 Arts & Entertainment
Books
Comics
Health & Body
Media
Mothers Who Think
News
People
Politics2000
Technology
- Free Software Project
Travel & Food
Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Search Salon
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment
"You are courageous"
A supposed former Alanis-hater confesses.
By Heather Havrilesky
[05/17/99]
Column
Size matters
In her engaging memoir "Wake Up, I'm Fat!" Camryn Manheim of "The Practice" reveals how she learned to throw her weight around.
By Joyce Millman
[05/17/99] Movies
Star what?
10 reasons not to see "The Phantom Menace."
By Toby Young
[05/14/99] Movie Review
Endless love
Director Franco Zeffirelli never surrenders his sunny disposition in this semi-fictional adaptation of his memoirs as a youth in World War II-era Italy.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[05/14/99] Movie Review
Boys to men
"Edge of Seventeen," a film about coming out and of age in the early '80s, trumps the current crop of nice-guy gay films.
By Daniel Mangin
[05/14/99]
Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
|
|
 s h a r p s__&__f l a t s
Radney Foster
Radney Foster's neo-traditionalist country faces the harrowing future of not mattering.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Tony Scherman
May 18, 1999 |
"Folding Money," the most interesting track by far on country singer/songwriter Radney Foster's first album in five years, opens with a rude guitar blast, a funky, almost hip-hop drumbeat and Foster's distorted voice, sounding as if it's been run through a digital compressor. Throughout the song (whose quasi-urban abrasiveness perfectly matches its hard-bitten, money talks message), a sexy female vocalist coos insinuating come-ons, Chaka Khan-style. "Folding Money" is an intriguing experiment, an attempt to run counter to form, to take liberties with Foster's sweetly inoffensive sound and persona. Its hard-edged production is exactly the kind of gamble Foster needs to take if he is to escape the dwindling pool of alternatives open to left-of-center but basically conventional country singers like himself: either working the city's coffeehouse circuit or opening for country-pop fluff like the Dixie Chicks.
|
Radney Foster
"See What You Want to See"
Arista Austin
|
Unfortunately, the rest of the album lacks the nasty frisson of "Folding Money." "See What You Want to See" is workmanlike country-rock of the sort that was called neo-traditionalist a decade ago, when it rode in on the coattails of Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam. While Foster's music has remained largely unchanged since his first solo album, "Del Rio, Tx, 1959" (1992), his brand of carefully produced, politely sonorous, major-label neo-trad has been roundly upstaged by insurgents like the Bloodshot Records gang. Yesterday’s rebel can sound awfully tame today; hell, even the incorrigibly snotty (we thought) Yoakam has lost his edge. So pity the aging neo-traditionalist in the late 1990s. Unless he's a force of nature like Earle (a genre unto himself) or an idiosyncratic quasi-genius like Lucinda Williams, he faces the gloomy prospect of, well, not mattering. Here is Foster's choice: Either stir up more funky, forward-looking brews like "Folding Money" or face a long, slow fade in the coffeehouses of Music City.
salon.com | May 18, 1999
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
 Get a printer-friendly version
 E-mail a friend about this article
 Backflip this article to find it again
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Search Salon
|
|
