 There ain't nothin' to win or lose If you take the time to think Only tomorrow we ain't got to And the faith placed in today And the time that ticks away It's only there for you to use You won't get much more, no matter how much you pay So, you might as well. (Chorus) Laugh a lot like everything is funny Treat others like your judgement day is comin' Cry when you need to, walk barefoot on needles Toughen up your skin, for the road gets rough as hell Fall into love an out and in again... well You might as well There's a future you can see That'll be here before you blink Don't spend all your time in dreams You're gonna wanna be awake For good and bad choices to make To learn to breathe and grow It all moves at its own speed, damn the brakes So, you might as well (Chorus) Laugh a lot like everything is funny Treat others like your judgement day is comin' Cry when you need to, walk barefoot on needles Toughen up your skin, for the road gets rough as hell Fall into love an out and in again... well
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 It don't mean a single damn thing It's just an old fool's pipe dream And people think it'll make 'em sing So they claim to really want it It's just that grass on the other side It's a myth but a real sweet lie Some fight for it and even die But couldn't handle it if they got it Freedom Some people explain it and say It's doing what you want all day But, hell, they all do that anyway So what's even the damn difference They say it's a life without a check Without boots standing on your neck To start a cause, avoid the effect Then pretend there's nothin' missin' Freedom Poets, and there's been quite a few Sayings that hold deep meaning to you Like another word for nothing left to lose Or some bell that'll sound a ring A state of being to which to aspire Striking the match and not gettin' fire A shelf full of things that never expire Demanding to ride the air without wings Freedom  Y'all don't know my daddy. But he drove those big machines. Came home with mud on his hands, Not fancy golden rings. He was a boy from up the mountain. He never made it out of there. He hoped his children might, But not sure we ever will. And I hear the men on TV Talkin' slow with 2-dollar words Like they're the ones out buildin' But never laid hands in the dirt. Fancy degrees and big houses, Lots of zeroes on their check Sayin' they know what is best, Lord, they sure ain't show it yet. (Chorus) 'Round here, you gotta do much more than talkin'. 'Round here, you show and prove it by your walkin'. Nary a magic word that's gonna plant those posts. Gotta get your hands involved, start diggin' your hole. Talkin' smartly to your car just ain't gonna make it run. Tinker and toil with nuts and bolts, 'til you make it hum. 'Round here, you must act useful for your livin'. 'Round here They tell me they're much better, That they're intellectuals. But let a pipe burst on 'em, They're hopeless and lost fools. Callin' up men like my daddy "Sir, could you come save me?" Then return to lookin' down After payin' the small fee. (Chorus) I do think about it often, How the end of days might be With our betters lost and hungry Begging us down on their knees. For food, safety and shelter It's a different kind of game. For they never learned true livin' Thought they could change fate with a name.  Ole Miss students hold American flags as pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups clash on their campus. Born and raised in the South, like my parents before me and theirs before them, I can say one thing with absolute certainty: Urban hellscapes are violent cesspools of debauchery, despair and demonic demolition. That doesn’t make the South perfect. Don’t get me wrong. We have our issues to be sure. Though we’re a damn sight better than New York, LA, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and any other high-crime, low-trust metro area. Why is this important to point out? Because it’s high time someone spoke up about this plague of Yankee Unionmen spitting all over the South because it provides them with social currency. Whenever a politician needs someone to blame, or a celebrity wants to get a little attention, or a nobody suffering from Main Character Syndrome wants to be noticed online for their 15-minute window of pseudo-fame and notoriety, it’s always the South they target. There are a lot of White people here, after all, and White people are inherently bad. Remember slavery? How could you forget it! There are over 50 million slaves in the world today, including millions of child slaves, whom no one lifts a finger to help. And by “lift a finger,” I do mean that literally. You won’t see a single one of these “The South stinks!” terminally-online schmucks type a solitary word about their suffering. But when it comes to American slavery in the South, from a long bygone era? It’s as if they tie a string around their finger to remember to mention every day just how much the South stinks in their estimation. And the crowd goes wild for it! (Probably NGOs using botted engagement, but that’s another story.) On today’s episode of “Spitting on the South for Social Currency and Clout,” we have a spate of people on X (formerly Twitter) who’ve decided to pretend that one White person’s alleged actions mean that tens of millions of people are rotten. An entire culture is evil. I mean, it’s so bad that you even have guys named Mohammed telling us all how much the South stinks. “Vile,” “Evil,” Racist” - these are just some of the words they use when describing the actions of one young man, attributing it to his race and his culture. And wait until you hear about the actions! At Ole Miss, Commie-Con is taking place, where hundreds of aimless wanderers are LARPing their little hearts out in solidarity with Palestine. You probably know about this already. NGOs are buying them tents and food, and so the little consumer communists set up shop and pretend to be oppressed. They have no purpose in life. This faux “revolution” would be televised from the inside, if any one of the modern-Marxist do-nothings wanted to film it. But, no; Western socialist ideals don’t work that way (or work at all). They all want to be the director, not the person filming. Everybody a chief, nobody an Indian. Though let’s not get off into a tangent. The point is that they’re all camping out, trying to act as if they’re being brutalized like their brothers and sisters (who definitely would not throw them off of rooftops or bury them to their necks in sand and pitch rocks). No! These little role-playing revolutionaries are also attacking the American flag, and so a group of pro-American students showed up to defend it. As it happens, the only people in all of America willing to defend the American flag are White Southerners. Imagine that. I thought they saluted Old Dixie! Go figure. But long story short: The cosplayers showed up to harass the White kids. One morbidly obese Black woman showed up to verbally harass these White students, and the White students started harassing her right back, calling her “Lizzo” and laughing hysterically as she waddled past a barricade to approach the White students. One White male student – one, as in singular – decided to make a weird motion and belt out some strange noises. If you ask me, he was imitating an obese person waddling, with his arms out to his side, rocking to and fro, and hooting. Of course, this has now been labeled as “monkey noises,” and he is just a flaming racist.  Still image from the viral video of Ole Miss students mocking protesters. As you might imagine, hundreds of accounts on X have picked up this story and are pushing it through the social sphere with the same relative complaints. The South is racist. All white people are horrible. White frat boys belong in prison. Whites are destroying America. And on and on it goes. We’re talking tens of thousands of people liking these tweets, and folks crawling out from under the woodwork to bash all White Southerners as inherently evil because one, as in singular – White student perhaps made monkey noises. So, of course, spitting all over the South is old-hat at this point and we know how people eat it up. Though what crawls under my skin more is the selective outrage. This week alone (It’s Friday, May 3, as I’m writing this), I’ve seen literally over a dozen videos of entire groups of Black people attacking White people, like hyenas descending on their prey in a pack. One especially egregious video showed an entire school hallway filled with black females, beating the ever-loving snot out of a young White girl. I’m talking about over a dozen of them, pulling her hair out, kicking her in the back when she was down, stomping on her head while she was down, curled up in a ball, and begging for them to stop. But a White guy makes monkey noises, and that’s the “evil” on which they choose to focus. Not the dozen-or-so Blacks who attacked an innocent White guy at an airport and stomped his head while he was already unconscious. Or the five Blacks who attacked a White kid from behind and beat him mercilessly while he cried out in shock. These instances are all from this week. According to data from the Department of Justice, well over 1,300 Black-on-White attacks happen in America every single day. Cue the Elon Musk meme of “Let that sink in.” Seriously; let it sink in! Imagine a nation where Black Americans attack White Americans over 1,300 times every single day, and you might know about a handful in the past year, if any at all. And I’m not trying to turn this into a race thing at all. Nor am I stereotyping all Blacks as violent people. What I’m saying is that every single day in this country, we see race-based attacks happen that are infinitely worse than one guy, standing 50 feet away, making monkey noises for two seconds. Just think about the whole standard of fair play. If the monkey noises can cause tens of thousands of people to malign the entire South as backwards, cruel and racist, what would 500,000 yearly Black-on-White physical attacks warrant as a response? It’s probably a mixed blend between true believers in the “White Southerners are evil racists” stereotype that’s permeated our society for decades, and people who just jump on the trend because they know it will get them some attention. Either way, I can only say this: These people are damn sure lucky that White people aren’t even 1% as bad as they love to falsely claim. Check out any history book and see what happens to everyone else when we get angry.  Beyonce recently released a country album, "Cowboy Carter." You can scream out “Beyonce isn’t country music!” until you’re blue in the face. You’d be right, of course. Blue, too, but at least right. The issue here, however, is that you’d also be right if you yelled that same screed about 95% of the “country” music that’s been released this century. There are rare gems, like Luke Combs, but even he has demonstrated that “country” music is really just pop music, as his biggest song is a cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” And, hey, that’s always been a fantastic song. I like it, you like it, the world liked it, which is why the song was nominated for three Grammy’s and the album went multi-platinum. So when Beyonce decided to ruin Dolly Parton’s legendary song “Jolene,” it was the rule, not the exception. Music in general, like movies and television, exists in this weird area outside of typical market forces. For instance, if McDonald’s puts out a crappy sandwich and it doesn’t do well, it instantly goes away and they reverse course and push their Big Mac harder. The country music industry doesn’t work like this. When they put out a crappy sandwich no one likes, they just put out another 500 crappy sandwiches that same year. The end result is that you’re programmed, slowly but surely, to accept that the nonsense you’re listening to on the radio is what constitutes country music now. So while you might insist that the initial crappy sandwich is crappy, you’ve now been conditioned to the point where you’re singing along to the least crappy sandwich of the bunch. Music doesn’t work on the principles of supply and demand. Profiteers will inundate and saturate the entire market with watered-down nonsense to the point you accept the closest approximation of the music you like as genuine music. There’s nothing organic about it. It’s a controlled genre where big-wigs manipulate the market and consumer tastes. Think about it this way: If all McDonald’s ever put out were crappy sandwiches, eventually people would eat them because it’s McDonald’s. This is all by design, of course, and it certainly didn’t start with Beyonce. It probably started back in the ‘50s when blood-sucking corporations sprang up like weeds and took advantage of rock and country music to profit. It really expanded in the 2000s when the idea of a full-piece country “band” became an archaic relic only suitable for touring concerts, while studios used mixed e-tracks with snaps on the downbeat to mass-produce cookie-cutter music for a high-turnaround and profits. The music industry hasn’t had any soul probably since “soul” was a popular genre. Parton’s original “Jolene” was a soulful plea to a woman deemed much more attractive. “I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man.” The song spoke to something very true about human relationships, in that men can be easily lured into relations by attractive women, and attractive women often know they have this power. It’s such a classic song because it’s entirely relatable no matter where you might fall on that aesthetic spectrum. Beyonce’s changed version of the song, which says, “I’m warning you, don’t come for my man,” speaks more to a hip-hop/rap world, where threats of violence are almost a prerequisite for any song that gets put out. Some may find that to be a bit of an over-reaction, but it’s just an observation about the stark contrast between sweet realism and current-year aggression. “I’m begging you” implies a tearful plea from a woman who truly doesn’t want to lose her man. “I’m warning you,” on the other hand, implies some threat of violence should the woman even consider such an act. And this isn’t outside of the scope of country music entirely, mind you. Many may remember that “Earl has to die” in the Dixie Chicks’ song “Goodbye Earl,” or that Miranda Lambert was going to blast someone with her shotgun and set the house on fire. These songs, of course, were about abusive men. “Jolene” is more about a woman who may–but hasn’t yet–ultimately sleep with a taken man. Not exactly the same. Though it’s important to point out that these themes have found a place in country music before. There are a few funny things I can’t help but notice about Beyonce’s version of “Jolene.” For starters, it’s basically a rewrite. Here’s the first verse of the new version:
Okay (lol). Here’s Dolly’s version:
To Dolly’s version first: From purely a songwriting perspective, Dolly’s version is incredibly strong. I’ve always said, as a songwriter myself, that the difficulty of writing a good song is that you’re basically fitting a novel’s worth of imagination into a few short lines. Parton’s use of adjectives here to create modifiers and qualifiers and attributes is just flippin’ fantastic. They’re not just locks of auburn hair; they’re “flaming” locks. “Your smile is like a breath of spring” tells an entire story in eight simple words. You can play that out in your mind and get a true image of what Jolene must look like and understand why Dolly–who’s not chopped liver herself!–would be jealous. In Beyonce’s version, it’s asymmetrical, first off, and illustrates horrid writing form. You can’t rhyme on C and C in a six-line structure? That’s either lazy or uncreatively lazy. Plus there’s literally nothing that exists here that qualifies or modifies or illustrates anything about this other woman, save the fact that she’s (a) “another woman,” and (b) she used part of Dolly’s first line from the original and called her beautiful beyond compare. But what weight does that hold? It’s simply a short thrust to get into the heart of her song, which is a threat to a woman. Dolly’s song really expounded on why the woman was a threat. Beyonce’s song is basically saying, “B*tch, don’t be a threat or you’ll catch these hands!”  Beyonce's husband, rapper and music producer Jay-Z. The funniest thing to me, however, is that Beyonce’s man is Jay-Z, who looks like a homeless painter with a medical condition that causes him to retain too much water. Beyonce is wildly successful, and this song will undoubtedly be a hit that you end up hearing all over commercials and playing in the background of the Dollar Store when you stop in to get some paper plates. Though because music is a machine and not a living, breathing organic organism, it enables this sort of subpar-effort disrespect. I’m not joking when I say it’s crazy that Beyonce’s song is asymmetrical and doesn’t even rhyme. Guy Clark, one of the best songwriters in history, has a brilliant take on this in his song “Homeless:”
 Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers It’s true. It doesn’t always rhyme. But at least it has to be symmetrical! Work/hurt/shirt/sometimes with control/go/unfolds/rhyme. Notice how that’s symmetry? AAC/AAC (or “B”; it doesn’t matter). For me, I’m not even angry about it. Hell, I don’t even really care at this point. Country music has long been a relic of the past, and what takes its place today is some body-snatched nonsense that I imagine Donald Sutherland would point at while screaming. Every time I turn on the radio and country music is playing, it’s some nonsense that sounds the same - canned-audio pop bereft of any and all emotion. Beyonce’s turn at a “country” song is just the latest slap in the face. After all, don’t forget that they paraded Taylor Swift around as “country” for a decade.
Before 2027, they’ll put an electronic banjo track over “Boyz in da Hood” and it will go to #1 and stay there for months. That’s just where “country” music is at today.  It’s Saturday, August 26, and I’m way too hungover. I’ll try to keep this quick. That being said, I do want to rage and rant. Though before I trigger the editor here with copious amounts of curses, let me start with a little story. I’m a songwriter who’s sold publishing rights to 18 songs and has won 12 1st-place contests with my music. Two years ago (when I had only sold 11 songs at the time), I asked myself a deep question: How can people love my songs so much yet I don’t have a hit on the radio? So, I befriended (sorta) a songwriter named Clay Mills via his blog, and I joined his website, Song Town, which Mills co-owns with another songwriter, Marty Dodson. Their pitch is rather simple. “We’ll teach you what you need to know to be successful in today’s market.” Paraphrased, of course, but that’s the site’s entire point of existing. So, anyway, I signed up there, spammed a few songs, won back-to-back “Song of the Month” badges, and was all chest-out thinking I was the little king of everything. But Clay Mills and Marty Dodson confirmed my suspicions about modern pop-country music (Or, “White-Boy SIMP-Hop,” as I like to call it). They would remind me–while their brainwashed members would berate me–that modern, commercial-friendly country needs to be dumbed-down. You can’t use “big” words that the common rabble don’t understand. Songs have to be under 3-minutes-30-seconds to keep the plebs’ attention. You have to talk about trucks and beer and partying and other redneck-friendly slogans. Does it sound like I’m patronizing you? Well, it sounded like they were patronizing me - condescending little ass-hats who played right into the corporate-controlled country market. (Try That in a Small Town wasn’t written; hate to break it to you. It was factory-farmed via four corporate-approved songwriters who used populous slogans to make the right-wing clap like baby seals.) I learned that almost every damn song you’re going to hear from the “country” genre today is just farmed from a factory where stale, popular slogans are used, and where small little wordlettes are interlaced between a catchy, ear-worm chorus to make you want to record a TikTok video of yourself shaking your ass to the fake, studio-produced beat. Long story short: I insulted those dimwit culture-killers at every opportunity and was promptly banned from the site. I can’t stand this modern nonsense. It has no soul; it no longer tells a story. It’s corporate-friendly “songwriters” piece-mealing together common-use slogans and buzzwords to placate the masses, using canned studio tracks that insert electronic snaps on the downbeat. It’s horrible. Whatever happened to the Outlaws? This brings me to Oliver Anthony, the hick-lib. Oh, before we get into what a phony this Yankee-sounding pretender is, you might want an explanation of “hick-lib.” Well, a hick-lib is a liberal-minded culture vulture who uses a fake Southern accent and acceptable Southern slang to infiltrate our culture and to ultimately grift off of us while they preach about the awesomeness of diversity and how great things would be if we in the South weren’t so bigoted and backwards. Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond” took the world by storm. The usual suspects on the right instantly promoted it. Kirk, Walsh, Shapiro, on and on; they all pushed it as the greatest modern protest song ever. Being a songwriter who’s well known in certain social circles (not really, but let me pretend for a second), dozens of people asked me what I thought about it. They tagged me on Twitter, sent me DMs, etc. I told the truth: It’s a corporate-friendly novelty song that uses right-wing slogans to target tired, frustrated people who do not have a voice. Do not trust this fella, fellas. A sample of Anthony’s lyrics I would use to make my point: “I wish politicians would look out for miners And not just minors on an island somewhere Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat And the obese milkin’ welfare” I think that’s boilerplate and very nursery-rhyme-ish, and moreover, just slogans from the right-wing, basically. Though I like the alliteration there with “street/eat/obese.” That’s somewhat decent. But from my experience of being shut out of the industry, and my experience with Song Town, I knew right away that this was just some guy who wanted to use the political angst of the working-class, voiceless Southern-right to catapult himself to popularity. But I have 3,000 followers on Twitter. Who am I to tell Matt Walsh to stop being so damn gullible? I take no pride in being right. In fact, I’m disappointed. I’d rather be wrong and admit such than to be right and disgusted that yet another hick-lib grifts off of the valid angst of the Southern-right, by pretending to be one of us. You can hear his real voice - not a hint of a Southern accent. You can see him praise diversity, read him lavish praise on Joe Biden, and it’s just extremely obvious that here’s a guy who used the right-wing to make his life a little bit easier financially. Though this does bring up a valid question: Do we blame the snake oil salesman for selling snake oil, or the dumb-asses who keep buying it every single time he knocks?  Brad Paisley is a pretty good singer. Brad Paisley is a pretty good guitarist. Brad Paisley is an okay-enough songwriter. Brad Paisley is a shitty Southerner. Brad Paisley was born in West Virginia, and so most people would agree that’s the South - that’s country. Not so fast, my friends. Paisley’s really a city slicker, through and through. He was born and raised in Glen Dale, part of the Wheeling Metro area on the Ohio River. The Lord won’t be taking his soul back home to Dixie. Glen Dale is above the Mason Dixon. Does that matter? Well, I don’t see Toby Keith tripping over himself to do a duet with Volodymyr Zelensky about how pushing toward a nuclear holocaust is something worth dancing about to pop-country garbage. (Let’s just hope Zelensky keeps his clothes on in the music video.) It really is shocking to see country music artists wrap themselves up in the bitterly partisan politics of our world today - particularly when they choose the side of election theft, the removal of freedoms, the indoctrination of children, and the universal suffrage of the plebeian class. While many country fans are firing shots at targets bearing Paisley’s oddly-shaped face over this globalist propaganda, some of us remember that this isn’t anything new for Brad the Boy Wonder. In 2009, after the full year previous doing everything he could to get Barack Obama elected as President, Brad hit his knees metaphorically (at least we can hope it was only metaphorically) and opened up with a song he wrote in Obama’s honor: Welcome to the Future. In that song, he wrote the lyrics:
Really? You were born in 1972, Brad. School football doesn’t start until at least middle school. He references a homecoming queen, which is high school. So, let’s say it happened when he was in 9th grade. That makes it around 1986. So, in the mid ‘80s, in a metro area of West Virginia, Paisley wants us to believe that the KKK burned a cross in a black kid’s front lawn. Not impossible, but I can find no record of it - and it’s easier than you think to find cross-burning records on Google. A guy in Mississippi lit his own bush on fire, in his own front yard, and was arrested for a hate crime of cross burning.
Obviously that verse of the song is only there for Brad Paisley to apologize for being White to the then-newly-elected black President, and Paisley was rewarded for that tout de suite when he got to go to the White House specifically to play that song. I know what the real Martin Luther would have to say about that nonsense. And if you’re a Paisley fan who wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, oh, just wait! He wrote an even bigger turd, impossible to flush, called “Accidental Racist.” In this song, he apologizes for:
The lyrics are too embarrassing to even put to print here. Look them up, if your stomach is strong enough. Brad Paisley has to be the most cowardly country music musician in history. Can you imagine this guy on the road with Waylon Jennings and David Allan Coe? Whatever has infected his brain has been there for a while; long before he joined the side of a potential world war. This guy literally said that his country music is like hip-hop for White people. (Which I don’t disagree with at all; I have my own name I use to refer to today’s hot garbage.) Brad Paisley wears a businessman’s Lady Stetson rather well, with a head that’s way too small for his body. And he married a seething, crazy-eyed left-wing-bordering-actual-communist low-tier Hollywood actress. There’s a lot to be said about Brad Paisley. There really is. The thing that should be most emphasized about Brad Paisley: He’s the antithesis of a Southerner and is really a Yankee Union man at heart. He literally said Reconstruction was a good thing. Pray for this poor goofy bastard, please. The man has quite a lot of fans running around out there - most of whom appreciate the genre of Country-Fried SIMP-Hop (dumb rap for white people) much more so than they appreciate actual country music - but the man has fans. No one can take that away from Mr. Paisley. Now, I wouldn’t call Paisley an untalented hack. He has a few decent songs, though he is easily the most overrated country music musician to ever exist. Most of his catalog is just a rip-off of Ray Stevens, with songs that aren’t nearly as good. Boogity, boogity. But what should have been a one-hit-wonder middling talent in the country scene was propelled, through force, to become a superstar. The merchants who murdered Music Row kept propping him up, year after year, allowing him to host award shows. On those stages, he never managed to not make an ass out of himself. Don’t look, Ethel! I’m not sure what the future holds for Brad Paisley. He seems to be constantly auditioning to join John Legend and the girl who played Wonder Woman for a TikTok collaboration of a famous song. Maybe “We Are the World,” where the diverse performers gather together to berate Brad for being a White man, and he thanks them for it and apologizes on behalf of the entire South. Whatever the future holds, I just know I’ll never bother listening to a new song of his. There are enough people who hate us already. We need to cut them out, not add them in.  If you’re a fan of country music, you’re supporting an extinct genre of music that died around the time Internet music streaming services were born. Though let’s not pretend the topic is that clear-cut. There still exists today a genre that’s called “country music,” but it has nothing to do with actual country. Back when Hank Williams and John Carson were the original country pioneers, and up through the Outlaw genre, and even into the ‘90s, country music consisted of real stories, real bands, fiddles and steel guitars, and true stories of human emotion put into song form. Today’s country music isn’t country at all. It’s pop music - cookie-cutter drivel mass-produced in studios by greedy corporate executives who push out “earworm” songs laden with electronic instruments, studio soundtracks, and weak, repetitive lyrics that don’t say much at all. Worse than that: The bulk of today’s country music is just rebranded hip-hop that’s targeted to White people as party music. For most people today, if you asked them, “Are you a fan of country music?” and they responded “Yes,” they generally mean that they like older, classic country. George Jones, Merle Haggard, David Allan Coe, Willie Nelson, and George Strait and Alan Jackson on the more modern end. Unfortunately, the Strait generation of artists was the last death throes of country music. Whereas if you asked someone if they liked pop music, and asked them to list their favorite artists, you can bet Taylor Swift is a name that would fly out of their mouths. Let’s not confuse pop music today with actual country music. It’s insulting to true cultural pioneers who went through hell–and a whole lot of rejection–to bring the world one of the purest musical genres to ever exist. Real country music is its own sub-genre, like “classic rock.” You don’t mix Imagine Dragons in with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. In the same way you shouldn’t mix Lainey Wilson and Zach Brown in with Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. As the musical world started pushing modern, with music streaming services and ample competition among record companies, the idea became to push music out as a consumer good. This is entirely antithetical to the reason country music existed in the first place. True country started to become popular with the fantastic story-telling abilities of Hank Williams. These stories resonated with people who felt the pain and angst in the poetry. At its peak, country music dominated the charts throughout the ‘70s when the Outlaw genre started. What the music executives did to kill country music in the modern era, they also tried back in the late ‘60s. They told artists like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and David Allan Coe that their music wasn’t catchy enough for the radio - it wasn’t safe enough, it wasn’t commercial enough. These rejected artists started working with independent labels, outside of the mainstream, which is why it was dubbed “Outlaw.” Surprising to the music execs, but not fans of country music, this genre of music would dominate the sappy, commercial music forced out by the largest corporate companies. After country music became popular, shifty execs tried to kill it in order to monetize it for their own wealth generation. While this just threatened unsuccessfully to kill off country music two generations ago, it actually did kill it in the modern era. The mass monetization of country music went off without a hitch once all of those independent labels either went defunct or sold out to larger companies. On their second attempt to kill country, the corporations met zero resistance. Country music is dead. You have a few artists who sound as if they’re real country musicians, such as Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs, but the fact is that they only sound like classic country when juxtaposed against the pop-music garbage that surrounds them on the radio. This fact isn’t any secret. Every country music fan knows that country music died a long time ago. Keith Urban and Brad Paisley are no saviors - they’re progressive sellouts whose corny music is only as good as the person writing songs for their puppet act. If you want real country music, the truth is you’ll just have to listen to the classics. The real deal is never coming back. |
