Some country music does not involve mullets (at least most of the time)

In the spirit of our Blog's title, the first post has to do with Mullets. While most people who have seen 5 minutes of video on any country music TV station would surely note - the Mullet has often been the hairstyle of choice among Nashville's esteemed list of twangers over the past few decades. Perhaps a forgotten fact - this hairstyle was also a favorite of many successful pop artists from the 1980s - so this subject certainly is relevant to either of this Blog's primary pontificates.

Being that I got first crack at this, I would like (at least partially) to contradict this some in regards to the country folks - in particular the very specific genre I prefer - Alternative Country. Most people are probably thinking - "what is the difference - I heard the word country and that surely means songs about beer, ticks, and a line in almost every song about some old guy (or gal) who sang country (usually Hank Williams).”

But Alt Country is something a bit different. Some of the early purveyors of this musical fair were bands like Wilco (now a Grammy awarding winning, experimental pop band) and Whiskeytown (one of the founding members is critical fave Ryan Adams). These outfits often used country instrumentation, and even wrote purest country songs, but sounded a lot more like The Band or Flying Burrito Brothers than some pre-packaged country act. And - most of the time - the Mullet is hard to find in band photos of any group from this genre (although I have to admit some early photos of Jeff Tweedy from Wilco might water down my point a bit....).

Sean