Collin Raye speaks out against Bro-Country ...Again! I’ve been calling loudly through the press for Nashville to get back to being a song-driven industry again. It has kind of lost that over the past few years. I waited for a bit like everyone did, but I’m getting tired of the way it is, and I think it needs to come back to being about the great songs again, from Hank Williams and on. It’s artists from Little Jimmie Dickens and up, who are saying ‘Please! Enough with the Bro-Country,’ Let’s get back to what made Nashville great and what built all those buildings down on Music Row in the first place, and is really what country music fans want. We’ve abandoned those fans over the past few years just to play to one demographic -- the Bro-Country demographic. And that’s fine, they can have their own deal. They can have their own separate awards ceremony. Call it the ‘Bro-Country Awards’ or the ‘Redneck Party Boy Awards.’ You can give away awards for Best Duet With Nelly, Best Six-pack, Best Tattoo Groupie ... but don’t let all that take away what so many people sweated blood to create. I think we are primed for a return to that. He continued, I think the Nash Icons concept is great! I think it’s been a matter of time ... and when Mr. Borchetta announced it two weeks ago, that speaks volumes. Scott doesn’t do anything that he doesn’t think is going to succeed. He knows, and feels what everyone is screaming for, ‘What happened to our industry?!’ When you see Country singers rapping, well a little bit of that is fine. But when hundreds of records -- one after the other -- I’m afraid, as I think he (Borchetta) is, that if we don’t do something, that we are going to lose our identity like Rock-n-Roll did. What happened to Rock? It’s gone. There is no place for it to be played anymore because it didn’t protect its identity. We’re doing the same thing. But I think with what Cumulus and Scott are doing is a valiant effort to save our music, and I think it’s going to work. I was talking to Larry Gatlin and Darryl Worley the other night. We were all saying that the reason we got into this business in the first place was because we wanted to be a part of that (the Country music genre, as it used to be); that thing that had so much integrity and beauty to it. I don’t want it to be something that we think of in the past like, ‘Oh, I remember that thing called Country music What happened to it?’ If I am played on the Nash Icons programming, great! But if I’m not, I’ll definitely be listening to it, and supporting it.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 17:44:48 +0000
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