Switched on Pop - Made In America: Toby Keith & Jay-Z

Episode Date: November 3, 2016

Back in 2011, two pop songs dropped with the same patriotic title: "Made in America." But the similarities pretty much end there. Toby Keith's country smash and Jay Z, Kanye West and Frank Ocean's soulful hip hop anthem have little in common except a firm conviction that each song knows what it really means to be American. Five years later, these tracks have a lot to tell us about the role music plays in shaping our national identity, and begs the question: does music truly bring us together? FeaturingToby Keith - Made In AmericaJay Z and Kanye West ft. Frank Ocean - Made in AmericaSisqo - Thong SongUsher - Yeah!Beyoncé - Daddy LessonsJimmie Rodgers - Blue Yodel No. 9Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys - Ida Red Likes to Boogie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Charlie, if there's one thing we know about music,

it's that music is universal. Music crosses boundaries and brings people together. I mean, it's magical, right? Yeah, of course. It feels like it's sent down from the divine so that all our hands are reaching around the world singing kumbaya together, right? But whenever I turn on the news these days,

I do not see a country whose boundaries have been erased and everyone is brought together. I see a country that's divided and disunited and pitted against one another. And it makes me wonder, does music really have this role of erasing boundaries and bringing people together? Or does maybe, in its own way, music sort of reinforce those boundaries and reinforce our distinct identities from one another? So, are you ready to go there with me?

Are you ready to get kind of deep in this one? Let's go. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist. Nate Sloan. And I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. And Charlie, I want to start with a question, kind of put it in your back pocket, and we'll take it out once in a while, run it over. And the question is kind of heady, but I think it's important. The question is, does the kind of music we listen to reflect our identities? Or does the kind of music we listen to shape our identities? Yes, okay. Yeah, mold that one over. The mirror, or is it the toolbox?

Right, right, mull that one over for a sec. and I thought in answering this question and understanding the role of music a little better in our lives, we could take two songs both from the same year, from five years ago, 2011, both songs with the same exact name, in fact. Both of these songs are called Made in America. But as we'll quickly see,

these songs, despite having the same name and being from the same year, are two very different kinds of pop songs. Right. The first, on the right side, we have Toby Keith Made in America song he wrote with Bobby Pinson

and Scott Reeves and on the other we have Made in America by Jay Z Kanye West featuring Frank Ocean produced by some hip-hop luminaries like Mike Dean

so we see these songs already are both called Made in America but they're probably going to be very different. Yeah I see what you're trying to do here you're relating the division in music to the division in the news. All right.

Where are you taking me? Let's go. So I want to take these songs, break them down lyrically and musically, and see how two different genres, country and hip-hop, both conceive of what it means to be made in America. Great. So let's begin with Toby Keith Made in America. Have a listen, Chuck. Well, it sure got that country twang. And maybe we'll start with the lyrics of it's enough.

And maybe we'll start with the lyrics of this song and see what we can unpack here. Yeah. So the question again is, what kind of political identity is this song projecting here in terms of its lyrics? Like, what can we read into this? And maybe how does it reflected in our national climate right now? Well, I feel like country songs are usually really great at forming narratives, really imagistic stories. Right. And there's a lot of imagery here that reads almost like a...

certain form of patriotic resume. Right? There's the waving the flag growing up on a farm. This is a veteran. This person buys only things made in the USA. Is a handyman and can fix anything in the garage. There's almost not a strict narrative here, but rather a bunch of images thrown at us

to reference a certain form of rural country life. Yeah, totally. Okay. And let's kind of zoom in a little into the, that country life and maybe think about how it is subtly suggesting a certain political agenda, perhaps. Right, because these images aren't neutral. No.

There are lots of references to tension. Right from the start, we have this line about buying foreign cars. Right. And setting up almost a protectionist identity. Later on, in the second verse, he references, I think it's Toby Keyes. his mother, at least by the story, who is a school teacher and says the Pledge of Allegiance even if it isn't cool. Right.

And this is a funny leap of narrative point of view because the coolness of the Pledge of Allegiance was not in question probably when his mother was a schoolteacher, but rather as a modern debate. And this pops up again when he mentions, I'm not prejudice. Like, nobody even accused the narrator of being prejudiced, but it felt like he needed to be defensive to what feels like it's a commentary on the current language about political correctness. And we're hearing at political rallies, people saying, I don't want to have to be politically correct, which is some very coded language. Right. Yes, yes. Wow. Great reading, Charles. I totally agree.

I think if we had to to put this song in a political camp. Without going red or blue, maybe we would just file it under Maga. What's that? My new acronym for Make America Great Again. It sounds like a hippie mantra, but it's really not. Because there is something, like you said, sort of protectionist, sort of looking backwards to some imagined golden era of Americana, of an imagined rural South. Right. And that seems to be slipping away, right? Because you're right, there's conflict, there's something threatened here.

Right. And certainly in one respect, what does seem threatened. And as you say, is really given away by that telling word prejudice. He ain't prejudice. But nevertheless, we do have a fantasy of disappearing white supremacy under Jim Crow America. And that is something maybe being bemoaned, not directly here, but in a general way, I think. Absolutely. Okay. And there's a lot more to say, but in the interest of time, let's move on to some of the music of this piece. What can we learn? And this is kind of harder to talk about, I think, right? Music is more elusive than lyrics, but nevertheless. Less overtly political. Right. But nevertheless, let's see how the sound world of this piece might be subtly reinforcing the same kind of political identity that the lyrics. do. And let's start with instrumentation here. Okay. So the first thing that I hear are a bunch of electric guitars, which makes me think of classic rock, roots American music. And then that's reinforced immediately by the entrance of the banjo, which is the twang, the most country sound. Right, right. That is a key moment in the instrumentation of this piece, I think. And then everything else fits within a country mold. It's a simple acoustic drum set playing the kick drum on every downbeat.

There is a interesting rising and descending baseline, but it's more or less acoustic and electrified instruments that have a relationship to traditional country instrumentation. Right. And that seems important. This acousticism, you mentioned, and a certain sense of traditionalism. How does that play into the political identity that we were detecting in the lyrics. Huh. Um, all right. Well, I guess if I have to reach really far...

Yeah, I'm putting you on the spot. I could connect the handmadeness of acoustic instruments to the garage in Toby Keith's song of things which are handmade and authentic and potentially made in the USA. Yeah. Ooh, I love that. Right. And in that, too, maybe kind of this pull yourself up. by your bootstrap, sort of self-reliance, but certainly a gritty authenticityism is communicated by

these acoustic choices, which really stand out especially in contrast to the pop charts, which are full of electronic instrumentation. There's a reverence to traditionalism. No doubt. And now I want to talk about the voice. I want to talk about the sound of the voice, because I think this is a very important part of what makes country music sound like country music. How did you describe Toby Keith's voice in this song, Charles?

Well, obviously it's got twang. Oh, it's got twang. I feel like that's the only way I really know how to describe it, but I'm sure you've theorized heavily on this. So why don't you tell me, what are you thinking? Well, I have hit the books so I can sound like I know what I'm talking about here. Right. And thanks to, in my research, thanks to a scholar named Jeff Mann,

I now have one of my new favorite words I can deploy here to describe that twangy sound you notice. Yeah. And it is diphthongization. No, no, no, that's definitely a song by Cisco from the late 90s. The diphthong song. Oh, man, Charles, that is such a dated reference, but I love it, so I can't help the laugh. Yes, diphtongization, that diphtong to thong, thong, what are we referring to here? What is a diphthong?

Oh, man, this is a really unfair pop linguistics quiz for you. It's a funny guttural-ish. sound. It's something that I learned in English in high school and I'm completely blanking and I feel really stupid. That's such a good guess. Don't worry, you sound really stupid all the time, so it's not out of character. This is a word that refers to saying or singing something that's kind of between two vowels. Okay. Not quite A-E-I-O or ooh, but sort of a blend and a lesion of two vowels. Oh, like... Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. So a word like...

Yeah. Yeah. Because it has like a yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think a better example is actually one we can draw from this song when Toby Keith sings USA. In the back it says USA. And the way he sings A is not A.

Like I'm saying it, but it's more like eh. A. Like somewhere between A and E. Right. Eh. Okay. And that's a big part of the southern accent. and it's something that you basically are required to use in a country song,

really regardless of whether you're actually from the South and have a Southern accent or not. Right. This has become just a sonic marker of country music, diphthongization. Right. It makes me think of Keith Urban, the Australian country singer who sings like he's from the rural South. Right. And it's funny because it maybe pokes at the authenticity that these singers are trying to create here. Right.

But it's also just a stylistic feature. of this music. Nevertheless, we can ask ourselves the same question. How does this twang, how does this diphthongization maybe support the political identity being shaped in this song? Well, this is a tricky one. Oh, this is really tricky. No doubt. Certainly there is a reference to the Old South, which is definitely a politicized reference. Right. And the other thing that comes up for me is that since all country singers more or less adopt this kind of accent, it creates a community of listeners and songwriters, a fluidity within a single genre, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I could even take it a little further and say that the politics of the

Southern accent seem to kind of go hand in hand as an expression of class struggle. and solidarity like you were saying because this accent is not the norm. There's something different and sort of underdog and maybe even slightly insurrectionist about it. So the choice to use this diphthongization is definitely just kind of a sonic characteristic, but I think there also might be something more there as well.

Okay. Now, at this point, we have scratched the surface of Made in America number one. Yeah. But it is indeed time to move to our other coroner. and listen to The Other Made in America. This one again by Jay-Z and Kanye West, featuring Frank Ocean from their 2011 album, Watch the Throne.

And immediately, we are in a very different kind of America here. Sweet King Martin, Incarretta, by the Johnson, we made it in America, sweet baby Jesus. Oh, yeah, this is a... It's funny because I'm hearing... So many references to American ideals, but with a totally different sound and narrative style. Yes, and let's just begin by breaking down Frank Ocean's opening hook here. Sure.

This gorgeous hook. Who are these figures? He's referring to sweet King Martin, sweet Queen Coreta, sweet brother Malcolm, sweet Queen Betty. Well, these are obviously the leaders of the civil rights movement. Right. Martin Luther King Jr., Credit Scott King, Malcolm X, Betty X, and then quickly alighted into Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. So very powerful start to this song. Yeah, uniting the Holy Family with the Civil Rights leaders in their families.

And now I'd like to zoom in on Jay Z's verse from this song. Sure. I pledge allegiance to my grandma for that banana put in our piece of Americana. I apple power supplied through almond hammer Straight out the kitchen Don't wake Nana Build the Republic It still stands

I'm trying to lead a nation And leading my little man's On my daughter So I'm boiling this water This girls was lopsided I'm just restoring order Here comes grandma What's up, ya ya

What's that smell Oh I'm just falling some aqua No papa Bad Santa The streets raised me Part in my bad manners I got my mother liberty chopping grams up street justice i pray god understand us i pledge allegiance to all the scramble

this is the star spangled banner that's an amazing verse yeah and again i just need to stress here this is a very different kind of made in america what kind of america is j z painting here i think he's painting a lot of different pictures great let's see some of that okay so the first thing i hear is a homemadeness, a reference to making homemade apple pie, the dessert of the nation. And there's this reference to almost making it in a homemade way, right? He says, our apple pie was supplied through arm and hammer. It's like he's baking it from scratch. But of course, that's not what he's really talking about here. No, what's he really talking about? Well, the next level of reading is that he is in the kitchen cooking up drugs. Right. But you're implying there's another level, too,

which I have not gotten to, so enlighten me. I'm hearing reverberations of the references to the civil rights leaders when he says, our apple pie was supplied through arm and hammer. Arm and hammer for me feels like this is direct action, class struggle, fighting in the streets. He talks about the scales of justice. He's not just referencing the scales that he's weighing these drugs on, but the actual larger fight that is taking place in our nation for equality for social justice. For social justice, yeah.

When he says the scales was lopsided, I'm just restoring order. Right, exactly. Yeah, okay, so great. And now let's get a little more refined. Let's think about how the vision of what being Made in America means in this song differs from that of the Toby Keith track from the same year. Well, this is interesting because on one hand, it feels like we have stylistically an entirely different song. But on the other, I'm hearing references to sort of,

normal American values of self-madeness, a Horatio Alger story of... Right. As you mentioned earlier, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, there's a certain sense of entrepreneurism to this song. Yeah, I totally agree. And there are similarities, but that's not what I asked you, Charlie. What are the differences here? What are the differences?

I don't know. What are you hearing? Okay, so here's what I'm hearing, because I think, again, something that is sort of fundamental to the Toby Keith song and a lot of country music is the center. of nostalgia, of looking backwards to a golden past that may be mythical, but it seems within reach. Right. And this song, and I think a lot of hip-hop, is looking forward, is looking not to the past because the past, as we are reminded in this song, is brutally unfair to its black narrators.

Right. They're not nostalgic for the Jim Crow past. No. They're looking forward. And while they're referencing these figures like Koretta Scott King and Betty X, they're doing so to acknowledge that they're building on their work, I think, rather than wishing they could be back in that era. So I don't see the same kind of nostalgia here. No, this is forward-looking. Right.

And in fact, it's worth noting that while the song is called Made in America, when they say it in the song, they actually changed a little bit, right? So it's we made it in America. It's more present than we made it in the past. Right, right. And we made it thanks to our forebears who paved the way for us. But implied in that is there's still much work to be done. Yeah, that and I think, I mean, here again, I think that there is just reference to making it, being an entrepreneur, the metaphor of the drug dealer, I think can stand in for anyone who's hustling to survive and trying to fight to have a, decent living. Right, and that's so beautifully

captured in the final couplet of Jay-Z's verse here, I pledge allegiance to all the scramblers, and then the music cuts out to further emphasize it. I pledge allegiance to all the scramblers. This is the Star-Spangled banner. This is the Star-Spangled Banner.

That's a powerful moment. Okay, now, Charlie, let's turn away from the lyrics of this track to the music. Again, harder to talk about, more elusive. Nevertheless, what can we learn about the identity being projected in this song from the musical choices they've made. What stands out to you?

Let's talk about instrumentation first. Okay. Underlying the entire thing is this bed of sort of gentle hip-hop beat. There's this really nice synth pad. There's these subtle but not in-your-face drums. There's a baseline which kind of merges with that synth pad. they're hard to distinguish. Right.

But the thing that really sticks out is this weird lo-fi bit-crunched synth thing that jumps in every couple of measures. Yes. That's the thing I keep going to. Yes, you're talking about

that kind of distorted beep thing that reappears again and again. Exactly. Wow, okay, that's crazy, you said that, Charlie. We are so on the same wavelength because I also I'm totally fixated on that sound, which just seems so

weird to me and kind of hard to wrap my head around, but what, why might they have included that kind of almost annoying beep there? Well, okay, again, you're asking me to dig deep here. Get your shovel. It feels like it's in contrast to what I described as this sort of calm musical bed. It is this alarm keeping you alert because the album is called Watch. the throne. There's a certain sense that having made it in America is not solid. It can be taken away. There is a constant threat. It feels almost like an alarm of like a fire truck or a police alarm. Yes. Yes. Okay, good. Good. I'm totally with you. This is seemingly representative of the need to be alert and on your toes. Even when the rest of this texture, as you said, is kind of

comforting and smooth, there's this sound that's out of place that always joltz you back to your reality. Yeah, safety not guaranteed. Yeah, and maybe in that sort of conjure something of the noise and chaos of urban life where this song is taking place, unlike the sort of pastoral country landscape of Toby Keith's song. Yeah, yeah. And I just need to stress something you already said, which is that all these sounds are electronic here. Well, with the exception of later on, we get this piano that comes in, an acoustic piano. That's true. That's very true. Okay, so there is one element not drawn from the electronic world of synthesizers and drum machines, which is this piano. And that's like totally a very grounding element of this track. But in general, I would say this is electronic and there's, and that's probably a deliberate choice that sort of supports the identity of the song, the political identity, somewhat alienated. So maybe that piano is kind of like the reverent reference to the civil rights leaders to a past, to a sound which comes from the past.

The piano is sadly a dying instrument. And then the synthesizers are all references to the future. As you said, this song takes a narrative point of view, which is very forward-looking as opposed to necessarily very nostalgic. Okay. I'm right with you. And then the last thing I want to talk about quickly, because we did it with Toby Keith, is the voice. The sound of the voice here. And immediately, I think it's obviously a very different kind of voice than in the country music. But it's also interesting because it doesn't seem to subscribe to this certain sound.

Like you were saying, in country music, you sort of need to sound a certain way to be recognized. here in hip-hop it seems more about sort of establishing your own unique sonic palette in terms of your voice. Right. I feel like the MC is always trying to create a unique sound through the subtle differences in how they articulate their verse. It's not to sound like everyone else. Jay-Z doesn't want to sound like Kanye. They both have their own voice. They're demonstrating that on this track. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. And at the same time, they are. referencing the kind of group solidarity needed to make it in America. Two very different versions of Made It in America. Yeah, right? And again, we've just maybe scratched the surface of these two songs.

But when we come back, I want to think about a little more what these songs have in common, both now and then in the past what these two genres have in common, which is maybe a lot more than we might think. Ooh, okay. Interesting. I'll see you all. other side. See you there, Chuck. of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE.

When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want. border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Welcome back to Switched on Pop. When we left, we saw two very different visions of what it means to be made in America on one side, Toby Keith and on the other Jay-Z and Kanye West featured. Frank Ocean, both in lyrics and musical choices, these songs present very different visions of American identity.

But now in the second half of this episode, I want to talk about, well, what actually might be shared by these two tracks, which seems so different. Right. And then kind of trace that back in time to see whether the separation of these genres that we now have today is really based in historical fact. Okay. Great. Oh, this is going to make it messy. Let's go. So first, let's investigate what these two tracks might have in common, which I think is more than meets the eye at first.

Well, I started to get in this already about the fact that they're making really normative references to American values. Right. And actions, right? Whether it's singing the Star-Spangled Banner or pledging allegiance or even these sort of larger themes of individualism, freedom. patriotism they are in both songs right and similarly we find a lot of religiosity in both of these songs as well oh yeah right i hadn't thought of that huh yeah these are i mean these are very uh these are very godly tracks here i would say right right okay cool and now i wonder this is maybe a harder question but are there any musical similarities from one song to the other yeah i wonder i mean

there could be a piano in the toby keith which is buried in there which i didn't notice but a piano doesn't feel like an interesting enough similarity. I don't know either, honestly. I'm not sure they are. These seem like from very different worlds. Well, I hear one point of similarity. Okay, what's that? I think as much as the Toby Keith song

is trying to reference this sort of American tradition of country music, it's still doing so in a fairly modern context. It has very sleek production. And there's one hint that brings it very much in the present for me, which is the opening guitar line. When I first heard this,

I couldn't quite figure out what instrument it was because there's this really processed, heavily delayed guitar, which could have been a synthesized line put over a hip-hop beat. Yeah, interesting. Or like maybe kind of a U-2-derived stadium rock sound or something. But yes, I agree, an element that seems not of a part of the two. traditional country aesthetic. And this is just another way that that song sabotages its nostalgic point of view, because there are those other points where it sort

of references modern political struggles while talking about the past. Interesting, right. Right. So musically, this is not a Hank William song. No. Musically, this is a country song made in 2011. Right, good. And I'm glad you mentioned that because it points out kind of the the fuzziness of these generic distinctions. At what point does a country song stop being a country song, or a hip-hop song stop being a hip-hop song? If you take away the banjo, if you take away the twang, if you take away the acoustic guitars, when does it stop being a country song?

That's a very flexible definition, I think. But one that can cause a lot of discomfort. And with that in mind, I want to recite the lyrics of a more recent song, a song from this year and I'd like you to try to identify the genre that this song belongs to. Okay, great. You ready? Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm going to read a little bit from the middle of it. And Daddy liked his whiskey with his tea and we rode motorcycles, blackjack, classic vinyl, Tough Girl is what I had to be. With his right hand on his rifle, he swore it on the Bible. My daddy said, shoot. Daddy made me fight. It wasn't always right, but he said, girl, it's your Second Amendment. Ooh, ooh, ooh. Right.

And, yeah, it doesn't say right, but it's implied. Okay, so after my dramatic reading of these lyrics, what genre do you think this song belongs to? Absolutely country. What makes you say that? The references to Southern Life, drinking whiskey, hanging out with their guns. Right. Yes, between the whiskey, the rifle, the Bible, and the Second Amendment, this seems firmly in the country camp. Was there a truck in there?

Not a truck, but a motorcycle. Motorcycle. Ooh, okay. Yeah, so maybe, I don't know, truck adjacent. And if we listen to this, we have a clear kind of country musical style. Yep. But who sings this song? Okay, your trick.

This is Beyonce off of Lemonade. Yes, this is Beyonce Daddy Lessons off her album Lemonade. And it's so clearly to me a country song. but the fact that Beyonce is singing it, I think, as this massive R&B hip-hop star, made a lot of country fans uncomfortable. I shouldn't say a lot. Oh, did it really?

Some. Let's say some. Okay. Which I think is evidenced by a writer for country music television saying, sure, Beyonce's new album, Lemonade, has a song with some yehas, a little harmonica, and mentions of classic vinyl, rifles, and whiskey. But all of a sudden, everyone's acting like she moves. move to Nashville and announced the chief's country now, just because of this song, Daddy Lessons. Oh, I can't believe that was published.

Feels like some racially coded BS. Well, in a way, in a way, I'm glad it was because it speaks to what might have been otherwise an unsaid tension here, which is can black hip-hop R&B musicians perform country music without the country coni protesting? And the answer is... Probably not. No, it doesn't seem like it. I don't think so.

Because, again, these genres and the people, maybe more specifically, the people who are allowed to perform them seem very, let's see, what's the word, very closely policed, right? Sure. And in fact, you really have to subscribe not just to a certain kind of style when you play country music, but often a certain kind of belief. And the same thing goes with hip-hop. You know, when the Dixie Chicks protested President Bush, that was a huge, a huge, hugely, hugely. damaging to their career. Right. And when the rapper Lupe Fiasco called President Obama a terrorist, that was similarly a huge blow to his career. So you really have to have to subscribe to a certain kind of style and a certain kind of politics. But I don't think this was always the case. I think if

we go back in American musical history, we'll find that this division between country music and hip-hop, or their progenitors, really, was not always so stark. Oh, okay. So we'll do a segment called Modern Masters? Yeah, I love that. Great. And maybe we can start with a sound, a sound which to us was so redolent of country music, right? The banjo. As you said, when you hear that banjo twang, you are in the world of country music, right? It is just almost inseparable. I love that you go to the banjo because I really love the banjo and I've looked into it a bunch. Good. Okay, then you actually are probably more qualified than me to talk about where the banjo actually comes from. Which is pretty funny because you play the banjo. I do. I do play the banjo, but I know very

little about it. It's like Pete Seeger said, or he quoted a banjo player in his book, How to Play the Five Stream Banjo, which is how I learned how to play the banjo. And he has a quote from this old-time banjo that says, notes, there are no notes to a banjo. You just play the damn thing. It's a very anti-intellectual instrument. That's kind of how I feel about it. But yes, but tell me, where does this instrument actually come from? So all that I know about the banjo comes from a documentary that I saw called Give Me the Banjo. It was narrated by Steve Martin, who is also actually a really great banjo player. And in it, they go into the past of this instrument, and the banjo is actually a slave instrument.

Originally in the United States, it comes from African gourd instruments, things like the Quora. and I believe the point where it switched was during the era of white minstrelsy where performers would dress in blackface and mock chair-cropping farmers, black farmers, by playing the banjo, putting on a fake accent, putting on this costume,

putting on blackface, and making a mockery of this culture. And I think it has, to do with this minstrelsy that black communities eventually rejected the banjo. It didn't just disappear overnight. Like, it was played in jazz music and in other places. Right. But it definitely had a new association, which was with white performers.

Right. This instrument that is so closely associated with country music and, you know, a genre so closely associated with whiteness and suveness is actually of African origin and came into country music via late 19th century minstrelsy. So this points maybe to the fact that these genres are historically very intertwined. And the separation that we see now, if we go back in the history of popular music, was not always like that. We can find these recordings like the great early country musician Jimmy Rogers,

an amazing yodler, among other things, recording one of his. his seminal tracks, Blue Yodel number nine in the 1920s, with none other than the greatest jazz trumpeter in the universe, Louis Armstrong, backing him up. And when we listen to this, I didn't mean no harm. It was down in Memphis. He says, big boy, you'll have to tell me your name. The Yudelie. And when we listen to this, I think we hear a really great. seamless blend of country music and jazz, suggesting that these two genres have a lot more in

common than we might think today. But couldn't this just be one of those things where Britney Spears hire as a rapper to do the third verse of her song to make it look more cool and be on trend and crossover into different genres to sell more records? Or it could be even more specific when Brad Paisley and L.L. Cool J release a song together called Accidental Racist. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, that's a whole other episode. Oh, my God. Pandora's box. Yeah, I see what you mean.

Is this not just kind of a commercial stunt? No, I don't think so. I think these musics were being played, exchanged, and performed across racial lines for a good part of the early 20th century. I can point to another example, this incredibly popular country style in the 1930s and 40s called Western Swing. Isn't Western Swing sort of early rock and rock and rock. roll. Right, right, right, right, which again points to how messy the history of all our American musics really are. Yeah, it kind of leads into rockabilly, which leads into rock and roll, I think. And this was basically, again, jazz meets country music. And a band like Bob Wills and the Texas

Playboys were hugely popular around the South and would cover jazz songs. And even in some tracks kind of merge traditional country with modern African-American music, like in the track Ida Red likes to Boogie, where you have this traditional country song kind of going boogie-woogie all of a sudden. No, you're wrong. I know you think there's been an upset about old Ida-Read. But this is not the old Ida-Rid, no, sir. This is the new Ida-Rid that likes the boogie.

And this wasn't something that people really raised an eyebrow at, because again, I don't think the political and identity divisions of these genres had been established yet. And in fact, as the scholar Carl Hagstrom Miller argues in his book, Segregating Sound, this separation that we now have today was a very deliberate construction by record companies who were trying to sell more records by targeting specific audiences, and they, in fact, divide. their record categories into, on one side, race records, and on the other, hillbilly records. Wait, really? They called them race records and hillbilly records? Yes, and these are the progenitors of what we still have today as the R&B charts on one hand and the country charts on the other. That this was a very forced distinction between these two styles of music, which people didn't necessarily understand as being all that different to begin with.

And as we've seen with the banjo, even had a lot of common roots. together. So what you're saying is if you had gone into a record store, those different genres would have been divided and labeled as such. Yes, precisely. Oh, so okay, this is, I remember you put a question in my back pocket, which is, does music shape us or is it a reflection of our identity? Right. Okay, let's take that out. And what do you think, Charles? This feels like there's some, some mastermining, some sort of Illuminati record labeling going on here, where sounds, which had not been apolitical, but had existed more in a mush of genre,

were intentionally divided as a way of making that money off the records. Right. Yes. No, I think that's totally true. So now let's take the question out of our backpockets, hold it up to the light, and what do you think? What's the answer, Charlie?

Does music reflect our identities or does it shape our identities? Should we say it? Should we say what we think at the same time? Okay. One, two, three, both. Ah. I think the reference to minstrelsy obviously proves that at the time, the mockery of identity and race was a reflection. That music was a reflection of identity, but the record labels took that kind of identity and further divided it as a way of shaping identity even further.

Right. and now if you listen to Toby Keith or Jay-Z and Kanye West on either side, you're probably drawn to that music because it reflects something about your identity. But then in turn, who you are and your views and your values and probably even the people you associate with are shaped by the sound and the lyrics of that music. There must be a word for this. I mean, yeah, I would probably say it's a dialectic, a dialectical relationship, a back and forth. Yes. Yeah. So in a way, I think we can go back to that initial statement of this episode, music is universal, and kind of put a big fat asterisk in there.

It's more like music is universal as long as it's written by someone like you with ideas of your own identity marketed to you in. way which reflects your own cultural values. Right. Like music brings us together, but only in as much as we already have something shared to begin with, maybe. Or like music reinforces the communities that we've already created. And maybe we can end our episode with a thought drawn from the history that we were just talking about, trying to see more commonalities between different types of music than we might give credit to. Reaching across the aisle, so to speak. Try and listen to music that you don't normally play. Go turn on the country station.

Turn on a hip-hop station. Listen to what your fellow country people are saying. And see if you can't connect to that identity a bit. See if there's not more commonality than we might expect there. That's my kind of Pollyanna-ish urging here. I think you could say it with more gusto. Go listen to music that you don't like. It's good for you.

Yes. But I want to back that up just a little further, which is that just as much as our reading of these songs can identify cultural history within the actual sounds. Right. We could also listen more abstractly as we tried to find the commonalities between these songs. And certainly there were things we didn't reference, right? I think both of them are in the same meter. They're both in 4-4. They both use similar chord progression.

they use tonal harmony. They have reference to bass lines and melody lines, even if one is played on an electric bass, one's played on a synthesizer, one sung with twang, one is wrapped. There are these universal elements of music, which can be heard in either one, and I think a great musician, songwriter,

will go across the so-called aisle of genres and draw from the creative forces of other. songwriters. Wow. Yeah, mic drop. Well said, Charles. Thanks. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Nate Sloan, and edited by Bill Lance and me, Charlie Harding. Our design is done by Luke Harris. You can check out his work at luke Harris.com. Switched on Pop is a proud member of the Panoply Network. You can find more episodes at switchedonpop.com or reach out to us on Twitter at Switched on Pop. If you're loving the show, please demonstrate your support by going to iTunes and leaving us a review, or better.

Yet, we are still in our campaign to tell five friends about Switched on Pop. Right. I've told everyone I know in my life, they are bombarded by it. But I really do believe that listening to music and talking about music is a whole lot more fun as a group of friends, as a community. Don't just listen in isolation. Share it and listen in your way and share with us what you think is going on in the songs around you. Totally. Wow. as Charlie, you are laying down some deep knowledge today.

As always, see you in two weeks. And thanks for listening.