Every since last Wednesday night’s CMA award show, I’ve been hit with a small avalanche of texts, emails, and other messages about Taylor Swift. Friends, colleagues, curious bystanders kicking my tires and asking, “What do you think of all that?” Some of them know that I saw Taylor do a couple of acoustic songs as an unknown in LA at The Whiskey a few years ago, with a coterie of serious music business types cheering her on. At the time I thought - “This seems like a perfectly nice teenager, but she has no unique talent as a singer, personality, or songwriter.” That isn’t a dig. That’s what you might expect from a young woman who is learning and getting her music chops together. The weird part was the entourage of serious business people that had clearly already invested heavily in this young woman. It was confusing to me and my pals. “What talent have all these people invested in?” - was the question of the evening from a group of pretty serious musicians.

I have waxed at various times since then with amazement at the phenomena that Taylor has become. It’s as if my next door neighbor, who likes to clean his lawn mower with his beer gut hanging out, were to suddenly appear on my TV in a Laker uniform shooting three pointers. Whether he’s doing it well isn’t the point. The fact that he is doing it at all is dumbfounding.

Rather than reply to all these questions individually, I’ll give a broad public response.

My feelings come on several different levels:

LEVEL ONE - Congratulations. You’re making a living in a tough business, and you seem like a nice person. Don’t start smoking. Don’t get married til you’re 30, and save your money.

LEVEL TWO - Wow, country music has discovered the tween and teen market. They’ve always been so jealous of the pop world. “How do we rope in those tweens and teens. They are good business.” But you DID IT! These consumers are too young to have any sense of what is good and bad, and developing acts for them is a pretty easy process. Hit a few basic music themes, market correctly, tour correctly and BAM the money comes in. New Kids on the Block, The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, The Jonas Brothers, David Muthafucking CASSIDY - teen bands have been around a long time and if some teen artists put more money into the system to develop adult artists then god bless them. But much like heroin and reality TV you have to go easy on this stuff…if you take too much you get addicted to that teen $$$ and it’s hard to want to put out adult music.

LEVEL THREE - Really? We’re going to celebrate teenager pop as if it were some of the most important art our genre has to offer? That’s sad. The movie business handles this quite well. That business LOVES the blockbuster. They love the big dumb popcorn movie. Those films are so cheesy, but they bring in the fun-loving audience and they make lots of money. Those films keep the lights on and the Bentley in the driveway. BUT THEY DONT AWARD THEM BEST PICTURE OSCARS!! They don’t pretend that they are the best art that the industry has to offer. They, generally, save the awards for real artistic achievement, and that makes sense to me. These awards drive the viewers to check out the movies that they normally wouldn’t see, and thereby expose them to a higher level of film making. What if the Oscars were like, “The Best Picture Award of 2008 goes to Bride Wars!”

If it so hard for me to understand why Country Music, and music in general, has chosen to award nominations based on sales figures. The small artist who creates a masterpiece will never get an award. He will never even get nominated. That can’t be good for the level of quality in our business.

LEVEL FOUR - Country Music is a thing. If I called a musicologist and said, “What are the traits that make a piece of music COUNTRY MUSIC?” They would have an answer. They would be able to give me 3 or 4 or 15 traits that make country music a distinct style of music. Clearly, all music isn’t country music. For example, we know that there is a difference between classical music and country music. There are obvious differences that would make an individual piece of music either country or classical or something else. So, if we start with that obvious fact, it is a fair question to ask whether Taylor is even making country music and therefore entitled to be eligible for a country music award.

This perspective has gotten legend George Jones into hot water. (If such a thing is even possible.) He has rightly pointed out that, “They had to use something that was established already, and that’s traditional country music. So what they need to do really, I think, is to find their own title, because they’re definitely not traditional country music.” Now George is 78 years old and for some that means that what he thinks doesn’t matter. There’s always an element of “These kids and their rotten music today!” whenever an older guy criticizes current music. But if country music has a definition, and surely it must, you have to wonder if Taylor’s style really qualifies. Maybe a new name is in order….”Modern Rock-try” or “Poppa Country”. Ug, I’ll work on that.

In conclusion, I’m aware that being called the “Entertainer of the Year” isn’t some title of artistic perfection. It’s about entertaining people and Taylor Swift seems to be doing plenty of that. All things must evolve and change. It would be a boring business if every new artist sounded just like George Jones or George Strait. We need room for innovation, but we also need to have the courage to say, “Sales are great, but sales don’t make it an artistic achievement.” We need to leave room for artists that are doing important, groundbreaking music in the genre that we all know as Country Music.

The very first time this occurred to me was some years ago when the Shania Twain song, Honey I’m Home came on the radio. Please take a listen. At 1:08 in the song, you’ll hear a backing vocal that sounds AMAZINGLY like a background part from a Def Leppard record, circa 1985. And, of course, Def Leppard producer Mutt Lang was the mastermind behind Shania. I thought, “DAMN that sounds like Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

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Over the years the evidence began to build: Big Choruses, Power Ballads, Rock Beats, and records that, essentially, have nothing to do with country music. Most obviously the music began to gain a sheen. Any sense of real performance was beaten out of it as it was polished and perfected to an astounding degree.

There is precedence with country music moving to mimic another musical genre.

In the late 1950’s country music went through an evolution as guys like Chet Atkins helped create a more pop sounding brand of country. The old fashioned hillbilly style of country wasn’t selling records anymore, and in an attempt to revive the genre the conventional wisdom was to make it sound very similar to pop music – with string arrangements and sophisticated crooners like Eddie Arnold.

But what I was hearing with modern country artists like Shania Twain, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, and Rascal Flatts wasn’t an attempt to sound like a more a current genre, but an attempt to sound like a style of music that is so passé as to be extinct. 1980’s rock has become a laughing stock. The style was pulverized by Grunge in the early 90’s and it never really came back. Sure, we all still love some of the 80’s rock songs, and many of those tunes by bands like Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Cinderella, and Slaughter and are really great. But the 80’s rock style – the exploding drum sounds, the wheedly wheedly wee guitar solos, the crazy reverb…seems pretty silly now.

If country was going to mimic a successful genre I suppose they would turn to hip hop, (And that has happened with some embarrassing results.) but mostly Nashville country sounds like watered-down 80’s rock music. Why?

For years I bumped up against this – and it was finally a long road trip conversation with sometime supermodel John Ramey when it all fell together. The audience that was 18 when 80’s rock was big and making an impact are 40 now…and they consume COUNTRY MUSIC. Their tastes and preferences were honed in a world ruled by Warrant, Motley Crue, and Poison. If the country music business wants to sell records (or downloads) to these people the best way is to make the music sound similar but softer to account for the years. This is just what has happened.

There are notable exceptions. Kenny Chesney has modeled himself after Jimmy Buffet with great success. Toby Keith is doing a kind of Hank Williams, Jr. take, and female singers, like Carrie Underwood are really just pop stars…but Modern Country and 80’s Rock are linked at the hip.

You need any more proof… here’s a video of Taylor Swift singing Photograph with Def Leppard. RAWK!!!