The Next American Music

It’s early morning as I drive east from Charlottesville, Va., rolling fast through the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains toward Richmond, past the cigarette factories and horse farms, shopping centers and snug residential grids. Soon I’ll swing onto the southern third of Interstate 95 and chug south for nearly 200 miles, eventually docking in Chapel Hill, N.C. In a few hours, I’ll shu­e into Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle, sip warm beer from a plastic cup, see friends and watch songwriter David Pajo—performing as Papa M—strum smirky folk songs.

While I-95 was constructed at the height of America’s romance with the road—around the same time Jack Kerouac propelled his bearded brethren out of cities and onto highways—the interstate’s contemporary incarnation is simply not that kind of road: gargantuan and numbing, impossibly dull, framed by fast food huts and gleaming gas stations, peppered by slabs of tire rubber, cigarette butts and crushed Coke cans. This morning I’m tired and bored; I count exits and yawn.

Over the last half-century, innumerable American highways have been similarly streamlined and demystified, rendered modern and efficient. Highway culture has changed, too, becoming lifeless, standardized, freeze-dried. Unsurprisingly, America’s landscapes are shifting in accordance, making way for brash human sprawl, conceding to “innovation,” yielding to our grimiest sins: Now, colossal mountain ranges are cut by strip malls, and white clouds are parted by thick gray exhaust. In response, America’s music is also changing, evolving, communing, and Americana—our sacred center—is in the midst of a self-reflexive revolution.

Collective notions of “Americana” tend to be both knee-jerk and bizarre: As an umbrella term, “Americana” is convoluted and sloppy, so overloaded with vague connotations and heavy-handed nostalgia that it’s been rendered almost meaningless outside the faux-log walls of Cracker Barrel gift shops. Is Americana a John Deere alarm clock? A wooden yo-yo? A peppermint stick? An old tin of Virginia peanuts?

As a genre signifier, Americana’s biggest problem is etymological. As tempting as it is to assume a connection, “Americana music” does not always mean American music, particularly in 2005. As Ray Raposa, frontman for San Diego’s Castanets, asks, “Are R. Kelly or Eminem or Hilary Duff any less American than Dock Boggs or Whiskeytown or Old Crow Medicine Show?”

Musically, Americana has much to do with bearded white people pawing acoustic instruments, employing minimal production (with a hint of twang), and dropping at least a few lyrical nods to the big Southern rivers. Loosely, it’s traditional folk music, a symbiotic swirl of bluegrass, gospel, blues and classic guitar-and-vocals emoting.

Sometimes Americana and American do mean the same thing. In 2001, the T Bone Burnett-curated O Brother, Where Are Thou? soundtrack, which featured a mix of plucky artifacts and modern Americana revivals, all homegrown, earned itself a mess of Grammys (including Album of the Year), sold over six million copies, and was almost instantly crowned America’s Unofficial Rough Guide to Americana.