词条 | country rock |
释义 | country rock music Introduction ![]() This evolutionary link seemed so essential to groups like the Byrds (Byrds, the) and Buffalo Springfield that (perhaps influenced by Bob Dylan (Dylan, Bob)'s similarly inclined 1967 album, John Wesley Harding) they sought to import country's vocabulary and instrumentation into their countercultural pursuit of psychological and formal adventure. Under the sway of Gram Parsons, the Byrds created country rock's pivotal album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968), the country-purist goals of which seemed somewhat avant-garde in a rock world that had come to disdain all things conceivably old-fashioned. To hear the Byrds perform the Louvin Brothers (Louvin Brothers, the)' country standard “The Christian Life” was to enter a distanced, hyperaestheticized realm where 1960s counterculture assumptions about the preeminence of loud volume and the obsolescence of tradition were called into question. Because the movement's very instrumentation—pedal steel guitars, fiddles, mandolins, Dobro guitars, unobtrusive percussion—promoted milder, generally acoustic sonic auras, country rock's overall effect seemed drastically different. Significantly, however, the style occurred not in a city alive with the values of contemporary art but in Los Angeles, which during the previous decades had attracted many rural Southerners. Moreover, country rock's rise to prominence paralleled the rise of the big-budget Hollywood recording studio ethic, the desire to compete with London in the effort to make pop recordings of the most highly advanced sonic clarity and detail then imaginable. Country rock had begun by insisting that the sources—and not the means—of popular music were of signal importance. Yet in the end the movement succeeded by adopting the same exacting production techniques pioneered by the Beatles (Beatles, the) and their producer George Martin. ![]() By the end of the 1970s, punk and new wave pushed country rock out of the pop charts and the media limelight. The 1980s saw a resurgence of the genre, more geared to rockabilly force than folk and country balladry. Christened “roots rock,” it yielded underground champions like Nashville's Jason and the Scorchers, ultimately manifesting itself in the mainstream work of Bruce Springsteen (Springsteen, Bruce), John Mellencamp (Mellencamp, John), and others. Also by the end of that decade, country music in Nashville had begun to adapt some of the riskier guitar tones and rhythms for its less traditional artists. Elsewhere a new wave of young country rockers, notably Son Volt and Wilco, lumped together under the banner “alternative country” in the 1990s, tried to resurrect the less glitzy side of the movement. But country rock in the most popular sense became a period style, left to evoke the 1970s, a time when artists dressed up deep aesthetic and personal concerns in music that only sounded soft. Representative Works ● Buffalo Springfield, Buffalo Springfield Again (1967) ● The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968) ● Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline (1969) ● The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969) ● Neil Young, Harvest (1972) ● The Eagles, Desperado (1973) ● Gram Parsons, Grievous Angel (1974) ● Linda Ronstadt, Heart Like a Wheel (1974) ● Emmylou Harris, Pieces of the Sky (1975) ● Jason and the Scorchers, Fervor (1983) Additional Reading John Rockwell, “The Sound of Hollywood,” in Jim Miller (ed.), The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, rev. and updated (1980), pp. 407–414, is a superb placement of country rock in the larger perspective of Los Angeles pop music, with special emphasis on chief practitioners and concomitant movements of the 1970s and '80s. James Hunter, “The Eagles,” in Paul Kingsbury (ed.), Country on Compact Disc (1993), pp. 55–56, offers an evaluative sketch of the Eagles' career and recordings and traces the influence of their work on mainstream Nashville country music. “The Eagles,” in Patricia Romanowski, Holly George-Warren, and Jon Pareles (eds.), The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, completely rev. and updated (1995), pp. 293–295, is a good running narrative of country rock's earliest and more commercialized, era-defining days. |
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