I mean listen to this. This shit is amazing. Now it’s all about being rapey to a good Christian girl and $65000 trucks
That's literally the story for every popular music genre.
Remember when Wrangler jeans signed a deal with Lil Nas X and all the Honkeys lost their shit?
Good times
The real shame is that the blue collar themes are still in the music, but instead of being angry about having to work 60 hours a week to make ends meet, it's presented as a point of pride.
Also, if you want some real good country music brain worms, look up Buddy Brown on Youtube.
It's a mix of recency bias and pop country being highly commercialized. There was plenty of garbage nashville trash back in the day but it is overshadowed by the outlaw movement which was underground and broke into the mainstream mostly organically. There are tons of good country bands putting out stuff right now, you just don't see them breaking top 40 or being featured at the CMA awards.
Tyler Childers
Colter Wall
Sturgill Simpson
Chris Stapleton
Margo Price
Sierra Ferrell
Trampled by Turtles
Turnpike Troubadours
Robert Earl Keen
Gary Clark Jr.
Hayes Carl
Todd Snider
Jason Isbell
Charley Crockett
Shovels and Rope
Dave Rawlings Machine
Justin Townes Earle (rip)
Those are just off the top of my head and none of them are super underground. Margo, Tyler, Chris and Sturgill are well known with most country fans and everyone who went to school in the south in the past decade knows a few Turnpike songs by heart.
Thank you for the list! I love how old country sounds and the new hick-pop shit is so tradh
Survivorship bias leads us to think that what we know as oldies but goodies and classics represented all music rather than just the most popular and “best” from a given period had to offer.
If anybody's looking for even more, here's some of my faves: Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, John Moreland, Garrett T Capps, Yola, Croy and the Boys, Karen and the Sorrows, Kelsey Waldon, Lasers Lasers Birmingham, Honey Harper, Dougie Poole, Jess Williamson, Secret Emchy Society, Gus Clark and the Least of his Problems
HOW CONVENIENT, yet another excuse to recommend (maybe) the best podcast on the left right now, Citations Needed
https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-119-how-the-right-shaped-pop-country-music
They covered exactly this topic only a few episodes ago! Very informative, I guarantee it's not a waste of your time.
Bro-country is the phenomenon you're thinking of, and it has a somewhat complex genesis. We didn't just go from Willie Nelson and Blair Mountain songs to chud-rap in one fell swoop. Even in the '50s and '60s there were competing pop-country subgenres (the Nashville and Bakersfield sounds) replacing the honky-tonk classics and broadly began the commoditization of country music.
Country has been kinda shit since the '90s imo. In the '80s, country was a broad genre but with limited pop relevance. A traditionalist form of country had taken the throne from the pop and outlaw country forms dominant in the 1970s. Enter Garth Brooks, who is wildly successful synthesizing neotraditional country and rock into a pop music product people just seemed to really just like.
Around 1990, two important events happened for country: The FCC changed FM station spacing requirements and Billboard began building charts solely from radio plays rather than record sales. Country music format went wild in the FM band, and soon it became just pop music. FM stations are expensive to run, and you want to play what people will listen to, so you play to the charts.
The thesis here is that country is a popular genre and will follow the whims of popular culture - however the hell that works. In the 1980s there was a synthesis with rock, but obviously nobody broadly gives a shit about rock anymore, so we look to the trajectory of other pop genres over the past few years, and we'll see where this is going: Interesting microgenres you need to be really plugged-in to have the slightest fucking idea about, and a lot of mainstream stuff everywhere else you have to sift the gold out of. It's just that hip-hop and EDM (and all their complex evolution) are more dominant now instead of rock, and artists who like those aesthetics sensibilities are going to adopt those themes for better or worse.
I don't know which drove the other, but imho this occurred around the same time that a country aesthetic became appealing to suburban teenagers, like in the late 2000s.
That sounds exactly why it’s about rapey vibes and $65k trucks then
It was earlier than that and I’d say the turning point was probably right after 9/11
Look what happened to punk music. They just find every little way possible to remove the actual art and passion in music, movies, whatever and package it neatly into a bland but formulated composure that appeals to the widest demographic possible. They take a lot of the staple reasons a thing gets popular but without the substance. Tons of music is just a simple formula, and they've found how to exploit it in various ways.
Around the mid-1990's. Any Man of Mine is the start of it (or so, you could probably put some of Reba's music in which is late-80's, early-90's. But this was before the "Rape"y vibe you're talking about. I think mid-00's, late-00's is when that vibe came in.
Somebody else said it’s when suburban kids started liking the country aesthetic and honestly that makes a lot of sense for the rapey vibes part
This song is good too, then all the comments are all about how unions suck and kids these days don't even want jobs.
"Back when people viewed working as a right not a chore."
Fucking WHAT!?
Ash to Ashes
Dust to Dust
In the end
Chuds are fucked.
--- Post Hog
what have you been instructed to think about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68cbjlLFl4U
