. Many people use music as a way to express their emotions and experiences. Some people use music as a coping mechanism by creating the emotional connection with the lyrics and rhythm of the songs. However, many people in the 21th century tend to like music depending on where the artists come from, the origin of the music, and their emotional status of the time of listening. In today’s society, music types are divided into different genres in order to simplify and connect people together. Some examples of music genres are soft rock and country pop. Country Pop is one of the most influential genres in the 21st century. This genre tends to give some sense of the southern feeling and the sense of home. The main theme of the music is love and relationships, which is almost similar to the soft rock music. However, country pop tones and rhythm is more delicate when compared to the soft rock. Most of the Country Pop’s artist comes from Nashville, which is also the home of country music. Furthermore, most of the artists in the pop-country genre start their career with
country styles. Through the transition of their career, they would slowly move towards the less country style in order to increase the number of their consumers. This is very ordinary because most of these artists are working with a recording company, which will be focusing on making money by selling the artist's appearances and popularity. Many of the recognized artists are known for their popularity when tracking them on Facebook or Twitter; we can see that they have very high number of “likes” or “followers.” This helps us understand that they are keeping their popularity in order to keep their job. Some examples of country pop music are the following:
I. Taylor Swift is an American singer and songwriter in the 21st century. She is very young and a very successful artist during this period. She moved to Nashville to pursue her career in country music. She was one of the youngest singers that signed a contract with Big Machine Records and later become one of the youngest songwriters. Most of her songs such as Fearless, You belong with me, and Love story became well known among all the fans. Because of it popularity, many of her songs received many awards. Swift wrote many songs based on her experience and love life. Therefore, she was able to put in the emotion and play with her fans feelings.
II. Lady Antebellum is a country music group from Nashville. The primary members of the group consist of Hillary Scott, Charles Kelly, and Dave Haywood. The band started in late 2006; they become one of the well-known groups because of their first album. When examining the production of Country pop music, we can see that most of the sounds mixed well together, the vocal voice is just right, focus on the cultural meanings and theme of the song, and the shared feelings. We can see and feel that these elements are what we can find in most of the Country pop music because they want the music to be somewhat suitable for everyone and able to target all types of people. In addition to the production, there are many people behind the scene, since the main purpose of being in a label company is to have a professional team that can make the music better and more suitable for consumers. Most of the Pop-country music industry's profits are not relying on the number of album sales anymore; instead the industries are focusing on the recording stream and live performance stream. Most of the artists would expect their fans to know most of the song before the live performance since, most of the songs are distributing online. The fan group of the Pop-country music is mostly female from age 16- mid 30 years old. This is a typical group of fans for most popular music in the others directed society. Most of the discussion about the Country pop music can be found on website comment section such as YouTube, iTunes, and music blogs. Most of the commentators tend to be people that identify them as “pure country” or sometimes the writers just hate the music type and the artists. For example, Ken Tucker on the NPR music site was criticizing Taylor Swift. Tucker said that Swift is the queen of pop music and she had become one of the biggest album selling in the U.S. In addition of how Swift is very “good at convincing her fan of heartache,”(Tucker, Ken) and he further mentioned that many of Swift’s songs have the “memorable” melody. Overall, Tucker said that Swift is magnificent at making her song stand out in the crowd. He also mentioned that Swift is one of the “peppiest” artist in the 21st century. Soft rock is one of the music genres that emerge in our society in the late 1970s.
This music is the combination of rock music techniques and some of the elements from folk rock. Soft rock’s tone is softer than regular rock music. Soft rock focuses its music production on the melody and harmonies instead of death and dying. Many people tend to assume that soft rock is similar to the rock and roll, that assumption is wrong. Thus, soft rock is considered to be part of the contemporary music because it has some of the elements from folk, light blues, and country rock. The genre’s central theme is about love and relationship of everyday lives and attempting to present emotions in a non-threatening way. The origin of the genre is believed to be from California and England. Some of the examples of soft rock artists and band are the
following:
I. Christopher Cross earned as many as five Grammy Awards throughout his career; he is one of the greatest singer and songwriters because he comes from Texas. Cross focused most of his work on the Pop rock and soft rock. One of his soft rock types of music that become famous is known as “Ride Like the Wind.” Ride Like the Wind was one his songs on his first album in 1980. He dedicated this song to Lowell George. The songs tell a story through the lyrics, in this particular song, he was telling a story about how a bad guy got away from doing bad thing. However, he wrote his song while he was in a car to Austin. Cross is one of the artists that could write his song, however, most of his songs become such a great work because of the help from producers and specialists.
II. The Doobie Brothers are an American rock band artists, who they started their career in the 1980s. The members of the band include Tom Johnson, Patriic Simmons, John McFee, John Cowan, Guy Allison, Marc Rosso, Tony Pia, and Ed Toth. The band was not famous or well known at first because they used to be bad. This is one of the examples for 10,000 rules because they gained most of their experience from a live concert in their early career. One of their famous well-known songs is “What a Fool Believes,” written by Kenny Loggin and Michael McDonald.
III. Seals and Crofts are labeled as an American soft rock duo; the members of the team are James Seals and Darrell Croft. The duos disband and reunited many times in their career. The duo is Texan born, but their start was not smooth. Their story is like a typical rock music artists because not all of people that we so called “rock star” is perfect. The song Summer Breeze is one of their well-known works and it has been used in many films and sound tracks. The nature of the song is very soft and easy listening. It does not have the southern tone when compared to country, however it does have some sense of classical music in the background. When examining the production of Soft Rock music, we can see that the sound is calmer than the rock and roll type. However, it contains a lot of elements of folk and country music. This is because the purpose of Soft Rock music is for easy listening and light in banging sounds. Many of the soft rock bands such as Seal and Crofts tends to have a problem at its start, and they learn the singing technique through their experiences. Overall, it seems to me that it is harder to be a famous Soft Rock artist when compared with the Popular Country artists. However, the question is which music or artist can stay in the trend longer? To answer this question, I would say it is up to the fans and discipline of the artists. I found that it is hard to find a broad critical review on the Soft rock genre, however, when examining the review on some of the music site, many of them claim that the genre should be re-classify under pop music since, the sound does not represent the “masculinity.” Most of the fans of this genre tend to be people from 17-40 years old, however we can still see older people liking the type of music depending on the time and their generation. For example, most of fans for Summer Breeze song are in the older generation and most of them are females. According to their comments on the comment section, they said that it gave them the feeling of “miracle” and a sense of good lives. When I listened to the song, I thought that the song is very soft and easy to listen to.
When comparing the two types of genres, one would say that their fan group and the root of music are very similar because soft rock and country pop have some similar elements. The similarities are rhythms and instruments. Sometimes both types of music would be on the same radio station. Unlike other musical genres, rock lyrics cover a broad range of themes such as love, sex, rebellion, and social conflicts. Lyrics of country pop songs are more important when compared to the soft rock music because they are focusing on telling a story with softer background music when compared to the soft rock. However, soft rock music takes the lyrics and melody in consideration when they make the music, but the genre still wants to keep the tone of rock music, yet it is shallow. Another significant similarity of country pop and soft rock is their fan geographic location, because of the fans are from urban and rural area. While writing this paper, I realized it is very hard to distinguish the differences of country pop and soft rock genres when listening to the music, yet their location, fans, production, artists, and literature do have some differences between the two styles.