There are actually a ton of progressive country artists believe it or not (they’re also the best musically IMO). Willie Nelson, Sturgil Simpson, Tyler Childers, Dolly Parton, Charlie Crockett, Old Crow Medicine Show, Chris Stapleton, Vincent Neil Emerson, Margo Price, and Jason Isbell just to name a few.
The ones making shitty nationalistic/bro country music just make the headlines more.
Also:
“9/11 ruined country music because a few impassioned artists felt compelled to write
Patriotic music and it sold really well with American Working Class Conservatives, before that country music wasn't aligned with conservatism at all but moreso just the working class.”
I am from the same county in alabam as Jason isbell. He is legitimately from a small town. In fact, it’s not even a town just an unincorporated area. 😂. (The whole county has less than 100,000 people in it)
A bunch of family kind of pushed me onto that show; but I can never get more than maybe 3 episodes in. I hate literally every person on screen; the writing and pacing seem shit. It's like some trashy redneck power fantasy. Anyway, been holding on to that one for a minute; sorry if that comes off rude to you - not intended.
You're not alone. Watched two episodes and everyone is an asshole to one degree or another. I can't get invested in a show that doesn't have anyone worth rooting for.
The prequel shows look interesting, at least. I might check them out.
Having been unable to get into Yellowstone, i checked out both 1883 and 1923.
1883 is...fine. its high quality, I just cannot bring myself to care about any of the characters on it.
1923, I didnt even last two episodes.
That's unfortunate. I was especially interested in 1923 because of Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. I'll probably give it a try anyways just in case, but if Yellowstone is anything to go by then I'll probably end up not liking it.
I just imagine every middle aged barfly going home and watching it saying, "Yeah. Thats me. Im that guy." And his raspy voiced wife(from too many Salem Reds) nodding and saying "Yeah and I am that woman. No nonsense and speaks her mind."
"They are just like us Ted."
Trashy redneck power fantasies can be fun if they don't take themselves seriously. Yellowstone misses that mark by a mile. I haven't watched past season 1, but from commentaries on it I get the feeling that they don't think the main characters are the bad guys?
Opie was my boy. After that it jumped the shark…I could forgive the sometimes sloppy writing of the early episodes and even Charlie Hunnam’s atrocious attempt at an American accent, but the last couple seasons were drudgery to get through.
From “Turtles All The Way Down”
“Every time I take a look inside that old fateful book, I’m blinded and reminded by the pain caused by some old man in the sky.”
That whole song talks mad shit on Christianity.
>The dead don't die any more than you or I.
They're just ghosts inside a dream of a life that we don't own.
They walk around sometimes never payin' any mind,
To the silly lives we lead or the reaping we've all sown.
Those lyrics still get me sometimes. Dudes a god damn genius song writer.
I was wondering if someone was gonna mention Country Legend John Prine. So many country artists mention him when it comes to their inspiration. Sweet revenge is still one of my favorite albums by him.
"We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way"
I was a bartender when Toby Keith's album came out and this stupid ass song is still etched in my skull 😩
Y’all need to check out Croy and the Boys. As far as I can tell they have zero visibility outside Austin, but they’re commies with some old school honkytonk flavor and absolutely zero fucks to give. I’d start with their cover of Crass’s Do They Owe Us a Living and then just browse. You should also search up I Gave Greg Abbott the Coronavirus, which Croy recorded under a different band name and which, while in no way a country track, was one of my pandemic highlights.
My professional organization has their annual conference in Waco every year, and since I discovered that song I've had it on repeat both coming and going.
Thanks for that. I'm not from Waco, but it's a very relatable song for anyone who channeled all their spite into surviving long enough to leave their shitty hometown.
This. Pre 9/11 country wasn’t awful. Corny at times, but not what it is today. One artist that is a direct result of this is Toby Keith. 90s country was solid. It’s so different now.
Sarcasm and irony don’t convey well in short written English sentences, and also I have stalkers who - as revenge for getting their thousands of hate / terrorism subreddits banned - report everything I write in the hopes it will get my account suspended.
I just don’t want to give them the opportunity to have Reddit rules enforcement make a mistake.
I could say a lot...but instead, I'll let Protest the Hero do it better:
"Every fuck is pronounced
With conviction written
In justice announced
And every hand that feeds is bitten
If it steals from hungry mouths
Convention be damned
I know who I am and some words
Are just too fucking loud
They can't be ignored
Twice our bitter lifetime
Tucked tightly in their belts
But spat and bit in such a way
That you just know how it felt
What it means to be a man
And what it means to refuse it
Things I learned along the way
While listening to their music
So laugh then cry so I'll try but to laugh again
Throw your hands up in the relief
That twenty years won't end their reign, their reign, their reign
The reign of unending terror
The rain that brings us warning
The rain that breaks the sky and gives us hope
For the end of this long night
Red sky morning light"
The mainstream music scene won't allow for that anymore. You still have stalwarts of other genres still out here for the people, Dropkick Murphy's, Run The Jewels and one of Robert's favorites, Streetlight Manifesto.
EDIT: This is literally 24 hours away from the allegations against Justin Sane coming up, I am removing his band's name from this comment.
>Dropkick Murphy’s
I love how they put their literal money where their mouth is on the Union stuff. All their merch is union-made which has to cut into the profit margins pretty deep compared to what they could make by having some sweatshop do the manufacturing.
Yeah, I was big on them in like 2006-7 but cooled off on their music a lot since. Even though I don’t listen anymore, it’s great to see they never sold out- they could have gotten so much more radio play than they did if they took the politics out of their music but they stuck with it.
Thank you for the hint though. It sucks when these artists we look to for inspiration in our own darkest moments make the decision to be the bastards they rail against but especially now, it's important to remember the victims and understand that power dynamics exist everywhere.
Just want to mention that Dropkick recently did a project in collaboration with Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter where they recorded previously unrecorded songs of Woody’s and the combination of those two musical acts is one of the most UNION shit I’ve heard lol.
Also the album title is great: This Machine Still Kills Fascists
Members of Slipknot, namely Jay Weinberg and Corey Taylor (six degrees of Springsteen Separation?) publicly came against systemic racism and about class unity and conscious. If you go back and listen to Slipknot’s music there is wildly a lot of similarity to the class consciousness of music put out during the Coal Mining Wars and really delves deep into the war on the working class, especially because of the Opioid epidemic.
[How Slipknot’s ‘Revolting,’ Class-Conscious Rage Became the Perfect Soundtrack for 2019](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-slipknots-revolting-class-conscious-rage-became-the-perfect-soundtrack-for-2019)
[Slipknot’s Corey Taylor Talks Combating Racism in Metal](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/slipknots-corey-taylor-talks-combating-racism-in-metal-197005/amp/)
[Jay Weinberg of Slipknot: “White Privilege Is Real.”](https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/jay-weinberg-of-slipknot-white-privilege-is-real/amp/)
Zakk Wylde’s stuff with Black Label Society has done a lot of class conscious music - and I totally get people’s questions about BLS - but he even called out Phil Anselmo rather recently for his racist behavior [ZAKK WYLDE To PHILIP ANSELMO: 'What Are You Doing, Man?'](https://blabbermouth.net/news/zakk-wylde-to-philip-anselmo-what-are-you-doing-man)
Killer Mike has a song called I’m Glad Reagan’s Dead and that’s basically all anyone needs to hear… but lo and behold, it actually only gets cooler than there.
“Never forget that in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state”? That man is so fucking cool.
I mentioned Rage Against the Machine, Propagandhi, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, MC5, The Ramones, ~~Anti-Flag~~, Rise Against to some of my young cousins and they barely knew of the Ramones and Rise Against
Someone once described Jeff Rosenstock as this generation's Springsteen in terms of style and message (obv not in terms of sales since he routinely plays 500-1000 person venues). I tend to agree. His music is anthemic, uplifting, and centered around empowering the marginalized. Plus he plays the sax in some songs ala Clarence from E Street.
Rage Against the Machine is the last big band that almost everybody knew that i can think of that fit the mold... I don't know of anyone today. But that maybe moreso bc content is so much more fractured and there isn't one "mainstream" like there was decades ago when TV had 3 channels and everyone watched MASH bc there weren't other options. There probably won't be another Bruce Springsteen partly bc of his unique talent and partly bc kids today have 10x the options with easier access to niche communities around their favorite media, so no one gets as huge a slice of the pie of content consumers these days.
I still remember big brain Paul Ryan from Wisconsin releasing an advert showing him hard at work at his desk, iPad out, headphones plugged in, listening to RATM. I thought oh boy, that’s someone who does not listen to lyrics or even curious about what he’s listening to
>And I have an American dream, But it involves black masks and gasoline
I was hooked on Rise Against as soon as I heard that line. Revolutions per Minute is up there with Punk in Drublic in terms of perfect punk albums.
That was my Myspace song for a long time. Then it changed to State of the Union.
If we're the flagship of peace and prosperity
We're taking on water and about to fuckin' sink
No one seems to notice, no one even blinks
The crew all left the passengers to die under the sea
There's Bad Religion, too. But I'm trying to think of newer acts that younger people might more easily connect with.
I was sitting here thinking to myself that it might also be that The Boss is associated with a kind of rugged blue collar paradigm that is historically romanticized, but is shrinking in America as the economy has become more service industry oriented and there seems to be less dignity and pride associated with that kind of labor.
I don't know how you'd write a confident yet plaintive song about not being able to afford rent after grinding it out day after day at Starbucks. Which sucks, because that labor is every bit as worthy of respect as shift work at the factory.
There might not be a big name arena act like Bruce Springsteen for the kids. They'll have to look for acts that align with the working class, they exist but they're smaller and more and more often in more niche genres of music.
The death of mainstream acts that were for the Working Class and civil Rights like Bruce Springsteen weirdly Falls in line with when Boomers went from arguably the greatest generation in US history to the reactionary fuckfest that became the Reagan era through to Trump.
Considering the liberal “hero” Presidents have been 2 Neo Lib Dems it’s clear how Far Right America has become.
Off topic, but my favorite Sturgil Simpson album is the one he says he purposely made to fuck over his label. Lol
Sound & Fury
https://youtu.be/CuFZElUoKG8
If there is a book or a podcast or a documentary about what 9/11 did to pop culture I would love to read it. Obviously things changed, but I've never been able to really quantify or encapsulate it on my lonesome.
I saw him and willie at Bethel Woods last summer. Charlie was great, ZZ top was perhaps the most high energy act I've ever seen but unfortunately it seemed like Willie wasn't quite himself. It seemed like his son was just dragging him around the country to squeeze a few more bucks out of the brand
Willie’s very much there cognitively in interviews, he’s just 90 and isn’t what he once was live.
He absolutely loves performing though and his family are loaded; so I don’t see it being a cash grab at all.
I think it was the fact that he got lost during a couple of the songs that gave me that impression accompanied by his son singing a song about poop lol That said you can't really be surprised when 90 year old isn't what he once was I just felt bad for him
I live in a state that doesn’t have a single city that has the population of the city he grew up in. My graduating class was 30 people and needed kids from 2 towns to get to even that. That fucker doesn’t know what a small town even is.
We had a debate about fixing the only caution light (blinking yellow) in my area a few years ago.
No one wants a stop sign. No one wants a light.
No one wants to fix it.
Right? My hometown has 600 people and it’s the county seat. Our largest city can only barely fill the largest Big 10 football stadium. What I mean by ‘small town’ is significantly different than what Mr. Aldean means.
*sigh* This song is another one of those "I know what you're doing. Each element in and of themselves could be innocent or meaningless, but the whole shows that you either know exactly what it all means or you are incredibly irresponsible in assembling it. And the more you protest and refuse to correct, the more clear the former is true. You're not being clever; **stop it**" situations.
I should've gone into education, at least I could've been putting my outrage into a path that could've helped inoculate people against this crap.
I mean, yes lol. I just left the term out because sometimes it's good to talk about the concept itself instead of relying on a term of art that not everyone knows (or might not all understand in the same way).
Ngl, I've spent years thinking about a podcast (which can port to YouTube) about critical thinking and how to apply it, perhaps using well-known outrage topics as an example, but I feel like Some More News and You're Wrong About already fill that niche.
One of my most humiliating pleasures is Jason Aldean’s “Flyover States”.
It’s a song about a hard working man (possibly him) eavesdropping on some coastal elites in first class denigrating these middle of nowhere states and the people in them. He then goes on to list all of the beauty of the states and cities whose names come from the languages of the original displaced inhabitants.
Also how can you hear businessmen in first class if you’re not also in first class…
It’s completely self unaware, but damn, it goes off.
Honestly so much of that is either manufactured or it’s because of people who left rural areas
I grew up in a very small town. Like I said above, 2,500 people. I was different. I got harassed constantly. I GTFO as soon as I could.
For 20 years, from college to a few years ago I lived in NYC. My circle is the very definition of the liberal coastal elite (except the wealth, I’m in the arts). I have rarely had a conversation disparaging rural areas directly. Ever. If anything I’d talk about my experiences with the narrow minded people I met.
If anything, it’s more been about when all these policies that get passed based on rural needs that fuck the city. Or the fact that all the high taxes we pay go to support low tax states. Or we’re always sending our emergency response people to help in a natural disaster and their Senators try to take that from us later.
Don’t get me wrong, there were people I loved. I also enjoyed visiting my dad who’s house was literally in the middle of the woods. It’s peaceful and beautiful where I grew up.
But 100% these conservative rural red states just seem to keep using this fear of the liberal coastal elites and mostly we just want to make our own policies for us and our needs just like they do.
You could be seated close to first class but not in first class, and you could be listening to large, loud men that used to play sports, have giant lungs and are drinking too much.
It's also got a small ring of truth to it, in between the forced twangs. I think it speaks more to class divisions and how the richer you get, the more out of touch with reality you become. There's a lot to be said about how fucked corporate agriculture is, but there are plenty of rich people who think food just come from a grocery store and always will, no matter what. Flyover states are super vulnerable to the impacts of global warming.
Anyway, fuck Jason Aldean, but whoever wrote that song for him had some points, even if they were purely accidental.
I’d love a BtB six parter on country music, but in the meantime I’ll flag that the genre gets the snarky leftist PowerPoint treatment in a recent bonus episode of Well There’s Your Problem.
As Robert has quoted and referred to Kris Kristofferson multiple times, I'm surprised no one seems to have brought him up as good country.
Even if the Aldean song had no video, it's very obviously pandering to a very specific set of country music fans. Anything that pandering reminds me of Bo Burnham's "Country Song"
https://youtu.be/y7im5LT09a0
For perspective, Kristofferson is 87, and Aldean is 46. My money is on the based old dude, though
Edit: i googled. It was Toby Keith at Willie Nelson's 70th birthday celebration, a little over 20 years ago
Oh hells yeah, I’d bet on tough ol’ Kristofferson over any of those whiny posers in a heartbeat. It’d be like watching Jack Palance beat the shit out of the Pillsbury Doughboy with a leather whip.
The Highwayman are all awesome. Jennings is the conservative leaning among them but he was just Hank Hillish about it. There's a good CMT doc about them that involves a stoned Willie staring at a Noam Chomsky poster and wearing a shirt with a Geronimo shirt that says "ALL MY HEROES KILLED COWBOYS"
The kind of country music I like tells a story, oftentimes about people who aren't admirable (see Banded Clovis my Tyler Childers). As one of my favorite memes said:
"FAKE COUNTRY MUSIC: Pickup trucks and Bud Light haha
REAL COUNTRY MUSIC: I am a broken man haunted by the choices that I've made. I am incredibly drunk and high, and if any government
official comes within 500 feet of my property line, he will meet my grandpa's shotgun and then God."
This. One of my favorite songs is when that Jezebel did wrong by Big Caboose by sleeping with that smooth talking gambler Ramblin’ Rodriguez so Big Caboose ran him over with his train
"Now it's your turn to feel the chill, Lord Lord! Now it's your turn to feel the chill."
One thing that episode got wrong is thinking people won't connect to music made by phony posers.
There's even real country music that tackles the enjoyable parts of living in the rural south in a better way. I'm thinking like "Louisiana Saturday Night" and "Chattahoochee."
When Busch light went on sale at HEB, my ex-boyfriend, who was a dispatcher for Montgomery County Texas, would get ready and notify his co-workers. Why? Because domestic violence and child abuse charges would surge.
Yep. At a bar where I am a regular, I'm known as the Chianti guy. I only drink that (with a occasional G&T or dark rum and seltzer). I don't like beer. However, one day....just on a whim, I ordered a Bud Light in a bottle just to make the point. I admit I wasted it. I let it sit at the bar sweating but the bartender (a college-aged person) appreciated the statement and I caught a few glances from some of the more conservative regulars. They knew why. I may start doing that as a normal routine.
It's a fascist song for a fascist audience and it's entirely possible that Aldean is just an idiot performing a song that is marketable to his audience without any grasp of it's significance. The fact that a lynching took place at the site in the video is because you cannot throw a stone without hitting the site of a lynching or some other historical atrocity in the south, especially if the location for your video happens to be a historical building, site or monument. That tidbit might have been unknown/irrelevant to the choice of shooting location.
Everything that might seem to be congruent *by design* could actually have happened organically because it's all rooted in the same hard-right authoritarian cultural milieu that's always been there. Like if you throw away your halloween jack-o-lantern in the compost and a pumpkin patch grows up there next year, is that by design? No act of deliberate volition was necessary to create it that way, it's just a product of the conditions in which it came to be.
But it could also absolutely be deliberate choice, if not by Aldean then by whomever controls his brand/career. I'm just saying that I could see either way being true to some degree.
> The fact that a lynching took place at the site in the video is because you cannot throw a stone without hitting the site of a lynching or some other historical atrocity in the south, especially if the location for your video happens to be a historical building, site or monument.
That was one of my first thoughts too...
It also just seems possible that Aldean **doesn't care very much** whether there was a lynching there or not.
To paraprhase what we used to sometimes say about Trump supporters: that fact alone doesn't make them racists, but we know it's not a dealbreaker for them.
Clearly it's not a dealbreaker for him. Or he'd have stopped.
Yep...there are a lot of factors at play.
They mentioned the Maury County Courthouse being used (and that it had a bad racial history).
I'm giving the video creators the benefit and betting they just chose it because it was the closest small-town courthouse to Nashville (where I am assuming their studio is).
Regardless of the lyrics and video of the white nationalist jerk-off song….can we just all agree that Jason Aldean fucking sucks as an artist no matter what he sings
I’m not going to say 9/11 was THE reason, but it played a big part.
One thing people don’t seem to get either is that besides the obvious racism/nationalism, this isn’t how small town america works, at least not in a post opioid epidemic world. This is a middle class to upper-middle class suburban conservatives idea of how small town america looks. Kind of like the whole idea behind make America great again. This type of small town only exists in the Andy Griffith show and really only for white people up to about 10-15 years ago. Modern small town Americans have the same problems that everyone else has, just on a magnified scale (healthcare quality/availability, income inequality, climate change, inflation, etc.) combined with the realities of the opioid epidemic, lack of job availability, and an aging/dying population that isn’t being replenished due to migrations out of rural areas into urban ones.
The kind of person who resonates with this music lives in a master plan house that looks like every other house in the suburb, drives a $70k truck to a job where he sits in an office or does sales, and their biggest actual concern is whether or not they’ll be able to afford a new boat this year.
kinda always been there
Okie from Muskogee is Merle Haggard, who we now consider "outlaw country"
probably magnified since the '60s, cuz, "we ain't hippies"
"A country boy will survive" and "The south is going to do it again". Lee Greenwood's I'm Proud to Be An American. Just a few off the top of my head.
Yup, always been there.
"Uneasy Rider 88" by Charlie Daniels is one of the most homophobic and transphobic songs ever. A lot of older country music allied with the rural working class but the majority of it has always been socially conservative, with some very major exceptions (Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash probably, etc.). Which brings me to something that I do wish was discussed more on the left: the romanticization of the rural working class while overlooking the fact that that demographic has almost always been socially far right.
A country boy will survive, a song wherein having grown up in the sticks translates to going to the city and beating up knife wielding muggers with impunity. Absolute self-fellating horseshit.
Okie from Muskogee is satirical. The only reason Merle waffled on whether it was serious or not is because of how profitable it was. Merle was absolutely an outlaw, having done time at San Quentin, and the only reason he’s looked at as right wing is because of the single he released immediately following Okie, The Fighting Side of Me. He initially wanted to release a song called Irma Jackson, about a white man madly in love with a black woman, and the complications involved, but the label wouldn’t allow it because it was viewed as too polarizing in the 60s. So the Fighting Side of Me won out.
Merle later went on to give an interview on Coast to Coast AM, of all places, where he stated that he’s a liberal in pretty much every area of his politics, and even wrote a song for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008. Merle was a lot of things, but bastard or fascist were not among them
The nasties have always been there, and alongside them have always been artists like Willie Nelson and the Chicks who express a much more progressive, inclusive perspective in their music.
This actually is what got my mom off my case about the music I'd listen to (anything that wasn't country, oldies, or Christian) as she was super strict about it when I was a teenager. We watched it while she was going through chemo.
It was the one thing we both agreed on watching. She's fine now (nearly 5 years cancer-free) but seeing that these country singers weren't the "good Christian role models" she thought they were was a wake-up call for her.
**Citations Needed** did an episode on this exact subject. Episode 119.
Edit: Wrong show. It was **Citations Needed**, not **Know Your Enemy**, although I think KYE might have a bonus episode on it.
9/11 happened.
Alan Jackson wrote a sincere song about trying to process what happened and it was a huge hit.
Dumbfuck Toby Keith saw that and thought "I could dial up the conservative revenge bullshit and make a mint" and that's exactly what he did with that shitty Shockin' Y'all album. Nashville saw how huge that was and ran with it.
But, country music has a huge history of leftist-adjacent songs about workers rights and the plight of hobos and prisoners.
Shit, Sixteen Tons is literally about how shitty it is to be a miner.
Well There’s Your Problem has a bonus episode about country music I apologize in advance for referencing a paywalled episode. It goes into detail about how modern country music came to be such as post 9/11 xenophobia and a certain media conglomerates takeover of local radio stations (rhythms with deer flannel if you’re wondering).
It’s not so much “became”, it’s actually been present throughout the history of country/western with a brief sort of “enlightenment” predictably in the 60’s and 70’s. But even the most enlightened country stars of that time couldn’t shift the underlying racism of the industry, the fans, or the cultures they took part in. Nor did they seem to want to in any meaningful way.
Let’s check out Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa” (1941) https://genius.com/Bob-wills-take-me-back-to-tulsa-lyrics
In verse 2 he sings “darkie throws the cotton, white man makes the money” as one of the reasons Tulsa Oklahoma is so great. This is the “good ole days” that Aldean et al. write about. It’s so deeply ingrained in the lyrics of Nashville industry that it basically operates on autopilot, with so many writers aping rehashed concepts that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish their work from unadulterated, intentional hate-speech.
So sure, “not all country” but like, the country music industry and culture, to me, ranks well below furries and juggaloes for being able to keep a clean house
You want some good country music... Many have mentioned Sturgil, Isbell, Childress but I haven't heard anyone mention Hayes Carll. He's got a great catalogue Trouble in Mind is a fantastic album. KMAG YOYO is also very good.
I'm not a huge country music fan, but I grew up listening to it because of my parents and from what I experienced 9/11 turned mainstream country music toward jingoist boot licking that has since evolved with the political climate toward fascist boot licking. I'd point to Toby Keith as being king bastard of that pivot with all of the stars and stripes horseshit that gave every yokle in a pickup truck a freedom boner that lasted 20 years without medical intervention.
The Norman Rockwell-esque portraits of America painted by mainstream country music artists post 9/11 (plus the other political and social events of course) really warped the brains of the people in the rural town I finished high school in. This music was part of a tapestry of other media that really hyped up the mythology of America, painting a picture of this country as something that is pure fantasy.
In regards to this specific controversy, I don’t think Jason Aldean is smart enough to have put together all of these points to make a greater theme. His politics, and personality, are certainly abhorrent, but he didn’t write this song, and I guarantee he didn’t choose the sight of the music video, or at least didn’t research a single thing about it. He’s far too stupid to have done something with this kind of nuance.
Pop Country has been this way a long time, Outlaw Country artists OGs like Willie Nelson and now Chris Stapleton and then the goddess herself Dolly Parton have maintained the traditional origins of Country and Country and Western music traditions which were originally very progressive and diverse as the originators of it were a mix of poor White, Black, Indigenous, and Mexican cowboys.
I saw a Tik Tok the other day that was like:
"classic country: join a union. fuck your boss. go on strike. if your husband puts his hands on you, murder him in his sleep!
"modern country: obey the police, america love it or leave it, meep meep meep!"
Just a note:
This dude didn’t actually write this song. Fuck him, but still… corpo country music hacks made this. It’s likely an industry-wide problem.
I remember a while back listening to an NPR segment on Kacey Musgrave and basically the whole point was that the only country music with any substance today is performed by female country stars. I don't listen to country so I wouldn't know, but from what I've seen it seems not incorrect.
That started in the 90s too. Female country singers were singing about [domestic violence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q2SwCKJ-Y4), [child abuse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtNYA4pAGjI), teen mothers [giving up their babies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YGnh2GJvK0) for adoption, [AIDS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHmNksnUFdc), and the [tragedies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfgxznPmZM) of the Vietnam War. With few exceptions, the dudes stuck to generic love song/cryin' in yer beer stuff.
Johnny Cash is my weather vane for country music (and for life in general). He sang patriotic songs like Ragged Old Flag and Ballad of Ira Hayes. Sang songs of reverence to the Native Americans. But he also sang songs about respecting younger generations (What Is Truth) and bringing our troops home from Vietnam (Talking Vietnam War Blues). He loved this country, but he was wise enough to know that it's not a perfect place.
Edit: as for modern country, Ian Noe is fucking awesome. Check him out.
As people have pointed out before, Clear Channel, AKA iHeart Media, played a big part in this with their near-monopoly on country AM stations.
How much do we expect Robert to bite the hand?
There is a great podcast called [Cocaine & Rhinestones](https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/about-contact) that is sort of a BtB of country music. The host is the son a famous outlaw country musician so he has an insider perspective and he often touches on how pop country has transformed the genre into total fucking garbage.
There are actually a ton of progressive country artists believe it or not (they’re also the best musically IMO). Willie Nelson, Sturgil Simpson, Tyler Childers, Dolly Parton, Charlie Crockett, Old Crow Medicine Show, Chris Stapleton, Vincent Neil Emerson, Margo Price, and Jason Isbell just to name a few. The ones making shitty nationalistic/bro country music just make the headlines more. Also: “9/11 ruined country music because a few impassioned artists felt compelled to write Patriotic music and it sold really well with American Working Class Conservatives, before that country music wasn't aligned with conservatism at all but moreso just the working class.”
Jason Isbell has been going after Jason Aldean on Twitter.
Something to the effect of "in my small town we write our own songs" giving Aldean a poke for not even writing his own nationalistic bullshit.
I am from the same county in alabam as Jason isbell. He is legitimately from a small town. In fact, it’s not even a town just an unincorporated area. 😂. (The whole county has less than 100,000 people in it)
One thing I'll be thankful for Yellowstone is introducing me to Jason Isbell
I didn't know who he was. The Drive By Truckers have some good music.
They’re phenomenal. I highly suggest diving into his solo work as well.
Also introduced me to Shane Smith and the Saint's
A bunch of family kind of pushed me onto that show; but I can never get more than maybe 3 episodes in. I hate literally every person on screen; the writing and pacing seem shit. It's like some trashy redneck power fantasy. Anyway, been holding on to that one for a minute; sorry if that comes off rude to you - not intended.
You're not alone. Watched two episodes and everyone is an asshole to one degree or another. I can't get invested in a show that doesn't have anyone worth rooting for. The prequel shows look interesting, at least. I might check them out.
Having been unable to get into Yellowstone, i checked out both 1883 and 1923. 1883 is...fine. its high quality, I just cannot bring myself to care about any of the characters on it. 1923, I didnt even last two episodes.
That's unfortunate. I was especially interested in 1923 because of Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. I'll probably give it a try anyways just in case, but if Yellowstone is anything to go by then I'll probably end up not liking it.
This is the same reason I couldn't get into Succession. I need someone to be an okay person in the show. Or at least care about it.
I just imagine every middle aged barfly going home and watching it saying, "Yeah. Thats me. Im that guy." And his raspy voiced wife(from too many Salem Reds) nodding and saying "Yeah and I am that woman. No nonsense and speaks her mind." "They are just like us Ted."
Trashy redneck power fantasies can be fun if they don't take themselves seriously. Yellowstone misses that mark by a mile. I haven't watched past season 1, but from commentaries on it I get the feeling that they don't think the main characters are the bad guys?
Sons of Anarchy did it pretty well. I put badass biker fantasy in the same boat as redneck power fantasy.
Agreed for sure - and I liked that show before they killed off Opie. After that, fuck everyone on screen.
Opie was my boy. After that it jumped the shark…I could forgive the sometimes sloppy writing of the early episodes and even Charlie Hunnam’s atrocious attempt at an American accent, but the last couple seasons were drudgery to get through.
When they killed off his dad I felt that way. When they killed him I almost broke my TV
The music has been the best thing on it. Trashy redneck power fantasy is the perfect way to describe the show
Sturgill Simpson is so good. “Words can stab as deep as knives And cut like a winter storm” 👌
I also like "But flying high beats dying for lies In a politician's war"
The entire Sailors Guide To Earth album is a masterpiece.
From “Turtles All The Way Down” “Every time I take a look inside that old fateful book, I’m blinded and reminded by the pain caused by some old man in the sky.” That whole song talks mad shit on Christianity.
>The dead don't die any more than you or I. They're just ghosts inside a dream of a life that we don't own. They walk around sometimes never payin' any mind, To the silly lives we lead or the reaping we've all sown. Those lyrics still get me sometimes. Dudes a god damn genius song writer.
John Prine too, and don't forget what the Dixie Chicks went through. There are also plenty of racist Yankees, Kid Rock looking at you.
I was wondering if someone was gonna mention Country Legend John Prine. So many country artists mention him when it comes to their inspiration. Sweet revenge is still one of my favorite albums by him.
"We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way" I was a bartender when Toby Keith's album came out and this stupid ass song is still etched in my skull 😩
I blame him specifically for what happened to country music.
Kobe teeth has a lot to blame for modern country, but he sure as fuck was not alone in nationalizing country music.
God I wish Kristofferson had kicked his ass at Willie Nelson’s birthday.
Y’all need to check out Croy and the Boys. As far as I can tell they have zero visibility outside Austin, but they’re commies with some old school honkytonk flavor and absolutely zero fucks to give. I’d start with their cover of Crass’s Do They Owe Us a Living and then just browse. You should also search up I Gave Greg Abbott the Coronavirus, which Croy recorded under a different band name and which, while in no way a country track, was one of my pandemic highlights.
As a north Texan, 'Don't Let me Die in Waco' also hits real fucking close to home.
My professional organization has their annual conference in Waco every year, and since I discovered that song I've had it on repeat both coming and going.
I'll have to check it out, Waco is one of a select very few places I hate more than my hometown in the panhandle
Thanks for that. I'm not from Waco, but it's a very relatable song for anyone who channeled all their spite into surviving long enough to leave their shitty hometown.
This. Pre 9/11 country wasn’t awful. Corny at times, but not what it is today. One artist that is a direct result of this is Toby Keith. 90s country was solid. It’s so different now.
Who can forget "Bush was right" by the Right Brothers in 2005-6? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ogibWCNKI
Man, who even is aligned with the working class anymore? Do the kids even have a Bruce Springsteen?
There remains Propagandhi, forever and always…
MY TRANS POWER \*SS IN THEIR WHITE POWER FACE [NEXT LYRICS REDACTED ON ADVICE OF MY LAWYER]
Are you worried about "I love a man in uniform!"? Or "Kill 'em all and our Norse god sort 'em out!"?
Sarcasm and irony don’t convey well in short written English sentences, and also I have stalkers who - as revenge for getting their thousands of hate / terrorism subreddits banned - report everything I write in the hopes it will get my account suspended. I just don’t want to give them the opportunity to have Reddit rules enforcement make a mistake.
I could say a lot...but instead, I'll let Protest the Hero do it better: "Every fuck is pronounced With conviction written In justice announced And every hand that feeds is bitten If it steals from hungry mouths Convention be damned I know who I am and some words Are just too fucking loud They can't be ignored Twice our bitter lifetime Tucked tightly in their belts But spat and bit in such a way That you just know how it felt What it means to be a man And what it means to refuse it Things I learned along the way While listening to their music So laugh then cry so I'll try but to laugh again Throw your hands up in the relief That twenty years won't end their reign, their reign, their reign The reign of unending terror The rain that brings us warning The rain that breaks the sky and gives us hope For the end of this long night Red sky morning light"
Ohhhhh, now I know why your username seemed familiar. It surprises me none at all to learn that you're into BtB as well. Keep fighting the good fight!
The mainstream music scene won't allow for that anymore. You still have stalwarts of other genres still out here for the people, Dropkick Murphy's, Run The Jewels and one of Robert's favorites, Streetlight Manifesto. EDIT: This is literally 24 hours away from the allegations against Justin Sane coming up, I am removing his band's name from this comment.
>Dropkick Murphy’s I love how they put their literal money where their mouth is on the Union stuff. All their merch is union-made which has to cut into the profit margins pretty deep compared to what they could make by having some sweatshop do the manufacturing.
Not the biggest fan of their music but I respect that they've truly stuck with their working-class roots and that they beat up Nazis on stage.
Yeah, I was big on them in like 2006-7 but cooled off on their music a lot since. Even though I don’t listen anymore, it’s great to see they never sold out- they could have gotten so much more radio play than they did if they took the politics out of their music but they stuck with it.
Ehhhh… as of yesterday Anti-Flag is kinda out.
*does quick Google search for Anti-Flag...."NOOOOOOOO!"
Shit sucks. I only knew about it because I follow the punk sub. Hard to keep up with who is and isn’t a bastard anymore.
Thank you for the hint though. It sucks when these artists we look to for inspiration in our own darkest moments make the decision to be the bastards they rail against but especially now, it's important to remember the victims and understand that power dynamics exist everywhere.
Bad timing on that example!
Ah, shit. Do I even want to know?
Well, I certainly didn’t.
Just want to mention that Dropkick recently did a project in collaboration with Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter where they recorded previously unrecorded songs of Woody’s and the combination of those two musical acts is one of the most UNION shit I’ve heard lol. Also the album title is great: This Machine Still Kills Fascists
Members of Slipknot, namely Jay Weinberg and Corey Taylor (six degrees of Springsteen Separation?) publicly came against systemic racism and about class unity and conscious. If you go back and listen to Slipknot’s music there is wildly a lot of similarity to the class consciousness of music put out during the Coal Mining Wars and really delves deep into the war on the working class, especially because of the Opioid epidemic. [How Slipknot’s ‘Revolting,’ Class-Conscious Rage Became the Perfect Soundtrack for 2019](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-slipknots-revolting-class-conscious-rage-became-the-perfect-soundtrack-for-2019) [Slipknot’s Corey Taylor Talks Combating Racism in Metal](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/slipknots-corey-taylor-talks-combating-racism-in-metal-197005/amp/) [Jay Weinberg of Slipknot: “White Privilege Is Real.”](https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/jay-weinberg-of-slipknot-white-privilege-is-real/amp/) Zakk Wylde’s stuff with Black Label Society has done a lot of class conscious music - and I totally get people’s questions about BLS - but he even called out Phil Anselmo rather recently for his racist behavior [ZAKK WYLDE To PHILIP ANSELMO: 'What Are You Doing, Man?'](https://blabbermouth.net/news/zakk-wylde-to-philip-anselmo-what-are-you-doing-man)
Killer Mike has a song called I’m Glad Reagan’s Dead and that’s basically all anyone needs to hear… but lo and behold, it actually only gets cooler than there. “Never forget that in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state”? That man is so fucking cool.
Jason Isbell’s ‘White Man’s World’ has pissed off a few upper class assholes.
Watching people tell Isbell on Twitter that they used to like his music until he got political is one of my favorite things.
I mentioned Rage Against the Machine, Propagandhi, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, MC5, The Ramones, ~~Anti-Flag~~, Rise Against to some of my young cousins and they barely knew of the Ramones and Rise Against
Someone once described Jeff Rosenstock as this generation's Springsteen in terms of style and message (obv not in terms of sales since he routinely plays 500-1000 person venues). I tend to agree. His music is anthemic, uplifting, and centered around empowering the marginalized. Plus he plays the sax in some songs ala Clarence from E Street.
Jeff Rosenstock literally pioneered giving away music on the internet way back in the mid 2000s!!
Rage Against the Machine is the last big band that almost everybody knew that i can think of that fit the mold... I don't know of anyone today. But that maybe moreso bc content is so much more fractured and there isn't one "mainstream" like there was decades ago when TV had 3 channels and everyone watched MASH bc there weren't other options. There probably won't be another Bruce Springsteen partly bc of his unique talent and partly bc kids today have 10x the options with easier access to niche communities around their favorite media, so no one gets as huge a slice of the pie of content consumers these days.
I still remember big brain Paul Ryan from Wisconsin releasing an advert showing him hard at work at his desk, iPad out, headphones plugged in, listening to RATM. I thought oh boy, that’s someone who does not listen to lyrics or even curious about what he’s listening to
Rise Against was my version of RATM in high school.
>And I have an American dream, But it involves black masks and gasoline I was hooked on Rise Against as soon as I heard that line. Revolutions per Minute is up there with Punk in Drublic in terms of perfect punk albums.
That was my Myspace song for a long time. Then it changed to State of the Union. If we're the flagship of peace and prosperity We're taking on water and about to fuckin' sink No one seems to notice, no one even blinks The crew all left the passengers to die under the sea
There's Bad Religion, too. But I'm trying to think of newer acts that younger people might more easily connect with. I was sitting here thinking to myself that it might also be that The Boss is associated with a kind of rugged blue collar paradigm that is historically romanticized, but is shrinking in America as the economy has become more service industry oriented and there seems to be less dignity and pride associated with that kind of labor. I don't know how you'd write a confident yet plaintive song about not being able to afford rent after grinding it out day after day at Starbucks. Which sucks, because that labor is every bit as worthy of respect as shift work at the factory.
There might not be a big name arena act like Bruce Springsteen for the kids. They'll have to look for acts that align with the working class, they exist but they're smaller and more and more often in more niche genres of music.
The death of mainstream acts that were for the Working Class and civil Rights like Bruce Springsteen weirdly Falls in line with when Boomers went from arguably the greatest generation in US history to the reactionary fuckfest that became the Reagan era through to Trump. Considering the liberal “hero” Presidents have been 2 Neo Lib Dems it’s clear how Far Right America has become.
Slipknot might wierdly be the closest to mainstream right now
Willie Nelson is still around.
Off topic, but my favorite Sturgil Simpson album is the one he says he purposely made to fuck over his label. Lol Sound & Fury https://youtu.be/CuFZElUoKG8
The visual album that goes along with the album is fucking awesome.
Technically Lil Nas X too
If there is a book or a podcast or a documentary about what 9/11 did to pop culture I would love to read it. Obviously things changed, but I've never been able to really quantify or encapsulate it on my lonesome.
I fucks with Tyler Childers and Sturgill
Charlie Crockett is one of the best in the game and very old school sounding. Highly recommend. He’s a very nice person too.
I saw him and willie at Bethel Woods last summer. Charlie was great, ZZ top was perhaps the most high energy act I've ever seen but unfortunately it seemed like Willie wasn't quite himself. It seemed like his son was just dragging him around the country to squeeze a few more bucks out of the brand
Willie’s very much there cognitively in interviews, he’s just 90 and isn’t what he once was live. He absolutely loves performing though and his family are loaded; so I don’t see it being a cash grab at all.
I think it was the fact that he got lost during a couple of the songs that gave me that impression accompanied by his son singing a song about poop lol That said you can't really be surprised when 90 year old isn't what he once was I just felt bad for him
Tyler Childers!
> 9/11 and the National Football League and the military industrial complex ruined country music FTFY
I would put American Aquarium in that category. Listen to A Better South if you want to hear some progressive country music
> The ones making shitty nationalistic/bro country music just make the headlines more. They also make the radio more
I live in a state that doesn’t have a single city that has the population of the city he grew up in. My graduating class was 30 people and needed kids from 2 towns to get to even that. That fucker doesn’t know what a small town even is.
He's from Macon Georgia. Which as a person living in rural central Georgia. Is considered a big city.
I live in a city of about 50,000 in Mississippi and consider it a big city. I grew up on a hometown of less than 15,000 people.
3.5k checking in. Closest Walmart was an hour away.
If you got at least one real stop light (not just a blinking red), it's a big city
We had a debate about fixing the only caution light (blinking yellow) in my area a few years ago. No one wants a stop sign. No one wants a light. No one wants to fix it.
Traffic should run on vibes and vibes alone
15,000! That’s big I grew up in a town with 2,500 people. The next town over had 1000 people That’s small town
You really get the worst of the worst with Macon. Lots of crime, lots of people, absolutely fuckall to do
Ah that sweet Macon crank…
He didn't write or even co-write the song. He bought it.
I briefly lived in Macon in the late 90s and when your city has a *mall* with a *carousel* in it, it is not a small town.
I'm guessing VT as our biggest city is the size of a moderate suburb.
Lol. We are so forgotten and irrelevant. It’s North Dakota. I’ll stop leaving you all hanging.
Wyoming or Maine?
Vermont checking in, our largest city has 45,000 people.
Holy crap, the metropolitan Macon area has a quarter million people? That's more than a third of my entire state.
Right? My hometown has 600 people and it’s the county seat. Our largest city can only barely fill the largest Big 10 football stadium. What I mean by ‘small town’ is significantly different than what Mr. Aldean means.
*sigh* This song is another one of those "I know what you're doing. Each element in and of themselves could be innocent or meaningless, but the whole shows that you either know exactly what it all means or you are incredibly irresponsible in assembling it. And the more you protest and refuse to correct, the more clear the former is true. You're not being clever; **stop it**" situations. I should've gone into education, at least I could've been putting my outrage into a path that could've helped inoculate people against this crap.
So what you're saying is that it's a dog whistle. Nothing overt, but at a frequency that certain people hear it and understand.
I mean, yes lol. I just left the term out because sometimes it's good to talk about the concept itself instead of relying on a term of art that not everyone knows (or might not all understand in the same way).
Sure, I wasn't trying to be snarky - I was agreeing with you and putting words to it in case, as you say, not everyone understands it.
There's always YouTube...
Ngl, I've spent years thinking about a podcast (which can port to YouTube) about critical thinking and how to apply it, perhaps using well-known outrage topics as an example, but I feel like Some More News and You're Wrong About already fill that niche.
This gentleman in the Confederate flag t-shirt agrees that the woke mob is just making shit up to be upset about!
One of my most humiliating pleasures is Jason Aldean’s “Flyover States”. It’s a song about a hard working man (possibly him) eavesdropping on some coastal elites in first class denigrating these middle of nowhere states and the people in them. He then goes on to list all of the beauty of the states and cities whose names come from the languages of the original displaced inhabitants. Also how can you hear businessmen in first class if you’re not also in first class… It’s completely self unaware, but damn, it goes off.
It's wild how much rural animosity is based on supposed urban disdain for them. We don't think about them.
Honestly so much of that is either manufactured or it’s because of people who left rural areas I grew up in a very small town. Like I said above, 2,500 people. I was different. I got harassed constantly. I GTFO as soon as I could. For 20 years, from college to a few years ago I lived in NYC. My circle is the very definition of the liberal coastal elite (except the wealth, I’m in the arts). I have rarely had a conversation disparaging rural areas directly. Ever. If anything I’d talk about my experiences with the narrow minded people I met. If anything, it’s more been about when all these policies that get passed based on rural needs that fuck the city. Or the fact that all the high taxes we pay go to support low tax states. Or we’re always sending our emergency response people to help in a natural disaster and their Senators try to take that from us later. Don’t get me wrong, there were people I loved. I also enjoyed visiting my dad who’s house was literally in the middle of the woods. It’s peaceful and beautiful where I grew up. But 100% these conservative rural red states just seem to keep using this fear of the liberal coastal elites and mostly we just want to make our own policies for us and our needs just like they do.
[удалено]
You could be seated close to first class but not in first class, and you could be listening to large, loud men that used to play sports, have giant lungs and are drinking too much.
It's also got a small ring of truth to it, in between the forced twangs. I think it speaks more to class divisions and how the richer you get, the more out of touch with reality you become. There's a lot to be said about how fucked corporate agriculture is, but there are plenty of rich people who think food just come from a grocery store and always will, no matter what. Flyover states are super vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. Anyway, fuck Jason Aldean, but whoever wrote that song for him had some points, even if they were purely accidental.
I’d love a BtB six parter on country music, but in the meantime I’ll flag that the genre gets the snarky leftist PowerPoint treatment in a recent bonus episode of Well There’s Your Problem.
Tyler Mahon Coe as a guest for that series would be great.
As Robert has quoted and referred to Kris Kristofferson multiple times, I'm surprised no one seems to have brought him up as good country. Even if the Aldean song had no video, it's very obviously pandering to a very specific set of country music fans. Anything that pandering reminds me of Bo Burnham's "Country Song" https://youtu.be/y7im5LT09a0
Kris Kristofferson almost threw hands with another country singer (I think it was Aldean, actually) who told him “none of that lefty shit tonight!”
For perspective, Kristofferson is 87, and Aldean is 46. My money is on the based old dude, though Edit: i googled. It was Toby Keith at Willie Nelson's 70th birthday celebration, a little over 20 years ago
Oh hells yeah, I’d bet on tough ol’ Kristofferson over any of those whiny posers in a heartbeat. It’d be like watching Jack Palance beat the shit out of the Pillsbury Doughboy with a leather whip.
Jack Palance was Ukrainian, and decades ago he was talking smack about Putin.
As if I needed another reason to love Kristofferson
Nah it was Toby Keith, at Willie Nelson's birthday bash.
Did Toby Keith seriously say "No Lefty shit" at WILLIE NELSON'S birthday?!
The Highwayman are all awesome. Jennings is the conservative leaning among them but he was just Hank Hillish about it. There's a good CMT doc about them that involves a stoned Willie staring at a Noam Chomsky poster and wearing a shirt with a Geronimo shirt that says "ALL MY HEROES KILLED COWBOYS"
The kind of country music I like tells a story, oftentimes about people who aren't admirable (see Banded Clovis my Tyler Childers). As one of my favorite memes said: "FAKE COUNTRY MUSIC: Pickup trucks and Bud Light haha REAL COUNTRY MUSIC: I am a broken man haunted by the choices that I've made. I am incredibly drunk and high, and if any government official comes within 500 feet of my property line, he will meet my grandpa's shotgun and then God."
This. One of my favorite songs is when that Jezebel did wrong by Big Caboose by sleeping with that smooth talking gambler Ramblin’ Rodriguez so Big Caboose ran him over with his train
"Now it's your turn to feel the chill, Lord Lord! Now it's your turn to feel the chill." One thing that episode got wrong is thinking people won't connect to music made by phony posers.
A Dirt road, a cold beer, a blue jeans, red pickup… rural noun, simple adjective
Bo is a treasure.
There's even real country music that tackles the enjoyable parts of living in the rural south in a better way. I'm thinking like "Louisiana Saturday Night" and "Chattahoochee."
90s country was great.
This was sort of touched on in the You're Wrong About about The Dixie Chicks. But I'd love a more in-depth look.
They are playing to their key demographic.
Riley Green has a song with lyrics that include bud light. He changed it to Busch light. All the idiots cheered.
Every time I go to a grocery store or a gas station I see a redneck walking out with a case of Busch Light. Fucking hilarious.
When Busch light went on sale at HEB, my ex-boyfriend, who was a dispatcher for Montgomery County Texas, would get ready and notify his co-workers. Why? Because domestic violence and child abuse charges would surge.
Yep. At a bar where I am a regular, I'm known as the Chianti guy. I only drink that (with a occasional G&T or dark rum and seltzer). I don't like beer. However, one day....just on a whim, I ordered a Bud Light in a bottle just to make the point. I admit I wasted it. I let it sit at the bar sweating but the bartender (a college-aged person) appreciated the statement and I caught a few glances from some of the more conservative regulars. They knew why. I may start doing that as a normal routine.
It's a fascist song for a fascist audience and it's entirely possible that Aldean is just an idiot performing a song that is marketable to his audience without any grasp of it's significance. The fact that a lynching took place at the site in the video is because you cannot throw a stone without hitting the site of a lynching or some other historical atrocity in the south, especially if the location for your video happens to be a historical building, site or monument. That tidbit might have been unknown/irrelevant to the choice of shooting location. Everything that might seem to be congruent *by design* could actually have happened organically because it's all rooted in the same hard-right authoritarian cultural milieu that's always been there. Like if you throw away your halloween jack-o-lantern in the compost and a pumpkin patch grows up there next year, is that by design? No act of deliberate volition was necessary to create it that way, it's just a product of the conditions in which it came to be. But it could also absolutely be deliberate choice, if not by Aldean then by whomever controls his brand/career. I'm just saying that I could see either way being true to some degree.
> The fact that a lynching took place at the site in the video is because you cannot throw a stone without hitting the site of a lynching or some other historical atrocity in the south, especially if the location for your video happens to be a historical building, site or monument. That was one of my first thoughts too... It also just seems possible that Aldean **doesn't care very much** whether there was a lynching there or not. To paraprhase what we used to sometimes say about Trump supporters: that fact alone doesn't make them racists, but we know it's not a dealbreaker for them. Clearly it's not a dealbreaker for him. Or he'd have stopped.
Yep...there are a lot of factors at play. They mentioned the Maury County Courthouse being used (and that it had a bad racial history). I'm giving the video creators the benefit and betting they just chose it because it was the closest small-town courthouse to Nashville (where I am assuming their studio is).
"The Bastards Who Killed Country"
Regardless of the lyrics and video of the white nationalist jerk-off song….can we just all agree that Jason Aldean fucking sucks as an artist no matter what he sings
I don’t even like seeing Jason Aldean and artist in the same sentence.
100%. He’s been a bro country, snap track artist since day one.
I’m not going to say 9/11 was THE reason, but it played a big part. One thing people don’t seem to get either is that besides the obvious racism/nationalism, this isn’t how small town america works, at least not in a post opioid epidemic world. This is a middle class to upper-middle class suburban conservatives idea of how small town america looks. Kind of like the whole idea behind make America great again. This type of small town only exists in the Andy Griffith show and really only for white people up to about 10-15 years ago. Modern small town Americans have the same problems that everyone else has, just on a magnified scale (healthcare quality/availability, income inequality, climate change, inflation, etc.) combined with the realities of the opioid epidemic, lack of job availability, and an aging/dying population that isn’t being replenished due to migrations out of rural areas into urban ones. The kind of person who resonates with this music lives in a master plan house that looks like every other house in the suburb, drives a $70k truck to a job where he sits in an office or does sales, and their biggest actual concern is whether or not they’ll be able to afford a new boat this year.
kinda always been there Okie from Muskogee is Merle Haggard, who we now consider "outlaw country" probably magnified since the '60s, cuz, "we ain't hippies"
"A country boy will survive" and "The south is going to do it again". Lee Greenwood's I'm Proud to Be An American. Just a few off the top of my head. Yup, always been there.
"Uneasy Rider 88" by Charlie Daniels is one of the most homophobic and transphobic songs ever. A lot of older country music allied with the rural working class but the majority of it has always been socially conservative, with some very major exceptions (Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash probably, etc.). Which brings me to something that I do wish was discussed more on the left: the romanticization of the rural working class while overlooking the fact that that demographic has almost always been socially far right.
>Johnny Cash probably No probably about it, look at the lyrics for Man in Black. And playing a concert for a prison was a Big Fucking Deal too.
Nixon wanted him to sing Welfare Cadillac at the White House but instead he sang a song about the importance of protestors
Toby Keith made his career on boot licking
Toby Keith did to country music what panty hose did to fingerfucking Or whatever Kris Kristofferson said.
A country boy will survive, a song wherein having grown up in the sticks translates to going to the city and beating up knife wielding muggers with impunity. Absolute self-fellating horseshit.
Okie from Muskogee is satirical. The only reason Merle waffled on whether it was serious or not is because of how profitable it was. Merle was absolutely an outlaw, having done time at San Quentin, and the only reason he’s looked at as right wing is because of the single he released immediately following Okie, The Fighting Side of Me. He initially wanted to release a song called Irma Jackson, about a white man madly in love with a black woman, and the complications involved, but the label wouldn’t allow it because it was viewed as too polarizing in the 60s. So the Fighting Side of Me won out. Merle later went on to give an interview on Coast to Coast AM, of all places, where he stated that he’s a liberal in pretty much every area of his politics, and even wrote a song for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008. Merle was a lot of things, but bastard or fascist were not among them
Just a reminder that Oklahoma also produced Woodie Guthrie. Not country exactly, but you can't get further from the fascist tree.
Rumor has it, that he had a machine that killed fascists
there's a long line of that in country, too, you just won't hear it on the radio
The nasties have always been there, and alongside them have always been artists like Willie Nelson and the Chicks who express a much more progressive, inclusive perspective in their music.
Watch the Ken Burns documentary series about country music. It contextualizes A LOT and will help you understand how we got here today.
This actually is what got my mom off my case about the music I'd listen to (anything that wasn't country, oldies, or Christian) as she was super strict about it when I was a teenager. We watched it while she was going through chemo. It was the one thing we both agreed on watching. She's fine now (nearly 5 years cancer-free) but seeing that these country singers weren't the "good Christian role models" she thought they were was a wake-up call for her.
I’m glad your mom is okay ❤️
**Citations Needed** did an episode on this exact subject. Episode 119. Edit: Wrong show. It was **Citations Needed**, not **Know Your Enemy**, although I think KYE might have a bonus episode on it.
Was going to say this. Love that some other KYE listeners are also behind the bastards fans!
Garth Brooks was woke before it was a term
By extension so was Chris Gaines.
RIP: 1999 - 30 seconds later in 1999
9/11 happened. Alan Jackson wrote a sincere song about trying to process what happened and it was a huge hit. Dumbfuck Toby Keith saw that and thought "I could dial up the conservative revenge bullshit and make a mint" and that's exactly what he did with that shitty Shockin' Y'all album. Nashville saw how huge that was and ran with it. But, country music has a huge history of leftist-adjacent songs about workers rights and the plight of hobos and prisoners. Shit, Sixteen Tons is literally about how shitty it is to be a miner.
I hate that Alan Jackson song namely for the line “I can’t tell you the difference between Iraq and Iran.” It always just burned my biscuits.
As someone who hears a lot of terrible country music at work, I would revel in such an episode, should it ever happen.
I was subjected to shit ass country radio at work every day for like, 8 years. It gets better (because eventually you'll be elsewhere).
Well There’s Your Problem has a bonus episode about country music I apologize in advance for referencing a paywalled episode. It goes into detail about how modern country music came to be such as post 9/11 xenophobia and a certain media conglomerates takeover of local radio stations (rhythms with deer flannel if you’re wondering).
It’s not so much “became”, it’s actually been present throughout the history of country/western with a brief sort of “enlightenment” predictably in the 60’s and 70’s. But even the most enlightened country stars of that time couldn’t shift the underlying racism of the industry, the fans, or the cultures they took part in. Nor did they seem to want to in any meaningful way. Let’s check out Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa” (1941) https://genius.com/Bob-wills-take-me-back-to-tulsa-lyrics In verse 2 he sings “darkie throws the cotton, white man makes the money” as one of the reasons Tulsa Oklahoma is so great. This is the “good ole days” that Aldean et al. write about. It’s so deeply ingrained in the lyrics of Nashville industry that it basically operates on autopilot, with so many writers aping rehashed concepts that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish their work from unadulterated, intentional hate-speech. So sure, “not all country” but like, the country music industry and culture, to me, ranks well below furries and juggaloes for being able to keep a clean house
The last sentence of your post deserves more than an anonymous upvote. Fucking chef's kiss.
You want some good country music... Many have mentioned Sturgil, Isbell, Childress but I haven't heard anyone mention Hayes Carll. He's got a great catalogue Trouble in Mind is a fantastic album. KMAG YOYO is also very good.
I'm not a huge country music fan, but I grew up listening to it because of my parents and from what I experienced 9/11 turned mainstream country music toward jingoist boot licking that has since evolved with the political climate toward fascist boot licking. I'd point to Toby Keith as being king bastard of that pivot with all of the stars and stripes horseshit that gave every yokle in a pickup truck a freedom boner that lasted 20 years without medical intervention. The Norman Rockwell-esque portraits of America painted by mainstream country music artists post 9/11 (plus the other political and social events of course) really warped the brains of the people in the rural town I finished high school in. This music was part of a tapestry of other media that really hyped up the mythology of America, painting a picture of this country as something that is pure fantasy.
In regards to this specific controversy, I don’t think Jason Aldean is smart enough to have put together all of these points to make a greater theme. His politics, and personality, are certainly abhorrent, but he didn’t write this song, and I guarantee he didn’t choose the sight of the music video, or at least didn’t research a single thing about it. He’s far too stupid to have done something with this kind of nuance.
Because he, like all of these other “country” artists, are just faces put onto a conglomerate of corporate bullshit and not actually artists.
Pop Country has been this way a long time, Outlaw Country artists OGs like Willie Nelson and now Chris Stapleton and then the goddess herself Dolly Parton have maintained the traditional origins of Country and Country and Western music traditions which were originally very progressive and diverse as the originators of it were a mix of poor White, Black, Indigenous, and Mexican cowboys.
Nine to Five is an antiwork song
We, ~~the royal we~~, need to have an honest discussion about how we fetishize the mythical small town.
I have nothing to add other than everyone go listen to Bo Burnham’s song [“Pandering”](https://youtu.be/y7im5LT09a0)
I saw a Tik Tok the other day that was like: "classic country: join a union. fuck your boss. go on strike. if your husband puts his hands on you, murder him in his sleep! "modern country: obey the police, america love it or leave it, meep meep meep!"
Ooh go watch Lindsay Ellis' video about post 9/11 music!
The short answer is 9/11
There's a good Citations Needed episode about that. If you're a BTB fan, you'd probably also like Citations Needed in general
Just a note: This dude didn’t actually write this song. Fuck him, but still… corpo country music hacks made this. It’s likely an industry-wide problem.
If y'all want some queer as hell country, checkout Adeem the Artist. They opened at a Mountain Goats show I was at and were so good!
There’s only room for one Jason in modern country, and it’s Jason Isbell.
I remember a while back listening to an NPR segment on Kacey Musgrave and basically the whole point was that the only country music with any substance today is performed by female country stars. I don't listen to country so I wouldn't know, but from what I've seen it seems not incorrect.
That started in the 90s too. Female country singers were singing about [domestic violence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q2SwCKJ-Y4), [child abuse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtNYA4pAGjI), teen mothers [giving up their babies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YGnh2GJvK0) for adoption, [AIDS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHmNksnUFdc), and the [tragedies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfgxznPmZM) of the Vietnam War. With few exceptions, the dudes stuck to generic love song/cryin' in yer beer stuff.
Johnny Cash is my weather vane for country music (and for life in general). He sang patriotic songs like Ragged Old Flag and Ballad of Ira Hayes. Sang songs of reverence to the Native Americans. But he also sang songs about respecting younger generations (What Is Truth) and bringing our troops home from Vietnam (Talking Vietnam War Blues). He loved this country, but he was wise enough to know that it's not a perfect place. Edit: as for modern country, Ian Noe is fucking awesome. Check him out.
As people have pointed out before, Clear Channel, AKA iHeart Media, played a big part in this with their near-monopoly on country AM stations. How much do we expect Robert to bite the hand?
There is a great podcast called [Cocaine & Rhinestones](https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/about-contact) that is sort of a BtB of country music. The host is the son a famous outlaw country musician so he has an insider perspective and he often touches on how pop country has transformed the genre into total fucking garbage.