That’s not how I remember it. Linda is at the leading edge of the boomers herself (born in 1946) and became famous in the 60s and 70s, just when boomers (hate that word) were of an age to define the market for new music. Speaking for myself, I’ve been a fan since her earliest days.
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I think that there was probably the division back then of those who were into the evolving rock scene of the 1960s and 70s (post-Beatles and all that), which was seen as more “authentic” and countercultural, vs. pop music that Ronstadt and others were doing. Much like pop singers today are often dismissed as plastic, and artificial and corporate, I think that’s likely were that discursive dynamic really took off. It certainly goes back to the earliest days of the recording industry, but it really got legs in the 1960s with the rise of the counterculture… It was always kind of bullshit, of course, because both rock and pop were being produced by the same industry, sometimes the same fucking labels…
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I’m no Ronstadt aficionado; but I remember liking her on the radio.
Learning that Alexander Siddig is related to Malcolm McDowell is both a surprise, and perfectly appropriate.
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She was the first rock woman to fill arenas. Management kept trying to sexualize her more than she wanted. And control the music. She spanned several styles of music- rock, folk, country, Mexican, standards - but she was more an interpreter of songs not a writer. Which probably has something to do with that [authenticity] for some.
But a lot of the resistance was because woman.
Edit:
With Nelson Riddle- several great American songbook albums.
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And when I saw this one I had to double-take and check to see if it wasn’t already Selena Gomez, the resemblance was so uncanny!
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And of course- this collaboration
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You have a treat in store. @anon61221983’s suggestion is a good one, made famous recently by its appearance in the third episode of The Last Of Us.
Here’s a couple more examples just to show her range.
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Yeah, I think that’s where the gap starts, because the older division of labor on the recording industry (song writers often not being the main performer of a song in public, but professional performers doing that) was giving way to the post-Beatles concept of rock (Elvis was also primarily a performer of other’s songs and the Beatles shifted to singer-songwriters pretty soon after their rise to fame), which was all about this kind of image of authenticity and the song writer being the performer of the music. This is more about public perception, I think, than reality - even in the singer-songrwriter age, song writing and then recording an album is more complicated and involves more people than just the genius individual writing the next great heartfelt hit. You can see several artists from that era that seem to straddle that change as it was happening, I’m thinking of people like Carole King who started out as a songwriter for others, and who later had her own high profile career… Lou Reed, too, who entered the recording industry as a song writer, before starting VU with Cale…
Yeah, the music industry remains one of the most misogynistic industries with us today.
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Thanks everybody! My beloved is the DJ on a Saturday and we tend a bit more towards groove so I’ll check them out while cooking tomorrow.
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i have nothing new to add to this discussion, but want to say that i loved Linda Ronstadt’s music when i was growing up (still do!) and that i think Selena Gomez will absolutely smash the portrayal! i just hope she does plenty of the mariachi and spanish songs. i love that stuff!
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It’s about the money! I know all the musicians who played, and arranged, the great singer songwriter hits find the concept annoying and many swear the named artists agreed it was nonsense.
It’s no accident that the longest lasting bands tend to have fairly egalitarian distribution of royalties. In a creative collaboration it is often very difficult to know who really contributed. As an example, and please don’t imagine I’m a Beatles fan but I watched the loonnnnnnnng documentary when it came out as I had Covid and was horizontal and it passed the time, but the song they kind of wrote in it, Come together I think, you could hear a motif played hesitantly earlier by I think George emerge as the big contribution by John or Paul a good bit later. When bands don’t have to stress who actually wrote but instead are all hands in, all get paid, everyone contributes to the vibe, they have a better vibe and last longer. Because it is really genuinely difficult to untangle who really contributed and who should really get credit.
The studio crews of the 70s were greats of course and made some of your favourite music if you like stuff from then.
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I did not expect Gilbert and Sullivan; cool 
and what a voice 
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I mean sure, I agree with that… the material conditions always matter. But I’d argue that the ideology of the “great genius song-writer” is what is underwritng that, if that makes sense?
yeah, it was never an either-or thing… I’m just arguing that the ideology of rock music was built on the great man paradigm… and that is always juxtaposed with the supposedly “inauthentic” pop music that was seen as “more” corporate…
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Well I absolutely agree with that. I’m not a huge fan of the concept of authenticity in music in the first place. So for example just tonight someone visiting the city was looking for an authentic trad session from me and, for me, all the vital sessions are open to multiple influences from the real interconnected world and the fact is that people have trad musics from everywhere. And this has always been the case. Musicians always want the new thing whether it be a technology or a style or a groove or a scale to spice up life.
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I’m a fan of authentic pop music. 
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Oh yeah, you can really see that dichotomy when it comes to “traditional” musics… authenticity in music really is very informed by how capitalism commodifies music. And frankly, in this case, by tourism, too. Of course, you got lots of people coming to Ireland looking for an “authentic” pub experience, right down to the music, so the tourism industry I’m sure works hard to make that a key part of the tourist experience. So now, people “expect” that when they come over (especially us Irish American tourists! We want to see the OLD country, don’t ya know)…
Well, that’s kind of my point, it’s sort of a pointless designation meant to organize people’s consumption and shape their identity in a way that helps to reproduce the capitalist system…
To be fair anybody who comes to me, from anywhere, for some music suggestions, is pretty open to wanting what people here might like rather than a curated experience. I’ve navigated that in places like Spain and Mexico (off the top of my head) where they kind of want to figure out if you are a music person before you are welcome. And I do understand that gate keeping. Cities often prefer tourism to locals and we need to keep our local culture for us. So I’m cool if I get the hairy eye in a dive bar in Oaxaca or Sevilla as long as they are open to some point where I might sing/play and join in. And I might not suggest certain places I like to people who watch movies like Top Gun unironically.
It’s not authenticity, or worse “purity”, it’s live culture rather than spectacle.
ETA
Local culture “for us” is wrong. Have our local culture, vibrant and open, but. It commodified for tourism and unavailable to the people living there.
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The Monkees were truly all things to all people — rock, pop, authentic, inauthentic, real, fake …
At the time we were supposed to have an opinion about them, but now we can just marvel at all the contradictions they managed to balance on 
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Funny you mention that.
But I like this version better.
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Nicely put, I totally agree… we should all keep that mind when we travel to other countries…
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