The Washington Post reports that country music stations won’t play anything from the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ new film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” This despite the fact that the soundtrack is the number 2 country album in the country at the moment.
Why won’t they play it? Because almost all country radio stations stink. There is a lot of really good country music being put out these days, but almost none of it gets played on country radio. Country stations have become even more narrow than pop stations, and if a song doesn’t fit an extremely narrow format it simply isn’t going to get played.
Apparently the liner notes to the “O Brother” soundtrack include a swipe at contemporary country music saying that Nashville, “expropriated that term [country music] to describe watered-down pop/rock with greeting-card lyrics.”
Not everything played on country stations fits that bill, but way too much of it does (as evidenced by the popularity on such stations of country singers covering boy band hits — yuck!) Lucky for me, the digital cable here includes a progressive/alternative country feed so I’m not stuck listening to the pop country stations.