In a famous incident Pauline Kael, the prominent movie critic from New York City, remarked to a colleague that she was stunned that Ronald Reagan had been elected president. After all, she mused, no one she knew voted for him. Kael's successor as a myopic critic is the New York Times' popular music writer, Kalefa Sanneh.
Sanneh figures that the only time most people who could afford to have televisions would ever hear country music was the annual Country Music Awards. What they "gawk"ed at was "garish" and a "mismash" where, according to Sanneh, the songs had lyrics that a rapper would have had banned from television. It was clear that Sanneh must have watched the program with the door locked, for fear that anyone, anyone of substance, would (shudder) think that it was being watched without the necessary sense of cultural superiority or detached irony.
I hadn't ever been a fan of country music. I grew up in New York, have attended all the right universities and have a profession which makes me as Eastern Establishment as someone in 2007 could be. Very few of the songs, and only a couple of the performers, were names with which I had been very familiar. Yet, I understand that this is a very big (Yo, Sanneh, check it out, country sold more CDs than rock last year...) and very powerful genre.
One little story, when I was traveling to Outward Bound in western North Carolina one summer while in college, I had a couple of hours to kill changing buses in a little town in the foothills. Being Sunday, I figured that I would do the crossword so I went into the local drugstore and asked the cashier if they had a copy of the Sunday New York Times.
"The what?," she asked. I repeated my request. Again, a blank look appeared on the woman's face.
"Nope, never heard of it."
Well, Sanneh, I guess you are now even.
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