“I don’t care”: The one genre Linda Ronstadt can no longer listen to
The music world that Linda Ronstadt grew up in is a lot different than what we know today.
She had the voice that could knock out virtually anyone who came within 50 feet of her, but whereas most people would rather their favourite artists stay in one lane, Ronstadt was going to do anything she wanted if she felt that it suited her voice in the right way. But while she had a good idea of how she could fit into genres like easy listening or even the occasional Mexican album, she did have a good idea of which genres she should be kept away from at every single opportunity.
Granted, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know which albums didn’t really suit her voice. Ronstadt was never going to sound great contributing to a heavy metal album, and as much as she had a great deal of respect for jazz, there weren’t that many places for her to get a foothold among the Miles Davis’s of the world or anything. She knew her strengths, and she was going to spend her career finding out what other strengths she had.
No one would have considered going into easy listening at the dawn of MTV, but it turns out that Ronstadt was accidentally groundbreaking in many respects. Years later, the greatest rock and roll stars of all time would be making records of standards, but What’s New felt like the first time where someone actually seemed to have a lot more reverence for the medium compared to other singers wearing the style like a costume.
After all, Ronstadt never considered herself a proper rock and roll singer in the first place, and when she started singing with Nelson Riddle’s arrangements behind her, there was no reason to think that she was going to go back to the same bar circuit and sing a couple of Rolling Stones songs every single night. She had a lot more to offer, but nothing could pull her away from the sounds of country music.
She had grown up hearing some of the greatest country songs of all time, and even after years of stepping away from the medium, hearing her Trio records with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris was a reminder to everyone what true country legends looked like. Because by that point, Ronstadt had to wonder where all the fun had gone when she saw what was coming out of Nashville.
Some of the biggest artists were superstars on the same level as Michael Jackson and Madonna in the 1980s, but ever since the 2010s, Ronstadt felt that country has gone down a dark path, saying, “I don’t listen to modern country music. I don’t care for it particularly. I like old country music, when it still came out of the country. What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music. You go into big-box stores and come out with huge pushcarts of things. It’s not an agrarian form anymore. When it comes out of the country, it’s not farmers or woodsmen, or whatever. It doesn’t make much sense. It’s just suburban music.”
And if we’re being honest, Ronstadt’s words are the kind of sentiment that many country singers have been saying for years. There are still patches of Nashville where people still have reverence for the classics, but Ronstadt was more interested in going back to her old records by people like Hank Williams than entertain the idea of whatever songs were coming out of the Florida George Lines of the world.
There are still some fine musicians that are lighting up Nashville and reminding everyone about what great songs sound like, but the country music world seemed to cross a line the minute that they let a song like ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk’ on the charts. This was some bastardised version of country music, rock, and some truly heinous attempts at rap that no one should have ever conceived of in the first place.
