Hey, if you’re in the USSA, that shit’s been blasting in your ears for years, decades even. The only “star” ever created by a vocal talent show was Carrie Underwood,
The country music community may be problematic, but country music itself is wonderful. And many country musicians are fantastic, unexpected people. If you want country like it used to be, dive into Melissa Carper’s catalogue. She’s the master of the brand new old time song.
Coors was among the first companies to extend benefits to same-sex partners and was named the Corporation of the Year by the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, despite being a right wing company in general.
Didn’t know that, I was just commenting on what the unhomed Bud Light drinkers drink now. I don’t drink any of that shit because it’s not good beer. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I go Yuengling. Best of ALL. It’s not available in my home state, but they said a year or two ago that they were partnering with IIRC Miller-Coors, got a deal to brew their beer using M-C facilities. And they’d service almost every state. Still waiting for that day. 😔
An absoluteky outstanding song by Cash btw. If you haven’t checked it out, I suggest you do so. Even if you have zero interest in Country do yourself a favour.
I know this is obvious, but Cash’s beliefs are endlessly fascinating. The same man who recorded “Ragged Old Flag” also wrote “Man in Black” and covered “Out Among the Stars.” The latter is a song about a kid who commits suicide by cop because he doesn’t feel like his life matters.
I dislike a lot of country music, but Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson are practically a genre in and of themselves, seperated from even the outlaw country genre they started.
We listened to the song in English class when I was about 14 years old and we discussed it quite a bit afterwards. I guess it was kind of a first transitioning into adulthood for me, seeing how much is going wrong and hurting people. Since then about 95 % of my wardrobe is black. It’s a statement and a reminder for myself and I want need to carry it everywhere I go.
The Nordic nations are societies. They care for one another. They don’t resent their taxes being used to aid and elevate the other members of their society. They root for one another in more than empty rhetoric.
We the US are just a bunch of rugged individuals competing against one another at eachother’s throats due to decades of propaganda by our owner class to keep us divided, isolated, and distracted from what they’ve inflicted upon our former society.
There’s a reason they hide behind gates and door guards, they know what they’ve done to this country outside their steel towers and golf clubs.
Nordic societies are also largely homogenous. Sweden has seen massive increases in violent crime and poverty ever since they started allowing anyone in. America has a very similar policy with immigrants and it’s really difficult to create such an insular culture with such a large landmass and variety of people. Americans to view themselves as -Americans and you don’t get the same with the Norwegian’s or Icelanders. I’m all for the Nordic model in Nordic countries (less Sweden until they clean up their policies that are turning their country into the third world) but America needs a different form of social welfare, starting with UBI, universal education, and socialized healthcare.
I wanted to do a "to be fair here, Cash had songs with stupid lyrics, too", but all I can think of is "Ring of fire" and that one is just a harmless metaphor about love.
I’d argue that Ring of Fire is a metaphor about forbidden love that you know is damning you but the feelings are too powerful to resist.
Rather than a harmless metaphor, I find it an incredibly powerful metaphor about the pain and suffering caused by helplessly loving the “wrong” person.
I don't think modern country even uses metaphors anymore. Before anyone comes at me, I'm well awair that there's some fantactic country writers out there.
That's because modern country is squarely focused on (far) right leaning people and they are utterly deaf, dumb and blind to any sort of metaphor, sarcasm and subtlety.
It's why these pricks go nuts for songs like Killing in the Name, not realizing it's a song that explicitly hates on them saying stuff like "some of those who work forces, are the same that BURN CROSSES".
They only see and hear that title and have no fucking clue what it and the rest of the song is actually about.
I loved ‘a boy named Sue’ but it was ‘the Man comes around’ that sold me. Heard it first during the OP of “Day of the Dead” remake, and there is no other song that comes close to fitting with this opening
He’s the guitarist for Big Thief but his solo albums are some of the best country I’ve heard in a long time. And free from the toxicity of modern country (as far as I can tell)
Holy shit Buck Meek and Big Thief are so good. Definitely more on the indie folk side of country but I’d be lying if I said Dragon New Warm Mountain wasn’t my favorite album of last year
Thanks for the suggestion! I would consider this more folk punk than country, but it’s got a Johnny Cash vibe to it for sure. I like it.
I would like to add The Devil Makes Three to the list of redeemable country music. I guess they are more bluegrass/folk punk, but they shred and the lyrics are good.
It shocked me the first time I met a real anti-Semite, in real life, in Tennessee. I’ve worked in a lot of places all over the world and I’ve seen plenty of racism. No one else topped that guy in Tennessee. Other places racism was mostly contained to ‘they stay over there and we stay over here.’ Tons of problems but living together but apart was possible. That doesn’t speak to every experience obviously. That old guy in Tennessee wanted another Holocaust, plain and simple. Anywhere else he’d get the shit kicked out of him, there it was tolerated.
Had someone try to sell me on the merits of the Ku Klux Klan while working at a factory in Tennessee, I was a staunch Libertarian at the time so i guess he thought i might bite, he told me how they helped the community out and kept people safe… the guy was dead fucking serious, and when I asked him about them being racist he just changed the subject… Still feels like a fever dream…
To show how pervasive the racist Southerner stereotype is: I was in Hawaii and met a guy from New Zealand. He noticed my accent and asked where I’m from and this happened:
ME: I’m from North Carolina
HIM: Oh really? Cool! Hey, whaddya call a n****r with a new bicycle?
I guess that’s his version of Americans saying “g’day mate!”
I suspect the NZ bloke was racist and immediately linked all Southern Americans with racism, so felt comfortable opening up.
Ngl as a non-american if I met a dude in a bar and he’s was from ‘the south’ especially Texas or Florida I would be sitting there expecting some kind of anti-‘woke’, anti-minority, anti-women, anti-brown comment eventually. At least until I had sussed him out for a bit
Can confirm. I’m a 6’4 big bearded mountain looking fucker in the Bible belt, and people REGULARLY think “he agrees with me about this painfully mundane thing so surely he agrees with me that trans people need to shut up and dress appropriately (or whatever)” They’ll often be saying the quiet part to me out loud within 5 minutes of shooting the bull with a total stranger.
I drove through Alabama once. That was enough. What a shit stain state? Experience the racism there, even if sort of second hand, was surreal. Sucks I know some people that were forced to move there.
Plenty of good modern country music out there, you just have to look for it. Tyler Childers and Colter Wall are some famous ones that spring to mind, but there’s many others.
I really love “Sarah Shook and The Disarmers” as well. They actually go by River Shook now I think, but the band still uses their dead name.
A bit more on the folk side than country, but “Nick Shoulders and The Okay Crawdads” is one of my absolute favorite bands these days. They just put out a new album too and I can’t recommend it enough.
I mean that’s the case for any genre. Time filters out the bad stuff from the past, the good survives to reach new generations. Now we get to do the filtering for future generations.
Shitty patriot country music has always been a thing and there are still tons of Outlaw country artists right now. This is literally just like those “rap in the 90s vs rap today” memes that ignore the fact that trap has been a thing since the 90s and old school hip hop is having a Renaissance right now
I too am curious about this. I still have some old school hip hop that I listen to. Living Legends and their songs “Never Falling Down” and “Moving at the Speed of Life”.
Pretty much all of Griselda and the dozen or so artists under their umbrella. Billy Woods & the rest of the Backwoodz Studios group are incredibly boom-bap inspired, not to mention all the “lofi” artists rn who are pretty much just old school rap. Turn off the radio and stop listening to algorithm-created Playlists and you’ll realize that there are still active artists in pretty much any subgenre of music you can think of
This is also ignoring The Alchemist and all of the artists he works with, who’s basically doing what El-P did in the early 2000s
No worries, I’d personally recommend Billy Woods’s album from last year Aethiopes if you like more serious and lyrical stuff. It’s one of my favorite rap records of all time since listening to it
The good stuff is still out there. You just have to know where to find it. Commercial radio and things like that are driven by what the younger generation want to hear, which is fine for them but it’s just not my thing. Im into rap that has substance and lyrical content
Pretty much all of Griselda and the dozen or so artists under their umbrella. Billy Woods & the rest of the Backwoodz Studios group are incredibly boom-bap inspired, not to mention all the “lofi” artists rn who are pretty much just old school rap. Turn off the radio and stop listening to algorithm-created Playlists and you’ll realize that there are still active artists in pretty much any subgenre of music you can think of
Also there aren’t only American artists, listen to artists from different countries and you’ll find a lot of great stuff, some of them even rap in English. I’m biased towards the French scene myself but there’s loads.
That’s true. French hip hop in general is really good, Gasoline’s album A Journey into Abstract Hip-Hop is one of my favorite instrumental albums of all time
Check out NAS’s Kings Disease 3(my fav). The man is 50+ still putting it down. He even got Lauryn Hill on a track, smh. Dropped another album yesterday and has another one coming soon next year. Crazy
Is almost the same thing with Brazilian sertanejo. Was once about the bucolic reality in the rural side of the country, now is about bragging about being rich, going to pointless parties and drinking a lot of alcoholic drinks, f-cking everyone…
I can’t put into words how much I despise modern stadium country. It’s like the opposite of art. I grew up in the south around people who could only stomach country music like that. Everything else to them was too weird, or not white enough.
The closest analogy to country music are the movies fascists made, like the ones Hans Steinhoff and Goebbels directed. Completely banal plots and lack of artistic value. The only reason they were made as to communicate fascist rhetoric and fulfill a quota of cultural markers.
That’s all modern country music is. It’s the music of boring middle class white people who feel uneasy if their specific cultural touchstones aren’t constantly reinforced. There have to be trucks, land ownership, high school football, generic American jingoism, glorification of alcoholism.
The most common thread in this shit music is that anything outside of a middle class conservative white lifestyle is to be mistrusted. The girl from a small town who goes off to college in a big city, but realizes her home was truly out in the sticks. The song about how country values make a person more virtuous or fun. “Don’t go over that hill, don’t go looking for anything further.” It could possibly be a sweet sentiment if it weren’t for the target audience: comfortable white shitheads who drive a $80,000 Ford truck in the suburbs.
At least with propaganda it’s the ruling class messaging the citizenry. In this case, at least for the most part seems self-inflicted and without purpose. People just gravitate to whatever fits their identity.
That’s all modern country music is. It’s the music of boring middle class white people who feel uneasy if their specific cultural touchstones aren’t constantly reinforced. There have to be trucks, land ownership, high school football, generic American jingoism, glorification of alcoholism.
At least with propaganda it’s the ruling class messaging the citizenry. In this case, at least for the most part seems self-inflicted and without purpose. People just gravitate to whatever fits their identity.
Don’t forget the record labels. Mega corporations are the ruling class of our society.
Oh no, absolutely not is country music self inflicted. Modern country music is part of the same propaganda network as everything else in capitalism. The whole Nashville and Georgia country scenes have been connected at the hip with conservative money since at least the 1970s where Nixon had a country campaign song. Then there was Reagan showing up at the Grand Ole Opry. It’s a useful vehicle to spread and satiate the thirst for white supremacy.
There’s also Clear Channel Radio (currently iHeartRadio) which is run by ideological conservatives.
Also there’s some kind of money floating around to suddenly promote the odd country song or two, like that Rich Men in Richmond song, or that stupid Jason Aldean guy. Every now and then you’ll see a random headline like “country star fights back against woke-ness in new song.” And that’s the propaganda.
Parasites hopping onto a culture to exploit it for their own gains is not really the same as state propaganda. I don’t think there’s some shadowy group inventing this music to control the masses. Though politicians would no doubt pander to (or even weaponize) a group if they can. And people will absolutely try and profit off it.
It’s just a bit of a leap to ascribe low brow music to some grand conspiracy. Or at least if that is, then every culture is a conspiracy.
I guess I don’t see much of a distinction between those exploitative parasites and the state actors. I’m on the side of Althusser here, where the state is both a structural arrangement and a set of ideological norms. In that sense, you could say all culture is a conspiracy, as in a conspiracy to replicate the content and character of one’s class interests.
I don’t mean to say there’s a shadowy group creating it, rather, there’s a shadowy group that gives a platform and representation to things that promote their own interests. Or something they can flip around and sell back to you. Capitalism is crafty like that, like Che Guevara t-shirts.
I believe that mainstream country turned to shit in the 80s, not sure why. My theory is that it’s down to the money men in Nashville turning out an increasingly phony product for commercial reasons, but I don’t actually know enough about that aspect of the business to have an informed opinion.
Fortunately there’s always been legit musicians turning out excellent alt-country or Americana, or whatever we want to call it. Also a lot of the older country musicians never completely sold out either.
That sounds about right. I also think that at some point around that time the big Nashville labels decided that it made more financial sense to get behind a specific type of cultural and political messaging than it did to simply let the music be whatever it wanted to be.
Long gone were the days of Loretta “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and Johnny Paycheck “I Owe my Soul to the Company Store,” and while we still had Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and their protogé young Steve Earle, for the most part mainstream country and western was turning into formulaic corporate crap.
The closest analogy to country music are the movies fascists made, like the ones Hans Steinhoff and Goebbels directed. Completely banal plots and lack of artistic value. The only reason they were made as to communicate fascist rhetoric and fulfill a quota of cultural markers.
That sounds exactly like the kind of slop in genres from video games to shows to movies that chuds attempt to sell to other chuds under the pretense of being “based” or “nonpolitical” mockeries of stuff they consumed before.
Heard a lot of this growing up like Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, but also Canadians like Lightfoot and Stan Rogers. Lately I’ve enjoyed some of the IWWs compilations of workers’ songs, Utah Philips etc. Phil Ochs is up there too.
My mother’s from an assimilated Mennonite background and it was one of the non-Christian genres that was permissible to her parents, because of the pacifist and civil rights sentiments in a lot of that music at the time. Also it lacked the sex and drugs themes which rock had. “I Aint Marching Anymore” and “Where have all the flowers gone?” I remember hearing quite often.
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