Country hasn’t always been the Luke Bryan’s and Toby Keith’s and whoever else has been playing on country radio for the past 20 years. Singing songs about “sittin in your truck out by the lake, 80 miles from Santa Fe.”
Country music was about feeling detached from your labor, feeling alone, running from the law, punching your boss, and getting high. It was about rejecting urban sprawl. It was about bandits, freight trains, and growing up poor. In fact… one could argue that country music is historically the most left leaning genre of music to date. From Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, to Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, to the modern artists in the alt country music scene today. Country music is made for us. And it never went away, it became harder to find good country with the commercialization of the genre. Capitalism put its filthy fucking hands in OUR music and soiled everything we loved about it.
So if you think you don’t like country music you and consider yourself a leftist.. I think you owe it to yourself to do some research into the genre. Those songs I used as examples above are great. Other examples of amazing older country songs are
Guy Clark - L.A. Freeway
Johnny Paycheck - take this job and shove it
Loretta Lynn - Coal Miners Daughter
Steve Earl - The Mountain
I could make a very long list of great old country songs, but I’ll stop there. Some newer songs to check out
Tyler Childers - Hard Times
Bella White - Just like leaving
Benjamin Tod - I Will Rise
I could make an equally long list of great modern country songs. You’re just not going to hear any of them on the radio. If you listen to those songs and still just don’t like them, that’s fine. I just think as leftists, tankies, anarkiddies, whatever you call yourself… we owe it to country music to give it more than a once over from what youve heard on the radio.
So yeah that’s my post. It was going to be a comment on @DasKarlBarx ’s post about country music but I felt this deserved its own post.
Counterpoint, Folk is the music of the Proletariat, Country is Capitalism's attempt to sublimate it into the superstructure.
EDIT: I've had some thoughts on this. The reason leftist country differs from folk is that it's usually individualised. It's introverted and about one person, usually the singer, and their suffering and sense of revolt.
Folk is sometimes this too (Northwest Passage comes to mind), but more often it's a tale of the struggles of another, or of collective action, or class suffering or just the feel of connection to a place or time.
The college radio around here is mostly folk, particularly appalachian folk. Every labor day they spend the week playing old protest and union songs. I'm a metal head but that is some of the angriest music I've heard and all of it is extremely anti capitalist.
And how can we forget the traditional ballads that go "They killed my love in the clearances so now I'm going to kill every damned English landowner I see and then myself so I can haunt them as a murder spirit" but in Gaelic so it sounds like a pretty bird warble.
Metal heads have never tried to fight a war against the US government en masse, but coal miners did several times.
Country is a subgenre of folk. And was it’s own style long before capitalisms attempt to sublimate it.. What you are saying would be like if I said Trap is capitalisms attempt to sublimate hip-hop into the superstructure.. which completely ignores the history of trap. And hip-hop for that matter.
Lmfaoooooooo lolololol Folk music is pretty much only played by and listened to by champagne socialists and red diaper babies, probably the least "proletarian" music possible since the 1930s.
Prole music = hip hop, punk, all kinds of dance music, shit that proles actually like and make. A soulful voice over a piano loop telling you to "give into the funk, we are all one" is 1 million times of a more relatable struggle than some string picking about shit from 200 years ago.
This is revisionism. Country and Western were popular for decades before Toby Keith was excreted out of some record executives cloning machine.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but didn't Henry Ford, being the white supremacist shit he was, contribute specifically to the proliferation of "country music" to try and combat the spread of Jazz/blues, as those were genres he considered "d*generate" (ie: made by black people)?
I found this Jalopnik article about it https://jalopnik.com/henry-ford-plotted-to-destroy-black-jewish-jazz-with-c-1788536315
There are still lots of people with crusty pants, tragic haircuts, and shitty untuned guitars singing about how their boss is a crook and the Sheriff is an asshole.
getting Sakai's Settler vibes when I think of how white Country music is, the white working class can be very reactionary without racial justice along with class consciousness.
Acoustic guitar is a terrible instrument in the hands of 99% of its players.
Country that uses fuller production is just worse pop. Literally just trying to be pop music with a cultural affect except that culture is a conscious attempt by capitalists to capture, alter and eventually produce their own self-conscious consumer base.
There's an interesting story to be told about country being Capital's attempt to produce an identity and culture for upper-middle class whites after The Blob ate everything they originally had but the aesthtics of the thing are lacking severely.
9 to 5
I hear you, and think you're right but the less said about this one lately the better lol
It's been a minute since I've listened to country newer than the 80s. Curious, What's (if any) the take on hank 3? Listened to a few things of his over a decade ago but didn't get too far in. From what I remember it wouldn't surprise me if he had some problematic shit.
hank 3
oh my fucking god there's another one riding his (grand)daddy's corpse :michael-laugh:
Lol I can't really remember his music other than a cover of Johnny Cash so that probably says everything.
I remember he had a punk-y band too tho so couldn't remember if thatbwas any good. Back in those days I wasn't much for anything punk adjacent
im kinda curious what this 'punk' Hank Williams bringing but his albums include "Rebel Within" "Rebel Proud" and "Hillbilly Joker" :joker-gaming: LMAO
hes definitely a CHUD
Lmao what a title. I just assume everyone making country music after the 70s is a chud or at least an oppurtunist
