Attack strikes country music, bastion of US traditionalism
In attacking a country music concert, the assailant in Las Vegas has targeted one of the moreconservative segments of US culture in which guns have more often been a topic of celebration. Sunday evening’s shooting, the deadliest in modern US history, struck a soldout performance by chart-topping country singer Jason Aldean whose songs have championed the values and grievances of workingclass America. Yet the stereotypical images of country are changing and Aldean is one of its more musically fluid stars with an openness to incorporating R&B and hip-hop influences. Once rooted in former Confederate states, country music has grown rapidly across the United States in the past decade. Aldean was headlining the three-day Route 91 Harvest festival on the Las Vegas Strip which was launched in 2014.
Aldean, who last year won the top prize at the Academy of Country Music Awards, has spoken to Middle America with songs such as “Fly Over States,” a tale of men flying firstclass from New York to Los Angeles who can’t understand the heartland. On “They Don’t Know,” the title track of his last album, Aldean again speaks of outsiders who drive past farmers but “ain’t seen the blood, sweat and tears it took to live their dreams.”
Aldean, a 40-year-old Georgia native who recently put on sale the sprawling Tennessee ranch where he hunts deer and turkeys, last year told Rolling Stone Country that Donald Trump pulled off his election upset by speaking to the “every-day guy who is going to work and wanting a normal life for his family” but feels forgotten.
Whiter, older demographic Authorities did not immediately assign a motive to 64-year-old gunman Stephen Paddock. Live music has increasingly become the target of attacks, with the genres varying widely. A May bombing struck a concert in Manchester, England of pop star Ariana Grande, whose fan base is full of young girls, while a devastating assault on a Paris club in 2015 hit the urbane crowd of rockers Eagles of Death Metal. Surveys have found that more than 90 percent of country listeners are white, with the music most popular in the Deep South and Great Plains, although the Nashville-based industry takes pains to stress that it is making inroads with minorities. A Nielsen study last year found that fans also skewed older, with the average person at a US country music show nearly 45 years old.—AFP