Earth Week (2)

Every year, many aspiring musicians make the commitment to begin learning how to play the guitar. It’s certainly an admirable goal, as there aren’t many more satisfying instruments to master. But the vast majority of would-be guitarists quit playing before they ever gain any real skill, and one of the contributing factors to the attrition rate is the low quality of instruments many guitar students try to play. Most guitarists begin on a small budget, but that doesn’t mean that a low-quality guitar is a good choice. While there are plenty of cheap guitars for sale, and locating a guitar that fits within your budget is not difficult, it is far more difficult to find a cheap electric guitar with sufficient quality to support your playing efforts for many years to come. Shopping to find cheap electric guitars is a bit of an art form all its own, and it’s best to be armed with a few tips before you set out to buy your first instrument.

First, if there is a single golden rule to guitar shopping, it’s this one: never buy a guitar without first playing it in person. Each instrument is different from the next, and the only way you’ll be able to figure out whether you like a particular guitar’s feel and sound is to play it and listen yourself! There are plenty of guitars in your price range that look cool, but that just won’t feel right. You’ll never know this unless you pick them up and play them for a while. As you’re look at various guitars, be sure to play them through the kind of amplifier you plan to use regularly. If you already have an amplifier at home, you should take it with you as you search for guitars. Each individual combination of guitar and amplifier produces unique sound characteristics, so you need to be sure you like what you’re buying.

The following paper was delivered at the 2016 EMP Pop Conference. Sometime around 2008 it occurred to certain segments of the country music industry that African-Americans existed. hey there delilah guitar tabs could occasionally hear what we might call reverse dog whistles - lyrical clues indicating that the singer wished to be perceived as not racist. Several country singers, in small but perceptible ways, challenged modern country radio’s implicit understanding that the Southern man is also a white man. Mainstream country music has an uncanny knack for refracting cultural trends - or at least perceived cultural trends - through its hits, its stars, its representation of itself as an industry, operating at a point where market research feels, at times, practically indistinguishable from a kind of intuitive mass empathy. 2008 was one such time. The candidacy and eventual election of Barack Obama was clearly one impetus for Nashville’s new racial cognizance, but it was not the only one.

In August 2006, 93.9 KZLA in Los Angeles segued from Keith Urban’s “Tonight I Wanna Cry” to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get it Started.” With L.A’s sole remaining country station making the switch to “rhythmic pop contemporary,” you could now no longer hear country music in three of the four largest markets in the U.S. Changing demographics in the U.S. Nashville. The percentage of Americans who were white was expected to steadily decline, a fact of particular importance to country radio because its listeners are almost exclusively white - a 2006 Arbitron report estimated that only 2.3% of country radio’s audience was black. Radio remains an important part of breaking country stars and nurturing their careers. Gary Overton, the head of Sony Music Nashville, frequently says of country music: “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” Sometime around 2008 it occurred to certain segments of the country music industry that, in a significant portion of urban America, country music superstars did not exist.

1 country song by an African-American singer since Charley Pride’s final chart topper, “Night Games,” in 1983. This chart statistic became instantly totemic, indicative either of how resistant Nashville was to change or a signal of potential transformation to come, depending on your perspective. Rucker’s third country single, “It Won’t Be Like This For Long” first charted in November, the week of the 2008 election. Sometimes Nashville’s timing is so on the nose it’s embarrassing. When Rucker who signed to Capitol Records Nashville in 2008, he was, of course, a known quantity. As the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, he’d been one of the biggest rock stars of the ’90s and one of the least hip. If the trajectory from aging rocker to country star was an increasingly common one, few followed it as gracefully the Charleston, South Carolina, native Rucker. He released his debut country album, Learn to Live, in September 2008 to widespread acceptance from country fans.