Frank Kogan

I'm late to the party so doubt you'll have time to put any of these into your playlist, and LOL at trying to find them on Spotify anyway.

To call my knowledge of country music "spotty" is to overestimate the number and size of the spots and to underestimate the vast amount of blank space. But last June when Tom's Peoples Pop Polls were doing 1966, I did a kind of dive for country music, especially looking for country women to toss into the Suggestions Box.

In the meantime here's one from 1985:

Lacy J. Dalton - Over You
Deep burnt voice, makes me want to hear more.

Another from 1985:
Louise Mandrell - Devil In A Fast Car
Sounds more Flashdance than her sister.

From hither and yon. Yes, I can find a way to put hip-hop into a country poll!
The Forester Sisters - Crazy Heart
More heart than crazy, but the guitars mince some garlic over in the cutlery section of Bed Bath & Beyond.
Faith Hill - One
Keep forgetting how good Faith Hill is. This is quiet storm, basically, that doesn't forget to get a little noisy.
Bonnie Guitar - Hello, Hello Please Answer The Phone
Question, what genre has the most telephone songs? Think country's a contender.

Norma Jean - The Gambler And The Lady
You're either on the boat or you're off the boat.
Haley Georgia - Becky
"Becky" is blissful and buoyant and one of the great songs of 2017 and when all the online creeps kept telling Haley it was shit she must've listened, 'cause it's been wiped off the Internet except for this snippet.
LeAnn Rimes - Family
Saw a live clip of this where LeAnn says "And just admit you have a dysfunctional family" and she raises her hand really high.
LeAnn Rimes - No Way Out
And she didn't know a way out.

Watch on YouTube

Taylor Swift - You're Not Sorry
Taylor Swift - Lose Yourself
SHeDAISY - Lucky 4 You
Carrie Underwood - Jesus Take The Wheel
Allison Moorer - Dancing Barefoot

Sarah Buxton - Space
Laura Bell Bundy - Giddy On Up
Sarah Darling - Whenever It Rains
Cassadee Pope - Wasting All These Tears

Most of the cows have left the barn already, but here's 1966. Among my surprises and discoveries when diving into '66 was how much country was still wrestling with rock 'n' roll and, for the women, wrestling with the girl group sound. For instance, Dolly Parton's "Don't Drop Out," produced by Ray Stevens, was going for a Spector/Shadow Morton/Shangri-Las sound. This is while, out on the pop charts, the girl groups were either disappearing or – in the case of the Supremes and the Marvelettes – morphing into mid '60s soul.

Of course, the country acts were not trying to absorb or meld with the (barely yet named) "rock" genre. Lots of country acts covered "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'," but they got no closer.

One happy surprise, though, was hearing Bonnie Guitar and Margaret Whiting veer towards the art-pop of Petula Clark, say, or Burt Bacharach. Bonnie Guitar (see upthread) is especially interesting – I'd never heard her, but she's terrific. She sounded as at-home on Bacharach type stuff as on Carter Family type stuff, and I could imagine her singing a Bond theme. If you can tell me more about her, I'd be grateful. In the Suggestions Box I was also posting for someone who couldn't figure out how to post, and I ran his choice of Scott Walker's "Mrs. Murphy" right into Bonnie's "Grey Rain Years."

Watch on YouTube

I made a couple of Sixties playlists with a bunch of stuff incl. these and some male-sung country tracks; the second playlist includes the Bonnie-Scott merger. And the first playlist's got my Suggestion Box segue from Norma Jean's "The Shirt" to the Rolling Stones' "Mother's Little Helper." This segue is one of the meanest things I've done in my life.

As much as I love the '66 country tracks, after 10 of them in a row I feel like I'm in an airless closet. If I'd been a kid in a country-listening family, I would've seized on the Stones as a giant bear claw to claw my way out.

In the '00s I wrote that country should change its genre name to "Resentment." For the '60s you could call the genre "What A Drag It Is Getting Old." —An interesting exception was Wanda Jackson; not that she's better than the others, but in going all Jimmie Rodgers she was arriving like a breeze of air and space.

In my actual 1966 – a mostly unhappy year for me – I was trapped in a room not with country but with the Rolling Stones. But since the Stones sounded like they were trying to claw their way out of themselves, I was able to ride with them.

To sum up, though, I'm impressed at the extent that country '66 was willing to engage with other people's present.

Jody Miller - I Remember Mama
Former folkie who foreshadows Emmy Lou/Ronstadt sogginess, which is actually perfect for the big fat sentiments of the song.
Jan Howard - You Really Know
This track's in the country and girl-group zone: her voice can wail, but's got a whip.
Connie Smith - Same As Mine
Excuse me, you've got the wrong house.

Margaret Whiting - The Wheel Of Hurt
Brings formidable style to the sobbing bucket.
Patti Page - Custody
The emptiest house in the world.
Norma Jean - The Shirt
What a drag it is getting old.

Watch on YouTube

Bonnie Guitar - Grey Rain Years
Deep grey voice but with mirth playing around the edges.
Jan Howard - Bad Seed
Traveling the more conventional country track, Jan is just as warm and dangerous as on the rock 'n' roll side; and that harpsichord might actually, after all, be a nod to the shiny new stuff over on the pop charts.
Wanda Jackson - Tuck Away My Lonesome Blues
Loretta Lynn - Saint To A Sinner
Wasn't God who made honky tonk angels.

Interesting thing about Jody Miller: I read in Wikip that in the early '60s she would appear on a television folk show hosted by Tom Paxton. In my folkie days I'd got an album I liked by Paxton, Ramblin' Boy. A few years later, in my rock nihilism days,* I read an old Sing Out! article circa 1965 called "Folk Rot" by Tom Paxton, a savage denunciation (iirc) of the new electric rock 'n' roll direction by erstwhile folk heroes like Bob Dylan. Beginning summer vacation of '71 I left my Sing Out!s on a friend's porch with a note lending them to his older brother, who was learning guitar (the mags had lyrics and chords). Neither the friend nor the brother ever saw them. I suspect a parental intervention, though maybe a dog ate them. Anyway, when Clark McGregor put together his anthology of old commentary about Dylan, Paxton refused to let him reprint "Folk Rot." So I haven't seen it since, but I remember it ending with Paxton quoting from and sneering at a crossover chart hit, "Home Of The Brave": "Home of the brave, land of the free, why won't you let him be what he wants to be." By Jody Miller. Maybe Paxton felt betrayed.

*which haven't ended, by the way; but neither have my folkie days.

Got my ballot in, tracks only, with maybe an hour-and-a-half to spare. While my number 30, "Suds In The Bucket," is a rockin' little record, it's surely not the 30th best woman-sung country song of all time, just the 30th best that I, my ignorant self, could think of (while restricting myself to only one song per artist except I invoked The Taylor Swift Exception and gave Taylor two, finally choosing "Should've Said No" over "Lose Yourself" as the second on the grounds of better (in)fidelity).

Only eight that I "nominated" i.e. linked above actually made my list; voted a different LeAnn Rimes ("Blue") and a different Sarah Buxton ("Stupid Boy"). My guess is my ballot's the only one with Cassadee Pope and Daveigh Chase. Never saw Big Love but from what I remember people telling me, Chase played either a screwed-up character or a character in a screwed-up situation; anyway, her "Happiest Girl In The Whole U.S.A." adds a grabbing passion to the song's supposedly staid and comfy happiness. I have no memory whatsoever of Cassadee Pope's "Wasting All These Tears" prior to three days ago except I must've heard it when it came out 'cause it made my 2013 Nashville Scene ballot. Is an angry self-pitying wailer that you'd think'd want an Avril Lavigne or an Amy Lee to drive it through the wall, but Pope's thin reeds manage to do just fine.

As you may have figured, I'd no trouble voting "country" songs that sound like they're invading or being infected by another genre.

( My top 30 songs )

CROSSPOSTS: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/388448.HTML

My school started using a blended curriculum model (which I won't name here) recently, and I have a lot of thoughts about it, some pro- and some anti-, none of which would be totally appropriate for me to share here yet. The one thing that it has undoubtedly done, though, is dramatically improve our math curriculum.

In the pre-blended days, our long-suffering but talented and enthusiastic math teacher would randomly pull from a grab bag of mathematical concepts and subdisciplines – geometry, trigonometry, algebra, repeat – trying to patch together a satisfactory sampler of mathematics to students who very often had significant gaps in even their most basic math knowledge. "You have to get 'em when they’re young," she says, sadly, so often.

Now we have an integrated math curriculum, where students re-frame some of their understanding of math to tools that will be more broadly applicable to different mathematical problems: identifying patterns, creating spreadsheet tables, graphing data. These are all skills that I use, more or less, in my day to day work and life &ndash you could use these tools to find significance in a lab experiment or organize your taxes, say.

So that's good. And yet there's still a kind of fog of specialization running through this integrated math; students still learn concepts they'll soon forget, and I find myself dumbing down my "so what" talks so that they'll just remember the difference between a domain and a range, or a mnemonic device to help them find the slope of a line.

It seems to me that there is something very deeply wrong with the whole concept of mathematics at a pedagogical level, and I think the problem with it is the way in which teaching math outside of meaningful applications of that math doesn't even provide some of the basic building blocks of what you'd need to apply it later. Some of the ways we teach reading suffer from this, but at some level the pay-off of knowing how to put letters into words and words into sentences at least has some obvious, immediate value. The higher level meaning-making of literacy is a lifelong project, and subject to constant, frustrating backpedaling, sometimes among very smart people for no reason other than general cognitive biases. (It's amazing, for instance, how your reading comprehension suffers when you really don't want to change the ideas you had coming in.)

But at some level, I understand at least the connection between learning the basics and applying the basics to some other thing – reading a newspaper, scrolling through a Facebook feed, even. I have a harder time seeing that much "higher" a level in mathematics than learning some baseline of competencies.

I think of the non-fiction books I've read on innumeracy, probabilistic thinking, other "mathematical errors" that so many people make, especially when interpreting or conveying their understanding of data. But in many of these cases, what's being described is the breakdown I mentioned above, a way of tactically, if perhaps subconsciously, not understanding something because you don't want to, not (just) because you can't. I think of someone like Nate Silver, lamenting the inability of journalists to convey his site's probabilities in a way that is true to how they're actually presented. But such inability doesn't necessarily speak to some breakdown in the way in which that person learned math. That person can likely do their taxes, use a spreadsheet, figure out the slope of a line if they really needed to. The breakdowns that I most commonly read about are of a kind with reading incomprehension more than they are of innumeracy.

This is a meaningful distinction for me as I work with lots of kids with genuine innumeracy &ndash it just doesn’t look like “dumb analysis” or shallow thinking. It looks like students who really can't calculate numbers, are unable to estimate or make mathematical inferences at a level far beyond misunderstanding or mischaracterization. It is closer to what it looks like when a student can't read a sentence, can't put the words together, than what it looks like when a student uses a poor argument to make their point.

The thing that makes this frustrating for me is that I genuinely have no idea what math should look like. I have at least some inkling, some model, some research, some something for how I understand and imagine almost every other school subject and its relevance to student outcomes. I know what I know, I know what I don't know, I have some provisional thoughts about where to go with it, where it works and where it doesn't. But math continues to totally perplex me. (And I now know, as someone who has developed about as much understanding as you’d need to teach all of the math at my school, that the problem isn't just that I suck at math.)

As for yesterday's election, it went even worse than I'd feared (though so far it looks as if the Dems held onto the governor's office in Colorado, though just barely). My only thought, which is not necessarily correct as far as winning elections goes, but:

Of the commercials I saw (mainly while trying to watch YouTube; watching, say, Spanish-language TV could've been a different story), the commercials for Mark Udall, the Democrat, and loser, in the Colorado senate race, mainly attacked his opponent on social issues (Gardner's long opposition to abortion, his confusion around birth control, etc.), while the Republican commercials, for Cory Gardner, consistently attacked Udall on his economic policy. Of course what the Repub ads said was wrong, but that's not my point. We Democrats need to be running against the Repubs on economic issues. But — this is my opinion and my wish, and I'm sure that lots of people would consider it unrealistic — this means that at some point the Dems have to decide that a significant portion of the electorate isn't too busy or stupid to understand some basic, comprehensible, but counterintuitive principles of macroeconomics, if we're willing to take minutes at a time to teach them. Otherwise, the Dems have no good response when the Repubs simulate being responsible and thoughtful by attacking us for running up debt and deficit and accuse us of burdening the future with our current profligacy etc. etc. Of course, most Dems don't know macro either (and I hardly do, but I've got some sense from Krugman of the basic principles), and whom I mean by "Dems" and “Democrats" and "we" and "us" in this paragraph isn't altogether consistent...

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and therefore Popular, include what was historically called "easy listening" or "beautiful music," as well as smooth jazz, quiet storm, lite rock, adult contemporary, urban AC, and oldies. Music liked by the audiences [for such genres and formats] will always get undercounted because their listening is less concentrated on specific tracks and less concentrated on recently released ones but also because these audiences are less likely to buy the music directly, whether on a single or an album. They're nonetheless consumers, and presumably respond to what gets advertised on radio and TV (and now on YouTube?).

But I’m guessing these audiences download a lot that in the old days they'd never have purchased in physical form, and that there's been a change in e.g. the way people listen on the job from, in days of yore, hearing a radio station piped into an entire office to, nowadays, listening to their individual iPods and such. I emphasize that these are guesses.

( Actual elephant hiding under the cut )

( Footnotes )

This is just awesome and right on the spot. I can't [get] with men (society in general) who hate 'ugly' girls but criticize those who do plastic surgery or even put on make up! Not everybody naturally fits beauty standards, so fuck you.

( Grimes' Vanessa )

( Brown Eyed Girls' Abracadabra )

The notion of scientific consensus is tricky, but the idea is that the opinion of the scientific community converges toward the truth as ideas are debated and new evidence is uncovered. Just as in the stock market, the steps are not always forward or smooth. The scientific community is often too conservative about adapting its paradigms to new evidence,⁶⁴ although there have certainly also been times when it was too quick to jump on the bandwagon. Still, provided that everyone is on the Bayesian train,* even incorrect beliefs and quite wrong priors are revised toward the truth in the end.

*And that they don't hold priors that they believe to be exactly 100 percent true or exactly 0 percent true; these will not and cannot change under Bayes's theorem.

64. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Kindle edition).

( More griping )