Post by erik on Mar 11, 2023 22:45:08 GMT -5
One of country music's leading female lights from the 1990's is in this week's Pop Music Hits Spotlight with a little slice of what it means to be a parent of a daughter entering her teens.
TEENAGE DAUGHTERS (Martina McBride; Republic Nashville; 2011)—Going into the second decade of the 21st century, things were starting to severely slow down for the women of the country music industry, given that the 1990’s female country music boom was now more than a decade in the past. Partly out of the firestorm of controversy engendered by the Dixie Chicks and lead singer Natalie Maines’ berating of President Bush on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, the womenfolk of the genre were having their radio airplay reduced dramatically and, in the eyes of a lot their fans, unfairly. One of those was Martina McBride, who, from her first recordings in 1994, had managed to achieve a certain amount of country and pop crossover success, though it didn’t match that of her role model Linda Ronstadt. Part of that might have had to do with the perceived “soccer mom” nature of some of the songs she chose to record. One case in point, at least insofar as the critics were concerned, was her early 2011 release “Teenage Daughters”, which she wrote with the Warren Brothers (Brad and Brett Warren) for her album Eleven. It focused on how daughters react to their mom’s laying down of the law, as it were, and then the mother figure has to be reminded that this is how she behaved when she was at that same age. With her powerful voice wisely tamped down, “Teenage Daughters” was liked enough by her fans, and numerous pop and Adult Contemporary audiences, when it was released as a single in March 2011, even if its chart placement of #17 on Billboard’s C&W singles chart (and only #100 [for a single week] on the Hot 100) didn’t seem to say it. With the popularity of her and other female artists declining, and the surge in what came to be known as “Bro Country”, Martina still managed to persevere, first with her 2014 album Everlasting, and her appearance at the 2016 Lifetime Grammy Awards, where she honored Linda.
TEENAGE DAUGHTERS (Martina McBride; Republic Nashville; 2011)—Going into the second decade of the 21st century, things were starting to severely slow down for the women of the country music industry, given that the 1990’s female country music boom was now more than a decade in the past. Partly out of the firestorm of controversy engendered by the Dixie Chicks and lead singer Natalie Maines’ berating of President Bush on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, the womenfolk of the genre were having their radio airplay reduced dramatically and, in the eyes of a lot their fans, unfairly. One of those was Martina McBride, who, from her first recordings in 1994, had managed to achieve a certain amount of country and pop crossover success, though it didn’t match that of her role model Linda Ronstadt. Part of that might have had to do with the perceived “soccer mom” nature of some of the songs she chose to record. One case in point, at least insofar as the critics were concerned, was her early 2011 release “Teenage Daughters”, which she wrote with the Warren Brothers (Brad and Brett Warren) for her album Eleven. It focused on how daughters react to their mom’s laying down of the law, as it were, and then the mother figure has to be reminded that this is how she behaved when she was at that same age. With her powerful voice wisely tamped down, “Teenage Daughters” was liked enough by her fans, and numerous pop and Adult Contemporary audiences, when it was released as a single in March 2011, even if its chart placement of #17 on Billboard’s C&W singles chart (and only #100 [for a single week] on the Hot 100) didn’t seem to say it. With the popularity of her and other female artists declining, and the surge in what came to be known as “Bro Country”, Martina still managed to persevere, first with her 2014 album Everlasting, and her appearance at the 2016 Lifetime Grammy Awards, where she honored Linda.