This is so true. I liked 90s country but after it became hyper-nationalist post-9/11 I couldn’t stand it anymore. It wasn’t like there weren’t patriotic sounding songs before then but some of it was pseudo-countryfried rock and heavily subversive. There was this “fuck The Man” vibe in many songs. Still lots of breakup songs, longing songs, and the twangy equivalent of bubblegum pop - it wasn’t all anti-establishment.
Then it became all Toby Keith drunk asshole bootlicking bullshit and I noped tf right out.
Got a friend that works at AmBev. Was telling me their profits went up because most the people outraged over the whole Bud Light thing just switched to other, more expensive AmBev brands. Yknow, because they're fucking idiots too angry to even check who owns the brand they drink.
I mean, I suppose maybe if you went all the way back to Eisenhower, who had his own whole of issues to boot anyway, you could say they were still respectable and had values, but like Nixon started the whole “Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.” shit.
…and you’d still have to be ignoring how absolutely bigoted most average people in the US were most of it’s history. Like what about the Disco Demolition Night riot in 1979, a fevered rejection of an art form that was primarily made by minorities by young white men? It wasn’t just the leaders who didn’t have good values.
Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh described Disco Demolition Night as “your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead”. Marsh was one who, at the time, deemed the event an expression of bigotry, writing in a year-end 1979 feature that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.”
It’s really incredible just how quickly the needle has moved on racial and sexual acceptance. If you go back and look at edgy comedy that has a racial component from the early 90s you can see just how far things have come.
The classic example, Blazing Saddles of course has the plot of the new sheriff in the old wild west town being black, and while a lot of the jokes and exact verbaige wouldn’t fly today, you can tell that it didnt come from a place of prejudice but simply racial acceptance has improved so much these days. But the part that absolutely aged the worst was at the end there’s a fourth wall breaking gag where all of the cowboys accidentally leave the Western film set at the studio and find themselves on the set of a musical, and there’s a series of very off-color gags about queer folk in theatre including (straight) male actors overplaying “gay” and feminine traits as part of the joke. This scene quite clearly did not come from a place of tolerance and hits very differently now because of it. Gay men are 100% the butt of the joke in that scene, and not the audience.
You can also tell how recent sexual acceptance is with how certain milestones are so recent. Legend of Korra which aired in 2014 ends with the main character entering into a relationship with another woman, something that was absolutely groundbreaking in childrens television, and that was less than 10 years ago!
A lot of LGBTQ+ people despair unnecessarily at the state of discourse around LGBTQ+ rights. Looking at the arc of history, we’ve gained rights at an astounding rate. The Stonewall Riots are usually counted as start of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, so just a touch over fifty years. Many other minority groups have spent centuries under the thumb of oppressors with only painstaking movement. Instead, every few years delivers something new. Yes, there are setbacks, but overall things are showing strong improvement.
I was listening to the whole thing about Rs protesting against increasing the required ethics to be a supreme court justice and it was just so bizarre.
They were saying that requiring justices to abide by the same code of ethics as congress would destroy the supreme court as we know it. Like… Yes, I know. That’s entirely the point.
Oh I forgot, so then this other asshole says the bill is “deader than fried chicken” because we can always just fillibuster it.
We need to get rid of the current fillibuster. Make them stand up there and talk forever. If you want to block something then you have to actually mean it. Oh sorry you have to pee? Get fucked.
It’s more common than you think. Based on my dad’s taste in music you’d think he was a socialist revolutionary. In reality he’s a “not political” hardcore Trump voter. There’s not an ounce of critical thinking to be found inside that brain.
I feel like pre-9/11 country had heavy influence from folk music. However, post-9/11 country got a lot more influence from current events and current world political climate. A redneck hiphop scene essentially (as hiphop has a long standing history of being vocal on social issues)
Country has always been about the old and the new, (mostly the old, I do acknowledge) it’s more the changing political climate, and the uprising of “snap country”. Nor to mention, country is TECHNICALLY easy to make, so a lot of people and corps with money just go for it these days.
Small venue concerts and privately owned radio stations aren’t really a thing anymore. Those were the tools of a machine that kills fascists, if you know what I mean.
Add comment