Flop Eared Mule A Country Music Death Beast and Worker in the Dylan Industrial Complex | Sydney, Australia | Est. 2004

Jumping off what Lang Mack was saying in comments. I have never been one to feel too deeply about the "underappreciated" tag. I mean, for my favourite "underappreciated" artists no appreciation is enough. Also it might be intense selfishness, but I care about what I like and do not care so much about what other people do/not like. Folks like Dylan, Springsteen etc are common comparisons because they are such uber A-List. Steve Earle's too-oft quoted

Townes > Dylan ... cowboy boots ... coffee table

(I paraphrase)

is an example. (Google it) But you know, TVZ disliked the fact his record label put a sticker with that quote on his records when Steve hit the big time, since to him Steve was just the kid who sat at his feet, and Townes' work can stand on its own without any trickle down troubadour charity. Which is true. And why I'm a bit sick of hearing it quoted. Disgression, somewhat. But I don't see the point of feeling aggrieved Dylan/Springsteen/Whomever is more famous than other singer-songwriters because, apart from the fact there are lots of genuine artistic reasons why, there are historical reason why artists like that could enter the stratosphere at those times and places and ... those times are GONE. They've been gone for probably decades. "This generation's Springsteen" has to do without the convergence of technological, economic and cultural hegemonies which made that possible. Tough cheddar, this generation's Springsteen. The kind of embedded cultural Celebrity that Dylan and Springsteen have has no simple logic, it is the result of a shifting equation of

talent * payola * (time / place) = ????, count the one and add the square root of n.

But, the point is, there are different kinds of mainstream. The mainstream mainstream which people mean when they say mainstream is the Top 40 etc, but americana/alt.country/roots/Ameripolitan/OKOM* has a mainstream too. I have to say, I generally have no real problem with the hierarchies. Even if I love "C-list Americana artist" way more than hipster "A-list Americana artist", I can usually see the reality-based market reasons why C is C and A is A, in a business/media sense. So I don't really kick and scream about it, I just enjoy the fact that if they tour I get to see them for $20 instead of $60 and hope they can at least make an OK living doing what they love.

The people Lang Mack names, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Mickey Newbury, (maybe not Bromberg) in my perception are more well known, and higher up the chain of recognition than Tom Russell. This has always been curious to me. I first was exposed to Tom Russell via Iris DeMent's appreance on The Man From God Knows Where -- and even though Iris has not released a new album or toured FOR YEARS and has all but dropped from sight, it still seems that "our kind of music" fans will have heard of her in much, much greater numbers than him.** It's weird, y'all. Within the mainstream of "Americana", Tom Russell is, yes, underrated. Plenty of people with a similar taste in music to me have just never heard of him, the way they have other artists who (IMHO) have had similar catalogue-ic trajectories.

So the short version is, I don't worry about why Tom Russell isn't as famous as Bob Dylan, but I do wonder why he doesn't have the name recognition of John Prine??11!!? The End.

*OKOM is "our kind of music" an heuristic which used to be all the rage on mailing lists back in the day (the mid-90s!!) but seems to have fallen entirely out of favour, probably because it does seem exclusionary. But I still mentally tag things as OKOM, because as long as you are talking to the right kind of people, it is a handy shortcut.

** I looked up her heartbreakingly poignant "You've Done Nothing Wrong" on YouTube, one of my fave Iris songs, and got a page of laughing stock Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich proclaiming "I've Done Nothing Wrong" in one of his many self-aggranding post-indictment pressers. Oy vey. I finally found it, except Not Iris singing it and Iris only on harmonies. Boo. Oh well. Buy her records. Oh and here is Iris, John Hiatt and Hal Ketchum!!!! on one of the best songs, gospel or otherwise, ever. Oh, and gawd here's my favourite Hal Ketchum song. And look, Mary Black did it too!

What did we do before YouTube?

There was no pre-YouTube.

We have always been at war with Eurasia!