When Americana doesn't mean American
deeprootsmag.org
deeprootsmag.org
For many cultures of the world, the most prominent musical genres are either highly parochial or highly corporatized (the latter also being the case in the USA).
Americana/Roots music still sits in place apart from those other genres, and while this probably limits the possible financial success of its practitioners, it preserves its authenticity and therefore it's broad appeal.
That raises the question, why doesn't every other form of authentic folk music around the world have the same broad appeal? Why aren't musicians all over the world taken up, say, Indian or Chinese folk music in total (vs borrowing themes or instruments)?
Because even Americana/Roots music has been a major source of the waves of US cultural and economic imperialism that have flowed over the world, from at least the early days of jazz and and definitely in the days of blues, rock, r&b, and rap.
Eastern folk music is a different plant.
African drum music as well, but is a hybrid that has integrated itself into the modern music structure.
It's arguably a branch with connections back to at least two trees, African being one and European being the other.
Then Japanese folk music started to become really popular.
These days, it's K-pop that's super popular all over Asia and it's catching on throughout the rest of the world too.
Yeah, it is.
> These days, it's K-pop that's super popular all over Asia and it's catching on throughout the rest of the world too.
And K-pop owes its roots to American pop and hip-hop, which itself descends from Americana/Roots music, so these things go full circle.
It might mean something different worldwide.
I've never heard of it referring to the music of indigenous Americans (American Indians).
The most common definition (per the Americana Music Association) has connections to nearly all the genres you mentioned, and with a strong historical connection to the American South.
Perhaps because Canada has english, a east coast, a west, and the great plains.
Also maybe some aspects of geography, like knowing in which continent Canada is.
I usually try to use US-ian instead of American, but it looks really stupid and so I get why it is pretty widespread to call us Americans.
The average non‐American is from outside the Anglosphere, and so may be from a culture that considers North America and South America to be a single continent. But continents don’t have an objective definition, only a cultural one, and in the language and culture of the Anglosphere the Americas are distinct continents, America is a country, and Americans are that country’s people.
I’ve never met a Canadian who clamored to be called an American. (Except naturalized citizens!)
Of course Nashville is not a hothouse of radical music, but we are talking about Americana right?
In the 1970’s, the Grateful Dead weren’t played on country radio. Indeed they were barely on radio at all anywhere until Touch of Gray in the mid 1980’s.
And then only because of MTV…which in the early days refused to air videos by black musicians.
Nashville was no different from the rest of US pop culture industry then. And is no different today. Americana still fares much better there than EDM, Punk, and Rap.
They were criticized for not having enough black acts. That's a reasonable criticism, but let's not make it sound like some kind of apartheid. They made a commercial decision about what genres to focused on, rather than something racially motivated. They didn't air many videos by country singers or classical violinists either.
https://youtu.be/XZGiVzIr8Qg?si=T1RmgwQiqOP_GiNE
Wikipedia’s article whitewashes the actual history. We were watching MTV and smoking weed in those Reagan’s America days.
—
In fairness the US music industry had the race music chart which became the R&B chart to keep black musicians off the pop chart and Elvis’s controversy was singing black music…and consequently being played on white radio stations to white kids.
Steppenwolf being the quintessential example.
1) Developing its own domestic artists/musicians, to a much greater degree than the US (eg https://www.factor.ca/)
2) Greatly restricting smaller foreign acts (especially from the US) from performing in Canada for commercial purposes
Yes, point #2 also applies to the US, but it's not enforced. But if you cross into Canada with musical instruments, they'll put the fear of God into you.
This is largely why the phenomena you describe exists: artists can develop within their domestic cocoon, without being crowded-out by Americans, and then tour their larger, wealthier neighbor to greatly expand their profile virtually risk-free.
2) Greatly restricting smaller
foreign acts (especially from
the US) from performing in
Canada for commercial purposes
Yes, point #2 also applies to
the US, but it's not enforced.
But if you cross into Canada
with musical instruments,
they'll put the fear of God into
you.
Lots of countries have this quota system where they try to artificially force feed homegrown music, tv shows and movies and it never works.
People always gravitate to the larger American sphere because it doesnt have such restrictions in place. They dont work anyway.
When I first saw Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (2008) it was so fresh and un-Hollywood like in the presentation of the raw violence and vice, that it stunned me. I still cant stand most PG-fied and Disney-fied American films.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film)
Gomorra (2008) Official HD Trailer [1080p]
IIRC you need to hit 3/4 to be considered Canadian content.
At that time J Biebs was big, but since his music and lyrics were written by Americans and he performed/recorded in the States, his music was not CanCon despite him being Canadian. So, at the radio station I volunteered at, his music would count towards the 30% quota of not-CanCon music.
Near the border, the people on either side talk the same. You go north/south the accents vary on a spectrum.
Oh yahh, dem yoopers are almost canucks!
Sounds just like the situation here in the US!
And there are three times as many people in Mexico as in Canada and as many Spanish speakers in the US as Canadians in Canada.
There are geographical similarities but I think it is more cultural.
Culturally, Canada and the USA are extremely similar. What a lot of people who don't live in Canada often fail to realize is that the vast, overwhelming majority of our population is concentrated in southern Canada... and that these areas are often even SOUTH OF PARTS OF THE USA in terms of latitude.
For example, Seattle WA lies on roughly the same latitude as Ottawa, ON which is quite north of Toronto. Detroit Michigan borders Windsor, ON (my home town) and Windsor is to the south of Detroit.
When broadcast television and radio were in their prime, we all watched American TV and listened to American radio (and the northern USA got Canadian channels etc).
In border towns like Vancouver and Windsor, it's not uncommon for people to have family on both sides of the border or to even live in one country and hold a day job in another.
A lot of Canadians have winter homes in southern states. Florida is a popular destination for east-coast Canadians and, while I don't know if it has changed, a typical visitor visa for Canadians let us stay for up to 6 months before we have to go back. And a lot of people even hold dual-citizenship.
Born and raised in SOUTH Detroit!
Howdy from the East Side of Windsor.
Dual citizen here living on the Canadian side. It will be interesting to see how the political unraveling in the U.S. will force Canadians to regard and reinforce aspects of our culture that are distinct.
It is also interesting that you mention Canadian snowbirds. That too, at least anecdotally seems to be changing. In the last few weeks I ran into two individuals who are both working on unloading their homes in Florida on account all of this xenophobic sentiment.
E.g. proximity to the US is why US broadcast TV was a normal experience for many Canadians.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/canadians-sell-...
Maybe, some day, Canada could (peacefully and consensually) acquire itself some Caribbean provinces
https://swling.com/blog/2023/08/radio-carpathia-and-rnei-to-...
Bob Catface (https://bsky.app/profile/bobcatface.bsky.social) has a Discord (Mostly Shortwave Discord: discord.gg/fr4Uuw4z5h) where you can receive notices when these come on the air. If you are a ham radio operator or SWL, you can decode MSFK usually with these shows.
Mostly that they've got no respect for genre boundaries. They play a lot of American rock and pop with Russian folk influences, but also the other way around, and later started mixing in even more genres. And they're always funny and irreverent.
A personal favourite is their interpretation of Eloise, which includes the weird shout "Kozachok!", which is the name of a Ukrainian dance, but is also used (in exactly the same rhythm, though a lot more repetitive) in a French or Romanian cover of a Russian or Ukrainian song (I momentarily forgot which one or who the singer of that cover is). Anyway, complex references that are nearly impossible to get.
Also, having the Red Army Choir perform parodies of American pop and rock songs seems like something that was only possible in the early 1990s, after east-west tensions had softened, the Cold War ended, and we got closer together. And the Leningrad Cowboys definitely did their part to bring us together. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we need them again.
In the mid-2000s, J. Karjalainen (a Finnish musician) put out a concept album called Lännen-Jukka. If you like Blues, it's worth checking out. YLE, the Finnish media network, put out a documentary on it. Karjalainen travels through the US including significant time in Upper Michigan, where many Finns settled a hundred years ago (and more recently).
Another thing I remember is that while here, Karjalainen & his bandmates were detained by the TSA at Minneapolis St Paul airport and treated rather poorly. Apparently TSA thought they were gonna overstay their visas in the US and try to "make it big in music". It was very bizarre.
Recent events made me think of that again.
And isn't that why there are so many who claim to be "Irish" or "Italian" even though they're third or fourth generation and have never set foot in the countries.
I'll probably grab UK citizenship soon, but I would never say "I'm British". Nor would I if I had British parents (I don't) when I was still in NZ, before I'd even set foot in the UK.
I don’t think this is uniquely American - I know people in Australia who identify as Italian despite the fact their parents were born here. And I wonder if you’d find something similar in other places where large numbers of Italians emigrated, such as Argentina. And the same applies to various other groups too, mutatis mutandis.
A word like “Italian” can variously describe legal nationality/citizenship, ethnicity, ancestry, language, self-identification - and different combinations of those possibilities in different contexts or as used by different speakers
I definitely still feel like it gives Americans in an otherwise contiguous and vanilla culture something to grab onto per se.
I have American friends over here who are very invested in where they're from and have a unique interest in telling peeps about their history even though they're like 5th generation at least.
I’m a British citizen, but I’m not British. I’ve never stepped foot in the UK in my whole life, I became a citizen through descent.
And my late grandmother, who was born in Scotland and lived the first half of her life there, I remember once calling her Scottish, and she corrected me “I’m not Scottish, I’m Irish” (both her parents were born in Ireland)
Interesting how you don't get "9/11" shots over here.
Also, there's a park in Tokyo, where people dress in "rockabilly" outfits, not unlike the ones in the video.
First of seven episodes of theirs about Ivy:
https://www.articlesofinterest.co/podcast/episode/338532f2/a...
Fussell's Class and (especially) Birnbach et al's The Official Preppy Handbook also treat extensively of the style.
It's not just for americana, many staples for european-inspired or gothic fantasy are made by the japanese, even if most of these creators don't speak english. Well in a sense perhaps it's the unique feature of the Western legacy that it's virtually transcended for everyone to use, rather than just a single group.
In the 70's, tons of people bought a-dime novels full of cheap Western like 'pulp' stories written from Spanish authors with English nicknames at the cover.
Later, with the widely spread television, spies and officers/detectives took that role seamlessly, with Charles Bronson et all. Because in the end it's the same story everywhere. Lonely wolf vs the baddies. That stuff sold well everywhere, because every society has its badass hero.
I'm pretty sure tons of French directors set lots of drama/action movies in the US too.
Oh, and not just white officers. The Asian Martial Arts exploitation with Bruce Lee and clones was widely seen from their sons too in late 70's/early 80's.
And these would be surely cloned in the US too.
Ninjas, samurais and exotic Japanese and Chinese fighters were pretty much everywhere too. And, OFC, Dragon Ball in Europe was a huge success in late 80's, even if at the beginning it just was a comedy manga/anime.
Dragon Ball does the same in the end with the Chinese culture being remade from the Japanese as a parody...
The French had Blueberry, Lucky Luke...
Franco-Belgian… Goscinny and Giraud were French, but Morris and Charlier were Belgian. I am not writing this to pick nits, but the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées were very much a synergy, worth more than the separate parts.
> According to veteran spaghetti Western actor Aldo Sambrell, the phrase spaghetti Western was coined by Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez in reference to the Italian food spaghetti.
- Italian directors
- Shooting scenes looking chaotic, like an Spaghetti dish