We. Live. In. A. Society.
The Nordic nations are societies. They care for one another. They don’t resent their taxes being used to aid and elevate the other members of their society. They root for one another in more than empty rhetoric.
We the US are just a bunch of rugged individuals competing against one another at eachother’s throats due to decades of propaganda by our owner class to keep us divided, isolated, and distracted from what they’ve inflicted upon our former society.
There’s a reason they hide behind gates and door guards, they know what they’ve done to this country outside their steel towers and golf clubs.
Nordic societies are also largely homogenous. Sweden has seen massive increases in violent crime and poverty ever since they started allowing anyone in. America has a very similar policy with immigrants and it’s really difficult to create such an insular culture with such a large landmass and variety of people. Americans to view themselves as -Americans and you don’t get the same with the Norwegian’s or Icelanders. I’m all for the Nordic model in Nordic countries (less Sweden until they clean up their policies that are turning their country into the third world) but America needs a different form of social welfare, starting with UBI, universal education, and socialized healthcare.
Sweden has seen massive increases in violent crime and poverty ever since they started allowing anyone in.
That is wrong. Crime has slightly increased due to more population in general.
America has a very similar policy with immigrants
No, it hasn’t and never had.
less Sweden until they clean up their policies that are turning their country into the third world
You’re way more in danger of that in your corposucking neoliberal shithole.
Plenty of good modern country music out there, you just have to look for it. Tyler Childers and Colter Wall are some famous ones that spring to mind, but there’s many others.
I really love “Sarah Shook and The Disarmers” as well. They actually go by River Shook now I think, but the band still uses their dead name.
A bit more on the folk side than country, but “Nick Shoulders and The Okay Crawdads” is one of my absolute favorite bands these days. They just put out a new album too and I can’t recommend it enough.
Meh. Depends on band/genre. There’s Green Day is Metallica’s kill em all radio for some reason. I love both bands, but they’re not really related.
There’s static-x and Korn in megadeth’s radio.
If you go to cannibal corpse’s radio, out of 2.5 hrs of music/40-50ish songs, you’ll see 6 songs by cattle decapitation, 4 of which from the same album. For a genre with hundreds of bands, that’s piss poor variety. And ofc bunch of other bands in there there aren’t death metal such as slayer or venom.
Sorry, end of rant.
I mean that’s the case for any genre. Time filters out the bad stuff from the past, the good survives to reach new generations. Now we get to do the filtering for future generations.
Nah, I’m sure there’s plenty of amazing songs we’ll never get to hear. I’m just glad I heard this absolute banger before I died
NSFW I think https://youtu.be/U6zMjIZwbBk?si=54WM9wWCzVSv41S2
I’m guessing you meant Corb? If so, he has the odd song, like The Truck got Stuck, that are more mass appeal. But he has so many amazing songs
I can’t put into words how much I despise modern stadium country. It’s like the opposite of art. I grew up in the south around people who could only stomach country music like that. Everything else to them was too weird, or not white enough.
The closest analogy to country music are the movies fascists made, like the ones Hans Steinhoff and Goebbels directed. Completely banal plots and lack of artistic value. The only reason they were made as to communicate fascist rhetoric and fulfill a quota of cultural markers.
That’s all modern country music is. It’s the music of boring middle class white people who feel uneasy if their specific cultural touchstones aren’t constantly reinforced. There have to be trucks, land ownership, high school football, generic American jingoism, glorification of alcoholism.
The most common thread in this shit music is that anything outside of a middle class conservative white lifestyle is to be mistrusted. The girl from a small town who goes off to college in a big city, but realizes her home was truly out in the sticks. The song about how country values make a person more virtuous or fun. “Don’t go over that hill, don’t go looking for anything further.” It could possibly be a sweet sentiment if it weren’t for the target audience: comfortable white shitheads who drive a $80,000 Ford truck in the suburbs.
At least with propaganda it’s the ruling class messaging the citizenry. In this case, at least for the most part seems self-inflicted and without purpose. People just gravitate to whatever fits their identity.
That’s all modern country music is. It’s the music of boring middle class white people who feel uneasy if their specific cultural touchstones aren’t constantly reinforced. There have to be trucks, land ownership, high school football, generic American jingoism, glorification of alcoholism.
Well written.
Oh no, absolutely not is country music self inflicted. Modern country music is part of the same propaganda network as everything else in capitalism. The whole Nashville and Georgia country scenes have been connected at the hip with conservative money since at least the 1970s where Nixon had a country campaign song. Then there was Reagan showing up at the Grand Ole Opry. It’s a useful vehicle to spread and satiate the thirst for white supremacy.
There’s also Clear Channel Radio (currently iHeartRadio) which is run by ideological conservatives.
Also there’s some kind of money floating around to suddenly promote the odd country song or two, like that Rich Men in Richmond song, or that stupid Jason Aldean guy. Every now and then you’ll see a random headline like “country star fights back against woke-ness in new song.” And that’s the propaganda.
Parasites hopping onto a culture to exploit it for their own gains is not really the same as state propaganda. I don’t think there’s some shadowy group inventing this music to control the masses. Though politicians would no doubt pander to (or even weaponize) a group if they can. And people will absolutely try and profit off it.
It’s just a bit of a leap to ascribe low brow music to some grand conspiracy. Or at least if that is, then every culture is a conspiracy.
At least with propaganda it’s the ruling class messaging the citizenry. In this case, at least for the most part seems self-inflicted and without purpose. People just gravitate to whatever fits their identity.
Don’t forget the record labels. Mega corporations are the ruling class of our society.
I believe that mainstream country turned to shit in the 80s, not sure why. My theory is that it’s down to the money men in Nashville turning out an increasingly phony product for commercial reasons, but I don’t actually know enough about that aspect of the business to have an informed opinion.
Fortunately there’s always been legit musicians turning out excellent alt-country or Americana, or whatever we want to call it. Also a lot of the older country musicians never completely sold out either.
Late 80s early 90s. When they started making 80s pop music with slide guitar and a twangy vocal and calling it country.
The final nail in the coffin was when country music radio refused to play Johnny Cash’s Unchained album.
That sounds about right. I also think that at some point around that time the big Nashville labels decided that it made more financial sense to get behind a specific type of cultural and political messaging than it did to simply let the music be whatever it wanted to be.
Long gone were the days of Loretta “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and Johnny Paycheck “I Owe my Soul to the Company Store,” and while we still had Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and their protogé young Steve Earle, for the most part mainstream country and western was turning into formulaic corporate crap.
I wanted to do a “to be fair here, Cash had songs with stupid lyrics, too”, but all I can think of is “Ring of fire” and that one is just a harmless metaphor about love.
“One Piece at a Time” is less of a country song and more of a novelty song.
Yes, so is “hey porter” or “boy named sue”, but those are sung jokes of a sort which gives them a purpose ;)
And A Boy Named Sue was written by Shel Silverstein, so you can’t really pick on that one.
I don’t think modern country even uses metaphors anymore. Before anyone comes at me, I’m well awair that there’s some fantactic country writers out there.
That’s because modern country is squarely focused on (far) right leaning people and they are utterly deaf, dumb and blind to any sort of metaphor, sarcasm and subtlety.
It’s why these pricks go nuts for songs like Killing in the Name, not realizing it’s a song that explicitly hates on them saying stuff like “some of those who work forces, are the same that BURN CROSSES”.
They only see and hear that title and have no fucking clue what it and the rest of the song is actually about.
I’d argue that Ring of Fire is a metaphor about forbidden love that you know is damning you but the feelings are too powerful to resist.
Rather than a harmless metaphor, I find it an incredibly powerful metaphor about the pain and suffering caused by helplessly loving the “wrong” person.
Plus, there’s an opportunity to make STD jokes.
It’d be a more powerful metaphor if he wasn’t a massive manwhore and his “love” wasn’t any fan with great tits, or his second wife’s sister.
Don’t forget to name at least two American brands so you get paid!
