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International News Title: Finding another country music It's not just cowboys coming out of the closet - it's country music fans too. So what, asks Grant Smithies, has made country cool? Let's be honest. Country music used to be about as cool as Christianity, or mathematics, or beige polyester slacks. Citizens with good taste listened to something else; country music was purely the preserve of rural hicks with a high sentimentality threshold and a wardrobe straight out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But something's changed. Country music and, ahem, its "fashion", has infiltrated our cafes, wardrobes, record collections and movie theatres. Bars and cafes that were playing electronica or hip-hop last year are now dishing up our long blacks and flat whites to the sad strains of alt. country artists Bonnie Prince Billy and Gillian Welch. Pathologically stylish inner-city hipsters are growing bumpkin beards and getting about in checked shirts. Women who care deeply about how they look are sliding their dainty ankles into hand-tooled Mexican cowboy boots. Go to the movies and there's Johnny Cash out of his head on speed in Walk the Line, or gay cowboys shagging each other when they should be minding the sheep in Brokeback Mountain. Music magazines are full of stories about country artists behaving like rock stars - hoovering mountains of cocaine, trashing hotel rooms, buying mansions the size of small countries, dating A-list models and actresses. Sometimes they even marry them. In May last year actress Renee Zellweger married country crooner Kenny Chesney, singer of the immortal "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem", though in this case there were problems and the marriage was annulled after just four months. Our own Whangarei-born country sensation Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in June after a very rock'n'roll past, which included the textbook rock star cocaine addiction and rehab, fronting a fashion campaign for the Gap, appearing naked in Playgirl and dating supermodel Niki Taylor. Add to this that all manner of local bands including Phoenix Foundation, Bunnies on Ponies, Grand Prix, The Broken Heartbreakers, The Cattlestops, the Windy City Strugglers and the Warratahs have built large audiences by putting their own spin on country music, and you're forced to ask - when did country become cool? "Country has never not been cool," says Aucklander Grant McAllum, who writes a country music column for Real Groove. "It's just that different people have picked up on it recently. Partially that's driven by things such as the Johnny Cash movie, I guess. Some of these people might buy a Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash CD and some cowboy boots that were made in Indonesia and then sooner or later they'll move on to the next fashionable thing. But some of them will dig into it a little further and discover the depth of amazing music that's there." McAllum's day job is as the music buyer for the Real Groovy record store chain; he is perfectly placed to notice trends in our record buying habits. "Country music has definitely crossed over into audiences that wouldn't have given it the time of day a few years ago." McAllum says there's been a steady increase in sales by country and Americana artists such as Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Over The Rhine, Neko Case and Jolie Holland. Best of all, there's been a flow-on effect with local musicians. "A lot have started incorporating country influences, which is exactly what happened in America during the 80s," McAllum says. "Over there you had guys who'd come out of the punk scene in LA, Austin or Georgia who realised there was a connection between the simple 'three chords and the truth' music they were making and the country music their parents listened to." One such local band is Cassette. The Wellington-based trio's new Cut For Summer LP is full of deliciously sedated ballads that sound like country music after a heavy shot of morphine. Drummer Craig Terris has a few theories on what's so attractive about the country sound. "It's great drinking music, for one thing. A good single malt whisky and some good country albums - that's a favourite combination of mine," he says. "And there's just so much scope for weirdness in country music. It can be really psychedelic, and lots of it is broken-arse sad, too, which I really like." But how does a sophisticated city boy like Terris relate to lyrics about floods and harsh winters, crops failing in the fields, wells running dry and unfaithful wives running off with the neighbour? "Those things are all just metaphors for how hard life is, aren't they? You don't have to be living in rural America to relate to the heartache of it. Sometimes life's a bitch, and country music acknowledges that fact. Or good country music does, anyway. I've got no time for traditional country music, to be honest. It's so cheesy, with all the bogus cowboy imagery and so on." Ah, yes, the great divide. The country music that's conquering our inner cities is mostly the so-called "alt. country" stuff in which elements of traditional country music have been hybridised with the blues, folk, indie rock, electronica or punk. This audience generally views the more traditional New Zealand country music scene with great disdain, in much the same way as Nashville's corporate country-pop sound is loathed by the American alt. country crowd. As Samuel Flynn Scott, of the Wellington collective Phoenix Foundation points out, "most of what people call 'alt country' is really folk music, or Americana, and it's certainly a lot hipper than it was 10 years ago. "I used to work at Fidel's, this uber-trendy Wellington cafe, and whenever I put a country record on people would say 'take this shit off. This is music for rednecks and wife- beaters.' People just couldn't handle the twang." As its older audience slowly dies off, our mainstream country music industry has also begun courting a younger, hipper demographic. Recently a new poster hit the streets advertising the National Country Music Awards, being held in Hamilton on Saturday. The event features performances by country music veterans such as Gray Bartlett, Jodi Vaughan, The Hamilton County Bluegrass Band and Brendan Dugan, but the poster features a gorgeous sun-tanned young man leaning on a wall, shirtless, his boxers peeking out from the waistband of his jeans, his cowboy hat obscuring his face, a guitar at his side. Both deliberately female- flustering and intensely homoerotic, it's an interesting choice of image. "It's a great photo, isn't it?" says Dugan, who, after playing country music in New Zealand for nearly 40 years, has recently noticed a change in the audience. "They're definitely getting younger," he says, his voice like gravel in a drainpipe. "In the past few years it's got to the point where at least 10 per cent of the crowd at performances is young people. I'd like to think it's my good looks bringing them along, but really, I think it's just that they've discovered how great this music is."
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