When Americana doesn't mean American
73 comments
·May 2, 2025danans
throw3726383
This is about soft power, isn't it? There was a time when Chinese folk music was extremely popular in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the rest of Southeast Asia.
Then Japanese folk music started to become really popular.
These days, it's K-pop that's super popular all over Asia and it's catching on throughout the rest of the world too.
analog31
At least among musicians, it's my understanding that "Americana" is a relatively narrow category of indigenous American music. For instance, it doesn't include ragtime, jazz, funk, rock, hip-hop, blues, soul, spiritual, gospel, etc.
It might mean something different worldwide.
danans
> At least among musicians, it's my understanding that "Americana" is a relatively narrow category of indigenous American music.
I've never heard of it referring to the music of indigenous Americans (American Indians).
The most common definition (per the Americana Music Association) has connections to nearly all the genres you mentioned, and with a strong historical connection to the American South.
j4coh
I’m a musician (American, but live in Europe now) and the Wikipedia version is the only definition I’ve ever heard.
darkerside
I'd say all the popular genres are descended from the same musical tree, from baroque to classical to romantic to modern. Americana is probably barely a century old, and is just another branch on that trunk.
Eastern folk music is a different plant.
African drum music as well, but is a hybrid that has integrated itself into the modern music structure.
danans
> Americana is probably barely a century old, and is just another branch on that trunk.
It's arguably a branch with connections back to at least two trees, African being one and European being the other.
brudgers
To my taste, a lot of great Americana music comes from Canadian musicians.
Perhaps because Canada has english, a east coast, a west, and the great plains.
gspencley
> Perhaps because Canada has english, a east coast, a west, and the great plains.
There are geographical similarities but I think it is more cultural.
Culturally, Canada and the USA are extremely similar. What a lot of people who don't live in Canada often fail to realize is that the vast, overwhelming majority of our population is concentrated in southern Canada... and that these areas are often even SOUTH OF PARTS OF THE USA in terms of latitude.
For example, Seattle WA lies on roughly the same latitude as Ottawa, ON which is quite north of Toronto. Detroit Michigan borders Windsor, ON (my home town) and Windsor is to the south of Detroit.
When broadcast television and radio were in their prime, we all watched American TV and listened to American radio (and the northern USA got Canadian channels etc).
In border towns like Vancouver and Windsor, it's not uncommon for people to have family on both sides of the border or to even live in one country and hold a day job in another.
A lot of Canadians have winter homes in southern states. Florida is a popular destination for east-coast Canadians and, while I don't know if it has changed, a typical visitor visa for Canadians let us stay for up to 6 months before we have to go back. And a lot of people even hold dual-citizenship.
kashunstva
> I think it is more cultural
Dual citizen here living on the Canadian side. It will be interesting to see how the political unraveling in the U.S. will force Canadians to regard and reinforce aspects of our culture that are distinct.
It is also interesting that you mention Canadian snowbirds. That too, at least anecdotally seems to be changing. In the last few weeks I ran into two individuals who are both working on unloading their homes in Florida on account all of this xenophobic sentiment.
bigiain
I, for one,welcome the new Canadiana/Polite-Core musical genre.
foobarian
I always thought it was because of long dark days in winter due to high latitudes, when there is nothing better to do than make music :-D Also explains the Seattle grunge, and all the good musicians from Alaska.
brudgers
To me geography is inseparable from culture. It is the water in which cultures swim.
E.g. proximity to the US is why US broadcast TV was a normal experience for many Canadians.
UI_at_80x24
>Detroit Michigan borders Windsor, ON (my home town) and Windsor is to the south of Detroit.
Born and raised in SOUTH Detroit!
Howdy from the East Side of Windsor.
scarface_74
As far as Florida where I live many Canadians are selling their American homes because of the current political client.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/canadians-sell-...
skissane
There’s this old proposal that Bermuda join Canada as a province. Related proposal exists for the Turks and Caicos Islands. In the early 20th century, the Bahamas even negotiated to join Canada, but the plan was derailed by racial anxieties and the negotiations were abandoned.
Maybe, some day, Canada could (peacefully and consensually) acquire itself some Caribbean provinces
r14c
Canada and the US are both part of North America. Maybe Americana transcends borders and political divisions.
RajT88
Canada is not terribly different.
Near the border, the people on either side talk the same. You go north/south the accents vary on a spectrum.
Oh yahh, dem yoopers are almost canucks!
sandworm101
The accents actually change more east-west. That's why all the movies filmed in Vancouver using local actors sound just like those filmed in LA. The "neutral" accents of the US midwest are similar to those of the Canadian prairies. Only in the east does the north-south thing become so prominent.
brudgers
Spanish language music generally isn’t considered Americana even though most of the Americas speak Spanish including much of Noth America.
And there are three times as many people in Mexico as in Canada and as many Spanish speakers in the US as Canadians in Canada.
moate
looks at the rest of Norte Americana This does not hold water.
kevin_thibedeau
It doesn't have Nashville funneling artists into a narrowly defined genre and excluding anyone outside the system from airplay.
brudgers
Despite its Grand Ol' Opery fame, on the ground Nashville has a diversity of musicians because of musical infrastructure, cost of living, and a social normality of musicianship.
Of course Nashville is not a hothouse of radical music, but we are talking about Americana right?
kevin_thibedeau
I speak of the corporate "Nashville" music publishing scene that controls what gets promoted as the latest flavor of "Country", not what happens locally in the city. A lot of what gets classed as Americana would have been played on country radio into the 70s.
greenavocado
[flagged]
sandworm101
Art is a comment on culture. It is often easier for an outsider to comment than it is for someone steeped in that culture. There are no doubt many aspects of American culture that go unnoticed by Americans but are obvious to Canadians.
RajT88
I grew up near Chicago. Detecting someone who grew up in Toronto is kind of like one or more scenes from Inglourious Basterds. "Soory", "aboot".
sandworm101
There is only one T in Torono.
moate
holds up 3 fingers Three Old Stoils, please!
pyrale
> There are no doubt many aspects of American culture that go unnoticed by Americans but are obvious to Canadians.
Also maybe some aspects of geography, like knowing in which continent Canada is.
bentley
The average American knows that Canada is in North America, as does the average Canadian, the average Englishman, and the average Australian.
The average non‐American is from outside the Anglosphere, and so may be from a culture that considers North America and South America to be a single continent. But continents don’t have an objective definition, only a cultural one, and in the language and culture of the Anglosphere the Americas are distinct continents, America is a country, and Americans are that country’s people.
I’ve never met a Canadian who clamored to be called an American. (Except naturalized citizens!)
bee_rider
Although I don’t have much faith in the geographical talents of my countrymen, I think most of us know where Canada is.
I usually try to use US-ian instead of American, but it looks really stupid and so I get why it is pretty widespread to call us Americans.
SllX
That’s a check
thimkerbell
and mr. young.
mikrl
One of the cultural touchstones of being a Canadian is the smug yet bleak realization that your tiny (in population) nation has produced so many titans of various creative fields, but everyone thinks they’re American because they had to bugger off down there to get their careers going.
Steppenwolf being the quintessential example.
spamizbad
Not sure if Canadians are aware of this, but Canada does two things really well:
1) Developing its own domestic artists/musicians, to a much greater degree than the US (eg https://www.factor.ca/)
2) Greatly restricting smaller foreign acts (especially from the US) from performing in Canada for commercial purposes
Yes, point #2 also applies to the US, but it's not enforced. But if you cross into Canada with musical instruments, they'll put the fear of God into you.
This is largely why the phenomena you describe exists: artists can develop within their domestic cocoon, without being crowded-out by Americans, and then tour their larger, wealthier neighbor to greatly expand their profile virtually risk-free.
wozniacki
2) Greatly restricting smaller
foreign acts (especially from
the US) from performing in
Canada for commercial purposes
Yes, point #2 also applies to
the US, but it's not enforced.
But if you cross into Canada
with musical instruments,
they'll put the fear of God into
you.
Lots of countries have this quota system where they try to artificially force feed homegrown music, tv shows and movies and it never works.
People always gravitate to the larger American sphere because it doesnt have such restrictions in place. They dont work anyway.
When I first saw Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (2008) it was so fresh and un-Hollywood like in the presentation of the raw violence and vice, that it stunned me. I still cant stand most PG-fied and Disney-fied American films.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film)
Gomorra (2008) Official HD Trailer [1080p]
jchw
Even as a U.S. citizen this hits me frequently. A lot of amazing comedians I didn't realize were Canadian for a long time, as a U.S. citizen. Norm Macdonald comes to mind, but he's far from alone.
brudgers
Canada has government programs requiring broadcasters to broadcast Canadian content. So there are strong economic incentives to find, fund, develop, and promote Canadian artists working in various media.
bee_rider
Interesting. He seems extremely Canadian to me. A lot of his jokes play off this sort of fish-out-of-water vibe…
fennecbutt
From the outside: isn't modern American culture just a parody of itself?
And isn't that why there are so many who claim to be "Irish" or "Italian" even though they're third or fourth generation and have never set foot in the countries.
I'll probably grab UK citizenship soon, but I would never say "I'm British". Nor would I if I had British parents (I don't) when I was still in NZ, before I'd even set foot in the UK.
skissane
> I'll probably grab UK citizenship soon, but I would never say "I'm British"
I’m a British citizen, but I’m not British. I’ve never stepped foot in the UK in my whole life, I became a citizen through descent.
And my late grandmother, who was born in Scotland and lived the first half of her life there, I remember once calling her Scottish, and she corrected me “I’m not Scottish, I’m Irish” (both her parents were born in Ireland)
stavros
Yeah, the way Americans mean "I'm X nationality" and the way the rest of the world means it are different. I don't think when Americans say "I'm Italian" they mean "I was born and raised in Italy and Italian is my native language", as we do, they just mean "I have distant Italian ancestry", and that's widely understood to mean that in the US. If an American said to another American "I'm Italian", I don't think the latter would ask "oh, how was your childhood in Italy?".
skissane
> Yeah, the way Americans mean "I'm X nationality" and the way the rest of the world means it are different.
I don’t think this is uniquely American - I know people in Australia who identify as Italian despite the fact their parents were born here. And I wonder if you’d find something similar in other places where large numbers of Italians emigrated, such as Argentina. And the same applies to various other groups too, mutatis mutandis.
A word like “Italian” can variously describe legal nationality/citizenship, ethnicity, ancestry, language, self-identification - and different combinations of those possibilities in different contexts or as used by different speakers
roywiggins
When someone says they're Irish or Italian they mean it as an ethnicity, not a nationality, and it often has an implied "-American" suffix. Irish-Americans are a distinct ethnic group, at least historically; you might compare it to, say, Cuban or Haitian immigrants, who each have distinct communities, cultures, and so forth, often even distinct from their namesake countries'.
null
firesteelrain
TIAMS (mentioned in article) stopped broadcasting I thought. RNEI and Radio Carptha took over. You can hear it on WRMI out of Florida every week.
https://swling.com/blog/2023/08/radio-carpathia-and-rnei-to-...
Bob Catface (https://bsky.app/profile/bobcatface.bsky.social) has a Discord (Mostly Shortwave Discord: discord.gg/fr4Uuw4z5h) where you can receive notices when these come on the air. If you are a ham radio operator or SWL, you can decode MSFK usually with these shows.
kaitai
I was absolutely impressed/puzzled by the Leningrad Cowboys as a kid.
In the mid-2000s, J. Karjalainen (a Finnish musician) put out a concept album called Lännen-Jukka. If you like Blues, it's worth checking out. YLE, the Finnish media network, put out a documentary on it. Karjalainen travels through the US including significant time in Upper Michigan, where many Finns settled a hundred years ago (and more recently).
Another thing I remember is that while here, Karjalainen & his bandmates were detained by the TSA at Minneapolis St Paul airport and treated rather poorly. Apparently TSA thought they were gonna overstay their visas in the US and try to "make it big in music". It was very bizarre.
Recent events made me think of that again.
ChrisMarshallNY
One of my favorite "Americana" videos, done by the Danish group, The Cartoons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNAr5tzZxdk
Also, there's a park in Tokyo, where people dress in "rockabilly" outfits, not unlike the ones in the video.
cowsandmilk
See also Japan being a stronghold of Ivy League fashion.
alabastervlog
The Articles of Interest podcast (affiliated with 99% Invisible, I think) has a good series on Ivy fashion, and covers Take Ivy and the Japanese interest in it extensively.
First of seven episodes of theirs about Ivy:
https://www.articlesofinterest.co/podcast/episode/338532f2/a...
Fussell's Class and (especially) Birnbach et al's The Official Preppy Handbook also treat extensively of the style.
devin
Here to vouch for this. This is a fantastic review of Ivy or "prep" style. Even if you aren't into fashion I think you'll find it fascinating.
mopsi
And some of the most influential Westerns were shot by Italians in the deserts of Spain, often without any of them ever having set foot in the US, and with a grasp of English barely a notch above miming. The stereotypical Western (as it is known today) is largely Italian-made, especially when it comes to the music (Ennio Morricone): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_Western
int_19h
This sort of thing has a long-standing tradition in Europe, by the way. Karl May of the Winnetou fame wrote what is probably one of the popular Western book series in the world without ever having been to US.
madcaptenor
Calling it "Spaghetti", in turn, says something about American stereotypes of Italians.
anthk
We Spaniards call them Spaguetti Westerns too.
corimaith
It's a great twist of irony perhaps that it is media that takes cultural appropriation (albeit from a point of admiration) often ends up reaching further than the original.
It's not just for americana, many staples for european-inspired or gothic fantasy are made by the japanese, even if most of these creators don't speak english. Well in a sense perhaps it's the unique feature of the Western legacy that it's virtually transcended for everyone to use, rather than just a single group.
anthk
The Western movies and books are widely known for every Grandpa in Spain except for the actual Far West history.
In the 70's, tons of people bought a-dime novels full of cheap Western like 'pulp' stories written from Spanish authors with English nicknames at the cover.
Later, with the widely spread television, spies and officers/detectives took that role seamlessly, with Charles Bronson et all. Because in the end it's the same story everywhere. Lonely wolf vs the baddies. That stuff sold well everywhere, because every society has its badass hero.
I'm pretty sure tons of French directors set lots of drama/action movies in the US too.
Oh, and not just white officers. The Asian Martial Arts exploitation with Bruce Lee and clones was widely seen from their sons too in late 70's/early 80's.
And these would be surely cloned in the US too.
Ninjas, samurais and exotic Japanese and Chinese fighters were pretty much everywhere too. And, OFC, Dragon Ball in Europe was a huge success in late 80's, even if at the beginning it just was a comedy manga/anime.
Dragon Ball does the same in the end with the Chinese culture being remade from the Japanese as a parody...
The French had Blueberry, Lucky Luke...
Americana/Roots music is a vehicle for people across the world to express themselves in a shared musical language of common people.
For many cultures of the world, the most prominent musical genres are either highly parochial or highly corporatized (the latter also being the case in the USA).
Americana/Roots music still sits in place apart from those other genres, and while this probably limits the possible financial success of its practitioners, it preserves its authenticity and therefore it's broad appeal.
That raises the question, why doesn't every other form of authentic folk music around the world have the same broad appeal? Why aren't musicians all over the world taken up, say, Indian or Chinese folk music in total (vs borrowing themes or instruments)?
Because even Americana/Roots music has been a major source of the waves of US cultural and economic imperialism that have flowed over the world, from at least the early days of jazz and and definitely in the days of blues, rock, r&b, and rap.