Slate.com misunderstands bluegrass music
Slate.com recently ran an article about Steve Martin entitled: Late-Period Steve Martin. The subtitle proves helpful in understanding what the piece is about: How to understand the actor, novelist, essayist, playwright, banjo player, crotch-centric variety show performer, and Oscar co-host.
The author’s concern is to answer the question of how? While his more recent efforts in film, music, comedy, and the arts seem to be haphazard, with many proving commercially and critically unsuccessful, while many of his contemporaries have faded from the entertainment limelight, how has Steve Martin managed to remain popular, successful, and in demand? The author maintains that the answer lies in Martin’s unique comic style which relys on the collision of nostalgia with the modern world.
He is a nostalgia artist. From the years of his first wild ascent, his signature has been to reach toward a lost cultural moment and remake it in his own time. The collision of those two worlds, past and present, gives his comedy its distinctive flavor.
While closing his argument that such is indeed the case, the author mentions Martin’s foray into the world of bluegrass music as an element of nostalgic in which the artist has indulged himself.
Let’s be honest: What’s more quaint, and out-of-time, and culturally beside-the-point than bluegrass?
This comment has stirred up quite a fervor among the online citizens of our little corner of the cultural landscape known as bluegrass. (more…)















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