Today, we start the first in a series of postings by guest bloggers that I corner in the hallway or break room and ask to share with our readers & viewers what’s on their mind. Our first post is from some guy I caught eyeing my lunch in the refrigerator.
One of the great things about working at a television station, and one of the things that usually flabbergasts those outside the fold, is easy access to cable TV during the workday. It’s a nice perk of the job, especially if you only have broadcast reception at home. Almost every work space at NPT is equipped with a television—out of necessity—for viewing tapes of DVD’s of upcoming programming, viewing what’s on our air or watching a taping in one of the studios. But on rare occasions, monitors at NPT find themselves tuned to other programming — for background noise in most cases — and in this writer’s case it often ends up on one of the cable country music video channels which shall remain nameless. The endless stream of country music videos running the gamut from the inane to the moderately entertaining are almost like an ethnographic study providing insight into traditional values and beliefs that are widely held throughout the heartland but foreign to many in centers like New York of Los Angeles. For example Craig Morgan’s recent video “Little Bit of Life” trumpets rural values through a rapidly delivered string of phrases evoking farm life and the singer’s significant other that he’s “doin’ alright with”. If listened to with a critical ear the lyrics are almost embarrassingly hokey, but when delivered with Morgan’s earnest country boy aplomb the entire thing actually works—evoking shared values and a valorization of small town agricultural lifestyle. For this writer returning to Nashville from New York and watching country music on television has been a real learning experience—it’s bred an appreciation for the music which I never had prior. As a result, I’ll be sure to be tuned in for tonight’s “Soundstage” featuring Lee Ann Womack and Julie Roberts—one of our town’s finest country singers paired with one of its rising stars.
Gotta go. Womack’s video “Finding My Way Back Home” just came on.