On May 7th, the Willie Nelson camp announced they were cancelling his headlining set at the annual New Orleans Jazz Fest on Sunday May 8th along with other shows “due to a positive Covid case in the Willie Nelson Family band,” leaving just who had tested positive ambiguous.
Country music is country music, and the best definition of what country music is, is that you know it when you hear it. It’s self-evident. But the genre has birthed many subgenres, many stylistic movements over the years, and at times has seen a splintering and Balkanization.
It was June 11th, 2019, and the music world was left in shock and anger after the publishing of an investigative report by The New York Times detailing the loss of an estimated 175,000 master tapes, and some 500,000 total songs in a fire on the grounds of Universal Studios in Hollywood, California.
Hypothetically he does, or at least metaphorically. But depending on Tyler Farr’s proficiency at internet research (which I’m guessing is pretty sub-par) and his proximity to the Big Apple where New Yorker culture writer Jody Rosen—who coined the term “Bro-Country”—makes his bed, Farr will probably just have to settle for sending verbal daggers out towards Rosen in The Arizona Republic.
On Monday, September 22nd, the subset of American country music known to many by its nickname “Bro-Country,” died at its home in Nashville, TN. Though the specific cause of death has yet to be ruled on by the local medical examiner, preliminary findings appear to show that Bro-Country had been exhaustively over-utilized over the last few months and years until it finally passed away from overexposure.