Is Alan Jacksons 9/11 song touching or tacky?
(Entertainment Weekly) — The prolific country-music songwriter Harlan Howard, who died earlier this week, once said that country music is “85 percent words, 15 percent music,” and that’s a good detail to bear in mind when considering Alan Jackson’s immensely popular hit single “Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning).” It’s also good to remember that country music is basically a music for adults, not adolescents: Its pervasive subjects are love, marriage, infidelity, and trying to find the keys to your truck after a night of honky-tonk self-medicating. The rebelliousness and anger that characterizes rock & roll is of lesser importance in country music, which prizes home and comfort as ultimate solace. All of which is a way of saying that “Where Were You,” written by Jackson about the multitude of reactions prompted by the events of September 11, wouldn’t cut it as rock music, in whose context a line like, “Did you weep for the children who lost their dear loved ones” might com
