Revival or Renewal: The cultural influence of O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Looking back over the first decade of the 2000’s, surprises abound. The continual innovations in communications and technology of the previous decade (you remember the dot com boom, the Y2K crisis, the proliferation of cellular phones) saw the enhancement and expansion of an increasingly powerful music industry, and as a result, American musical culture experienced an astounding homogenization in terms of its aural artifacts. The record industry bid farewell to the humdrum, maudlin styling of grunge and alternative rock and began to frolic in music that prized marketing over meaning. Accessible dance beats dominated the air waves, and as 1999 came to a close, instead of being led to the millennium party by Prince, we were usurped by Brittney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, and N’ Sync as they took control of the musical reins claiming the rights to leading sales for the year.

Similarly, the technological developments that allowed communications giants such as Clear Channel to increase their editorial powers over the industry of music witnessed a similar growth in power over the film industry. Technology and action seemed to be the name of the game with movies such as Star Wars Episode I, Armageddon, and Jurassic Park claiming the top grossing spots toward the latter half of the final decade of the 1900’s. Even films set in a historic time period, like box office boom Titanic, indulged in excessive amounts of visual effects and touted oppressive budgets that independent filmmakers could not compete with. With the appropriate foreshadowing in place, many of us held our collective breath as we crossed the threshold into the 2000’s, hoping that tides might shift allowing for the artistic minnows to return to the pond, saving our cultural heritage from an untimely death. Unfortunately, the horizon was dim, and with MTV generation marketing minds at the helm, the coming days appeared to hold nothing but club beats and computer-age action.

Never ones to pursue a predictable course of action, rather than follow on the heels of the major studio giants, director and producer Joel and Ethan Coen choose to leave behind their modern age material, which included the neo-noir success of Fargo and the now cult classic The Big Lebowski, as they dove into our collective cultural identities to create their first film of the 21st century. Stepping into the new millennium, The Coen Brother’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? led the dynamic filmmaker’s newest effort in their ongoing exploration of dark comedy, as they portrayed Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney) as a contemporary Odysseus trying to find his way home in depression era America.

Leaving behind contemporary material, it is intriguing that the well-established brother duo chose to embrace the first year of the new millenium by looking back through the folds of history, reviving the Homeric epic as a mode of modernist expressionism. Fortunately, the brother’s gamble paid off as the film was mildly successful earning two Academy Award nominations including “Best Screenplay Adaptation” and “Best Cinematography.” And, much like the preceding film by the brothers “The Big Lebowski”, much of the film’s success came post-box office, growing in popularity via DVD sales and word of mouth, after receiving mixed critical attention.

However, the film’s true surprise, other than portraying George Clooney as a credible actor, came in the form of the film’s mesmerizing soundtrack, produced by T-Bone Burnett with additional help from Gillian Welch. The 19-track album that dwelled upon the music of times long since passed, rapidly surpassed all expectations as the soundtrack went on to achieve multi-platinum status and cleaned up at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards, receiving five individual honors including an Album of the Year award that saw “old-time” music outshine U2, Bob Dylan, and OutKast, among other contemporary artists.

With the immense popularity of the i soundtrack, an unforeseeable phenomenon at the time, many critics and music aficionados alike were claiming the first “revival” of the new millennium. Despite the success of overt studio pop at the close of 1999, a soundtrack composed of an eclectic sampling of various artists playing in a wide range of traditional American styles, was able to assert itself at a time when many participants in the folk and bluegrass culture felt like outsiders in the pop music industry, thereby constituting a renewed interest in traditional American music or “revival.”

Now, while there is much credibility in asserting the success of O Brother and its soundtrack success as antecedents to the first “folk revival” of the new century, there is also a good case for skepticism regarding this so-called “revival”. As was argued by Jeff Todd Titon in an article for the UCLA based post-graduate music journal ECHO, since all of the movies performances were over-dubbed versions of actors pretending to sing, “Ralph Stanley and most other O Brother performers were but disembodied voices on a soundtrack, making it easier for the viewer to disengage the film from these musicians and give the soundtrack album a life of its own.”

Viewed in this capacity, O Brother serves as more of a reminder of the existence of a particular era in our cultural heritage, rather that a true revival of those traditions. The audiences of the film did not leave the movie theater knowing who Ralph Stanley was, and many were also unaware that George Clooney never actually sang “I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow,” but that it was actually the voice of Dan Tyminski of Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station. Once these truths are acknowledged, it becomes difficult to view the O Brother phenomenon as a true revival due to the fact that much of the film’s audience enjoyed the music of the film without learning anything about the artists creating the songs, or anything about the history of the songs themselves.

This is not to say that the O Brother soundtrack was anything other than tremendously influential, it just wasn’t a “revival,” which is important in its own right. The soundtrack did not create a bevy of artists that strove to acquire the necessary tools to explore the rich traditions of American roots music. Rather, it refocused a spotlight upon the dying trend of popular ownership and use of the roots music medium. One only needs recall the popularity of groups such as the Dixie Chicks and Nickel Creek and their success in the late ‘90s as evidence of the existence of Americana traditions in popular music.

Even the performers who helped to create the O Brother soundtrack were quick to point out that the unexpected interest in old-time and bluegrass music only exposed the artists already existent interest in a somewhat obscure and largely forgotten period in American music history. Gillian Welch recognized the presence of a tight knit community of traditional musicians pre-O Brother in her September 2001 interview with No Depression magazine, in which she states, “This little light has been shined on our little community. We just went and played Carnegie Hall, and that was crazy. They plunked us at Carnegie Hall. So it feels the same; we’re just getting a little more attention right now”.

However, like all things related to the music industry, trends come and go. As we stand at the close of the first decade of the new century, the huge sales and excitement of the O Brother soundtrack have worn thin. If bluegrass is mentioned as an album influence, it is quickly tied to the Coen Brothers’ film rather than to a pre-existent musical heritage, and then the entire genre is usually dismissed. Fortunately for our pop music culture, the seeds of the folk traditions present in the music of the O Brother soundtrack have once again been re-sown and that evidence can be seen in much of the artistic productivity of the decade. It is therefore useful to re-define our conception of the folk tradition so as to see its application in our modern musical culture. In the 2001 No Depression interview with Welch, author Grant Alden recognizes the importance of, “understand[ing] folk music [as a] continuum, not an archive. [An accurate conception of folk music encompasses] everything from old-time fiddle tunes to rock to country to blues to bluegrass, and whatever else litters the landscape that might be of use.”

Viewed in this capacity, the O Brother explosion signifies a renewal of folk traditions in the popular music of today as countless indie-rock bands employ folk archetypes in their modern day material. The Avett Brothers serve as a succinct example of the myriad sources appropriated by the modern American music of today, as they blend traditional old time and bluegrass instrumentation with modern day rock structures and punk rock oriented displays of raw aggression and emotion. Similarly, the New York based band O’ Death offer a direct reference to the folk traditions of the past with a band name that is taken from the very song that revitalized the career of Ralph Stanley on the O Brother soundtrack, while they explore the new possibilities of folk instrumentation in a thoroughly modern sound structure.

Further examples abound at the close of the decade – the most prominent of which is The Decemberists latest record, The Hazards of Love, a modern day rock opera structured entirely around a short EP preformed by Anne Briggs during the English folk revival of the ‘60s. While one would be hard pressed to find a direct correlation between the music of the O Brother soundtrack and the decidedly prog-rock slant of The Hazards of Love, it is precisely the awareness created by the popular soundtrack that imbues the listeners with a knowledge of folk traditions allowing the full-length major label album to register with listeners, rather than seeming like an indulgent foray into overly archaic territory. And as we move forth from this first decade of the new century, it is with a certain understanding of our place in American musical culture, an understanding that might elude us were it not for O Brother and its musical remembrances.

Tagged as: 2009 Year End

Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.