Can We Get Our Country Back Now?

The 24-hour Waffle House is closed. The men’s clothing store only has brown shoes. The Hilton across the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville is selling rooms Saturday night for over $650 (with tax and valet charge closer to $750).

Songwriters, stars, radio and TV programmers, if you haven’t noticed, the world around you this fall, you better get out of your bubble and look. Gas prices are up $20 a fill-up for most. Shelves in everything from Walmart to the grocery store have huge empty spaces. The Hardee’s is out of steak biscuits in Birmingham!

Wherever you are, you are feeling this. At a job fair at the Denver airport to fill 5,000 jobs, something like 100 people showed up. There’s something really big going on and someway, somehow, it’s rolling downhill toward all of us.

Concert ticket sales, radio station staffing, the price of bus fuel, lack of concession workers at the venues -- it’s a very odd time. Yes, glad to be out and about again for the most part, but the bounce back is tough, multi-millionaires excluded, maybe.

The politics of division, vaccine wars, people are going to really be upset if the predicted Christmas toy shortage comes about. So, what do you do?

From the broadcast side, you have to find a way to soothe the nerves and have your contests and promotions geared into the real world. For the music people, you know better than any of us. The “year in the can” music might not work right now. We need music that is a fast turnaround and captures the spirit of the times.

The shutdown of the nearly million-cume New York City Country radio station is certainly not a plus for the industry. Advertisers probably couldn’t figure out who those almost a million people were. TNN had that problem when it was around.

I’ve seen some stories/commentaries about Hip-Hop-infused Country music, pro and con. Country music certainly may have an identity problem. Alan Jackson’s song may be too far to the right, but someone better figure out what the gold standard Country song sounds like and copy accordingly.

You see some attempt at genre purity at the Grammys. They are trying to keep the songs in their lane: Country is Country, Hip-Hop is Hip-Hop. If you blur the lines too much and don’t make the taste test, then you are going to be put on the shelf/in the category where you sound the closest. That happened with Kasey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile recently. What are the differences in Country/Americana/Pop? That’s where we are.

Why have lanes anyway, it all just music? Hybrids confuse the masses. A pure comedy and a pure action film are easier to market than a hybrid. Not that hybrids are a bad thing, but the audiences like to put a square peg in a square slot.

Filmmaker Ken Burns and Marty Stuart are working on a feel-good project about hometowns, “Honor Your Hometown.” It’s an effort to find common bonds. With so many things that separate us, let’s look for the things that bring us together. A great conversation started, something for everyone to think about.

Unless you want us to go to a city folks versus the left out rural folks, media power brokers better get to work, ’cause that’s where we are headed.

The Youngbloods of the hippie ’60s had a song, “Get Together”: “Come on people / Now smile on your brother … It’s time to love one another right now.” Amen! Music and media folks, get to work. Be a positive bright light. It’s badly needed right now!