This article is colored by the time period I’ve experienced directly, namely songwriters from the 90s through today. What I have noticed is a distinct change in the way songwriters are seen, by themselves and by the public and the industry.
Songwriters, since the 60s have represented the voice of the independent person. The disenfranchised due to economics or artistic reasons, the outlier, the outlaw at times, the rebel. The person who can see life for what it is and sing about it. Folk songwriters of the 1960s seemed brave. In the ’70s they seemed comfortable (the age of light rock meeting folk). In the ’80s they seemed to be all but vanished, covered in a sea of black leather, giant hair and electric guitars. In the early ’90s the best lyrics you might hope to hear would likely be on a hip hop or pop album. Then, from out of the wreckage crawled Nirvana and it was cool again to be yourself, in all your imperfections, and sing about life for what it was, and be pissed off, and tortured, and all that good stuff. Artists like Ani Di Franco seemed to be a whole school of thought unto themselves. Even if you didn’t like the music, you got that it was more than a lifestyle, it was a form of self-expression. I never doubted for a minute that having an acoustic guitar and wielding your own lyrics meant that you were free thinking.
The word that described this in a marketing sense was “alternative.” Meaning, the music you were listening to was an alternative to mainstream music. This could also mean heavier rock, but the idea was that it was different than the norm. DIY was hailed as a way to maintain your artistic integrity, without the hands of a label telling you what to do.
Once the early 21st century started, there was not only social media, but home recording was finally affordable to the masses, in the sense of Garageband and beats, and people could really be up and running making their own music in the comfort of their home or bedroom. This led to a lot of bedroom producers and home recording projects of various levels of quality. Some were quite good. Others so-so. But it didn’t matter the quality, the common thread was that it was done outside of live performance, outside of a social structure that involved clubs, and other people. Artists could be totally to themselves, in their own world.
This started to be the death of what I could see as the free-thinking archetype of the musician, which I grew up with.
Then, in the ’00s, being an independent musician was all about pandering. Pandering to social media, to the club whom you had to convince you could bring out x number of people, even pandering to your band to make it worth everyone’s time. Clubs wanted musicians to bring people because Chicago is over-saturated with clubs, in the indie rock scene, but I digress. There were no unions, there were few gigs that paid based on anything other than draw. For a variety of reasons, music was inherently becoming a hobby, even for those that took it seriously, there simply wasn’t the revenue structure to make it a serious undertaking.
DIY was becoming a necessity, not an artistic statement, because there were fewer labels with budgets for new artists, and now DIY was just a matter of course. Musicians had to wear many hats and do their own promotion, as neither clubs nor labels were doing the heavy lifting anymore.
In the midst of these changes, the archetype of the acoustic singer-songwriter started seeking authenticity. In the minds of the public and of musicians, something was missing, so they tried to fill it with a word. That word was Americana.
Americana started to be thrown around for every act that had an acoustic guitar. No longer was the acoustic guitar simply the tool for a free thinker to create their own style of music, but it was a throwback to another time, a time of folk, roots country and the like. Everyone liked the word Americana. It seemed to fit. It was homey. It was wise. It was like folk music but broader. It was traditional-sounding but loose enough so that no one expected the musicians to have any real technique.
Three examples of Americana of various kinds (to understand the genre’s ability to interface with “marketability,” authenticity (by collaborating with a street musician) and maintain the thread of the individual voice of the singer-songwriter — in that order):
That’s not progress, it is a slippery slope.
The guitar has often been at the helm of music innovation, especially in the past 60 years. Prior to that, perhaps the piano was at the helm as composers often created epic works on piano. As music from the big band and orchestrated era started to fade out in the ’50s and the 4-piece rockband became the staple diet of American music (for the most part), the guitar was a huge part of that.
Because guitar was a common instrument in groups, innovative groups or artists/composers would be guitar players by default (of course there are many fine exceptions to this), and the guitar was the canvas that many musical thinkers painted on.
Now, the once innovative instrument is becoming a dime-store novelty, and any strumming on it is referred to as “Americana.”
Artists like Kaki King are certainly exceptions to this, as her style is incredibly innovative and original, but for the most part the acoustic guitar is dying the slow death when people brand it as Americana. Musicians in this genre seem ready to be lumped into a category that is neither true to tradition nor pushing the envelope of the future.
The music in this video, by Leo Kottke, has elements of blues and country (with slide guitar and a chugging rhythm) but I would not call it Americana becuase it’s too good. It has spirit, skill and tenacity.
This word that is robbing the acoustic guitar of its energy and potential. Let’s reclaim it.
Addendum
Kaki King’s work nods more to the integration of technology and artisic expression than to an individual voice of human experience, yet shows the inexhaustible flexibility of the guitar to make a statement:
The cover photo is a music store in Chicago and this creepy ventriliquist could remind us not to simply echo the words and thoughts of others, but to make our own voice heard.