Why I Love Country Music

Maybe because real twang is slightly annoying in the first place.. ?

Please tell me you didn't say this.

Also, I'm not begrudging country music anything. I'm really trying to examine why I just don't care for it.

Maybe because real twang is slightly annoying in the first place.. ?
Oh, I said it! Don't hang me for it.. It's a prejudice I live with every day. I'll try to change, Mr. Raggett - honest.

No, they try to do it *musically*, and they fail at it.

in fact I will say
that that is the overall
theme there throughout time

and since hip-hop is
largely concerned with that too
(not every song)

I submit my theme:
country music is hip-hop
and vice versa too

I think you do ...! I mean "artist" .. meaning, trying (& sometimes forcing) introspective lyrics, rather than bubbly, happy-go-lucky lyrics. (Not that each don't venture into the other's territory...) You know what I mean, you just don't want to acknowledge it, because it's bullshit. (And I mean bullshit from the lyricists' point of view, not my own.)
Morrisey versus Bobby Sherman .. you can't tell me they don't approach songwriting differently.

Lots of people find Southern suburbanites nauseating, though

Heck, lots of people find suburbanites in general nauseating! But I've always been a suburban person, so I really can't complain much.

ha next year when I
move to North Carolina
I'll be one of 'em!

Which is what is really interesting to me! It's this strange but involving dynamic that you can present yourself as a representative of something 'real' when...well, not fake, just another level of reality, if you like. The reality of a now that is trying to be colored up as a reality of a then.

I remember Tico Ewing saying this somewhere as well. The problem is I don't really hear this danceability in popular country either. And GIllian Welch is a pretty extreme example of alt.country being backward looking. I hear punk and folk and rock in alt. country, meaning I think it can be appreciated on its own terms without being proclaimed as "real country" or some such nonsense.

I didn't mean to say it was - I was saying that alt-county ISN'T. and pop (of any genre) tends to be more often (but as I said, they each venture in to the other's territory.) And pop-country seems to me to be a little less than genuine when it tries to be pessimistic. It's either maudlin or a cartoon (as you say) of what country is "supposed to be". Not that alt-country isn't guilty of the same thing.. Getting back to the original question, I don't know why I don't like modern country. I still haven't figured that out.

Regarding Morrisey vs Bobby Sherman... Morrisey always frowns. Bobby always smiles. I didn't mean that one's approach was superior to the other - I meant that one thinks he's a tortured soul and the other is just writing songs that he thinks people will like.

i always assumed morrissey was writing songs that he thinks people will like.

As soon as I realized that the main reason for me hating it is because I grew up with a lot of people who loved it uncritically and was being a corny-ass "rebel" for all these years, I opened up to country radio a lot. Just listen to it during drive-time or something. You'll like some stuff and not-like other stuff. It won't have anything to do with fake twang or sociology or anything.

...and might a i also site the likes of:

Waylon Jennings
Connie Smith
Ernest Tubb

also see, What is Country?

i think nearly all artists of all stripes do it for both reasons.

xpost

on the fucking money!

I've said this before, but what I like about mainstream, radio-friendly country music is the songcraft (Nashville still has a stable of mighty fine writers) and the subject matter.

This is music for the masses, buy it at wal-mart, dance to it every saturday night (dancing culture is HUGE in country, by the way) and it's addressing some really intense subject matter in a very adult way. It's talking about the emotions and issues that come with being married and having kids and growing older, and I don't get that anywhere else in pop music and rarely anywhere else either.

Here are a couple from the top 20 Country chart last week.

http://www.countrylyrics.circularmoney.com/kennychesneytheregoesmylifelyrics.html.html
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/atkins-rodney/honestly-write-me-a-list-10202.html

----

There's a war going on and shit, so I don't have time to argue with y'all much, so I'm just going to cut and paste a couple things I posted on other threads a few months ago and leave it at that. First:
Best Tim McGraw Album: Place in the Sun.
Best songs on Tim McGraw's new album: Comfort Me, Tickin' Away, Red Ragtop, That's Why God Made Mexico, Illegal, Sing Me Home, Who Are They, Tiny Dancer.
Best Tim McGraw song to mention the Village Voice: Who Are They.
Best Tim McGraw song mentioned by My Name is Kenny: Where The Green Grass Grows
Second-Best Tim McGraw song mentioned by My Name is Kenny: Refried Dreams
Best Tim McGraw song to rewrite "Indian Reservation" by the Raiders:
Indian Outlaw
Best recent song by Tim McGraw's wife: One
Best early song by Tim McGraw's wife: Wild One
Another song by Tim McGraw's wife that's just as good: The Secret of Life
One Album which would be immeasurably better if Tim McGraw was the singer: 69 Love Songs
Best songs on Kenny Chesney's most recent album: Young, Big Star
Best song on Kenny Chesney's Greatest Hits album: How Forever Feels
Best country album of 2002: Toby Keith, *Unleashed
Best country single of 2002: Ty Herndon, "Heather's Wall"
Best Taylor Dayne single of 2002: LeAnn Rimes, "Life Goes On"
Best country album of 2001: Montgomery Gentry, *Carrying On
Best rock album of 2001: Montgomery Gentry, *Carrying On
Best anything album of 2001: Montgomery Gentry, *Carrying On
Best songs on Montgomery Gentry's current album: Break My Heart Again, Free Fall
One band that *might* rock harder than Montgomery Gentry: Turbonegro

-- chuck (cedd...), March 28th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And now this (from my Pazz and Jop ballot of a couple months back):
In Nashville country, there are producers (Mutt Lange, most obviously) as enamored of middle-eastern modes as Timbaland is, and other boundaries are being exploded left and right. Faith Hill and Toby Keith are singing what amounts to soul music, and Montgomery Gentry are rocking as hard as any garage-revival band in Detroit, and LeAnn Rimes is making full-fledged disco albums, and Brooks and Dunn are collaborating on stage with Sheila E. Most rock critics can't hear any of it, of course, but they still think Wilco are brave for tip-toeing outside of alt-country, which may well be the blandest, most conservative, most whitebread-anal-compulsive sub-genre in rock history. How come when alt-country bores stretch a little it's considered godhead, but when Nashville types, who've been doing it unabashedly for years, do it, it's considered the essence of cheese? How come rock critics never fully embraced the Dixie Chicks, who I often love (the album rocks fine until it slows down halfway in), until they retreated back into acoustic *O Brother* bluegrass? I considered voting for "Long Time Gone" as a single, but its stupid pandering line about Haggard and Cash pisses me off. You don't hear rock people whining in their songs about how modern rock music doesn't sound like Elvis and Chuck Berry, do you?

-- chuck (cedd...), March 28th, 2003.

Ringo Starr must be the connection.

oh this would make me
so happy; especially
Justin or Pharrell!

Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton "Islands in the Stream"

or maybe

Terri Gibbs "Somebody's Knockin" (same rhythm as Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" or Lou Gramm's "Midnight Blue," not to mention Robert Johnson style devil words. And the singer is a blind woman, no less.)

Hm, I always knew I wasn't punk!

And Shapes of Venus was the best postpunk/alternative album of the year. (There were a number of good ones. If you just take the albums I heard from Detroit, for instance, possible-P&J-winner Elephant was the fourth-best. And there must have been scores of such albums from Detroit that I didn't hear.)

Yeah, Ned, you're about the last person I'd call a punk. (And don't be offended by that.)

better than Groovski? say it ain't so. i quite enjoyed that clone defects album though.

I'm not! :-)

But anyway, there's enough interesting tension in country for it to fling itself to unexpected territory. And the rap barrier may break.

Well, first off, even thinking of just commercial country, it does claim a lot of sounds that it wouldn't have in years past (loud guitar rock is one of its options; death metal singing isn't). And it's not just incorporating pop, it's helping to shape it, albeit in the "adult contemporary" category.

And it's too big to call "marginalized." But it tends to be left out of the general cultural discussion. That is, the people who don't listen to it barely know it's there (except in the way that they know that, say, Mexican music is there), and few feel the need to educate themselves in it. Not only does it tend to be absent in Pazz and Jop, its absence isn't even an issue. (And Wilco and Lucinda Williams and Magnetic Fields are never discussed there in relation to country.) Whereas the people who listen to country sure know that rock and hip-hop are there.

But I wouldn't say it's more left out now than in 1948 (for instance). But it defines itself differently from how it did in 1948. Christianity and social conservativism weren't absent from the music in 1948, but they weren't defining characteristics in the way that they are now (not that the genre is locked into those characteristics, or that all the performers promulgate them, but they're in your face a lot, aggressive rather than matter of fact). And this will have some effect on what signifiers it's willing to take in. It won't think of itself as containing vanguard elements, or musical innovation, even when it does.

The last time I was in Knoxville I got my hair cut in Vestal, and the TV was on and it was some kind of "my boyfriend got a sex change" show ... inbetwee segments, the ads came on, and of cours they're basically the same ads I get in New York. I was struck by how loud, how abrasive, and how alien to the pace and feel of that barber shop the TV was (though I may have felt the same way at a sleepy barbership in Midwood, Brooklyn, too) and it came home to me - again - how television lays this vast same-ing blanket over the country, where what goes in New York and L.A. is what goes for everybody, and a lot of that shit is scary and not that pleasant and is liable to give you the feeling that things are frankly a little out of control, that the freaks are multiplying. I think there is plenty of country that very consciously sets out to counteract that feeling of anxiety and insecurity, and I don't see anything wrong with that per se.

Rolling Country 2006 Thread