Point is? We know that there’s a shit ton of conservatives desperate for the most disgusting pandering that can be provided. Brown is just another scumbag providing fixes for the addicts. And y’all know that like any pop music, country’s mostly shit.
That said, I do respect Brown or his people taking a little agency for his career — unlike the martyr queen Britney who needed 15+ years of abuse to realize that maybe she could oppose a conservatorship so fucked up that a famously estranged parent who had nothing to do with her career put in charge.
Tread carefully about Britney: the conservatorship was installed because she was declared mentally disabled & her entire life stolen from her. That might set you back a bit in the confidence needed to resist an absive, estranged parent & a court system who doesn't see you as fully human, even if fabulously wealthy. The problem is more than it's taken 15+ years for her fans (& some [too few still] of the public at large) to recognize that disabled people have rights & stand behind her.
"A considerable crime is in contemplation. . ." as Sherlock Holmes would say. Her "conservators" basically 5150'd her and turbocharged it for 15 years.
I would also add that she didn't come by her "martyr queen" status all by her lonesome; she was in the Mickey Mouse Club for cripes sake. Child actors are cajoled into performing by being continually told they are God's gift to creation, then when they grow old enough to make their own decisions are lucky not to go completely 'round the bend.
Point is primarily what seems to be ignorance-fueled passivity. I fully understand the initial need for a conservatorship but not taking so long to do anything about it. Brit was surely surrounded by awful people but the disconnect from reality to wait so long to do anything about it? I don’t know… Ditto appointing an estranged parent.
That he’s pandering to deplorable shouldn’t take away from taking some agency for his career, a rarity in show biz. That his music is shit is secondary.
Wow. I mean, just, wow. Conservatives really are going all-in on making America a White supremacist nation.
I would like to think that American voters will reject these people as the fecal matter that they are, but I fear that we may be coming to the point where what the voters want won't matter any more.
The stridence comes from the fact that they know that they've lost the hearts & minds. I mean the boots may still be coming, but the war for the soul is lost
Which is why we're seeing all this voter suppression stuff. The conservatives are a minority and they know it, but they think they're entitled to rule America and the world anyway. They want what they want, and they don't care how they get it or who they have to hurt.
They’re the party of the ruling class so their dedication to destroying democracy to preserve the entitlements of said ruling class is understandable. Disgusting but understandable.
There are only two types of music I don’t enjoy – opera and contemporary country – so to say I’m not this guy’s audience is an understatement. But although I’d never thought of it before I’m kind of surprised *more* contemporary country performers don’t release songs that are just “Trump, Trump, Trump, n-word, n-word, n-word, libtard, libtard, libtard, cancel culture, cancel culture, cancel culture.” Seems like it would be a gold mine.
This has been Episode 17,439 in our running series, Conservatives Can’t Do Art, They Don’t Understand What It’s For.
Contemporary, commercial country seems to be experiencing a schism: instead of sounding like warmed over Skynyrd or 80s power ballads like it did in the first decade and a half of this century, there are a lot of songs that I hear in passing that incorporate rap and contemporary R&B cadences in their top lines (that Walker Hayes song is a perfect example) as well lifting the sonics: 808-style drum machines and beats, autotuned vocals, etc. Not a surprise, since that’s how music gets done in America.
I really look at Buddy Brown (who only seems to be able to write in the key of G. Good thing he’s got a capo) or Aaron Lewis as a counterreformation that’s not going back to Porter Waggoner even David Allan Coe, but to all that schlocky 80s and 90s country like George Strait (who Brown namechecks), Alan Jackson, Lee Greenwood, etc. It’s reactionary, like everything else in conservative American culture, and reactionary in a Cleek’s Law way. “I’m against the thing you’re for, since you said you were for it.” It’s formulaic in the same way as the contemporary stuff too: red, white, blue reference, check. Defiant, you can’t tell me what to do line, check. Trucks, muddy boots, etc., etc.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking down my nose his musical simplicity. I’m a big fan of untrained musicians, having been one myself. Side note: There was an anecdote that producer Tony Visconti told that Marc Bolan only knew a few open chord shapes and barre chords on guitar, and that guy ruled. That’s just an excuse to post this, really https://youtu.be/5Ud_X5eTln8
I had the same thought, maybe it says something good about musicians? That people try to make a life in music because they have something they want to say, and for them it's not about appealing to a target demo to make lots o' money.
Hey, some day, please give opera another chance. Start with "The Marriage of Figaro" or "Tosca", with subtitles if your Italian is as near-{non-existent} as mine.
Recently at a gas station in the Boston metro area, I was privileged to overhear “Redneck North of the Mason-Dixon” blasting from a pickup truck. I lead a very sheltered life.
In the early 80's I picked up a couple of weeks work wiring a county building in Erie PA. It was Morning in America and you took whatever work you could get. Paid prevailing wage though and was only 6 hours away so fuckit, off I went to the shores of Lake Erie.
After the first week the Drywall guys showed up. It was some local contractor. Drywall guys get paid by the sheet and they are always waiting for all the other trades to get their shit done. When they finally get the OK to start, they tend to work straight through until the job is done. We went in one morning and the Drywall crew was already there busting ass. It's really something to see - they work fast! A lot of time they are up on stilts. Amazing. So they're working and their tape player is blasting this country music. Turns out it was Johhny Rebel - hard-core ugly racist music. Pure distilled sonic hate. It turned my stomach and I'm from super racist ass Ohio farm country. I had no idea there was such a thing. Somebody had a talk with them because the next day they played the same Led Zeppelin/ Pink Floyd/Aerosmith as the rest of us, so It wasn't the country music they liked, it was the racism. This was Erie PA, remember- not Greenville Sc.
I worked with a guy years later who told me how his single mom, a truckstop waitress in a place off of Interstate 55, outside of Cape Girardeau , used to burn cassette tapes of race records and sell them to the truckers for extra money. He was a pretty good guy , seemed like.
Johnny Rebel's biggest "hit" was "Klassic Klan Kompositions ."
Bobby Brown can’t ink a deal because Nashville is too leftist? I’ve heard some bullshit excuses for why a talentless hack isn’t awarded a golden ticket to Billboard’s top 100 (“They don’t know how important the accordion is to the history of real country music!”), but Bobby, it’s Tennessee, where they fire people for promoting vaccines for teens.
Buddy can't get a deal because no one has shown a white grievance audience is as profitable as the hip-hop crossover audience has proven to be. Nashville is happy to embrace anything that sells.
Can't fault Buddy Brown, King of the Kountry Krooners for his career choices. Why, The Real President of these United States proved that there's money, Big Money in being an out racist fuck knuckle.
Well, eventually there wasn't, not that I'm _suggesting_ that we burn contemporary country to the ground for the feeling of freedom it'd give us, briefly.
Of the attempts of rightwingers to provide evidence that they're contemporary and edgy there is no end--I'm so old I remember Paul Joseph Watson proclaiming "Conservatism is the new punk rock", or for that matter W.F. Buckley Jr. writing imitation James Bond thrillers (in one of them Blackford Oakes fucks the Queen, if I remember right). But I have to say that ghetto lyric gives me the willies.
I love poseurs of any stripe, and Aaron Lewis seems like a good-un. His momma is Jewish, he was born in Vermont, and he grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. Was a conventional love-song rocker who never saw a day of military service, and now he's all "Am ah the only wun willin' to bleed and take a bullet for bein' free?"
And hey, Buddy boy, any black person jogging through a white American suburb has a greater chance of being threatened by a McCloskey or shot dead by a McMichael than your scared little white-boy ass in a hillbilly truck.
How does a good ol' boy get lost driving in Atlanta? I can only imagine it happens when leaving Mercedes-Benz Stadium buzzed on Bud Lite and Southern Comfort, refusing to use GPS because it was "designed by queers and Japs," and pissed at your 2nd wife because she had the temerity to call you and ask you to say goodnight to your boys, Gunnyr and Jaxsin.
A good ol' boy doesn't get lost driving in Atlanta because they're not going near there in the first place. Closest they're getting is White Flight Ballpark (north suburbs) or Neckcar Motor Speedway (south suburbs).
Like Roy says, these racist codes are a big big part of the "wounded honest worker" trope of contemporary country. This weekend I was singing karaoke in Burlington Vermont and a nice young man sing some song by Toby Garth Cracker Keith Clint Black Snowroach whoever and the line of it was some thing about "how everything would be great if we all just follow the Bible / follow the law of the land, /not the law of the jungle." And I'm like oh which jungle are we talking about, sweetheart?
There's a classic story where someone asks Chet Atkins what The Nashville Sound is. You need to understand that the Nashville Sound referred to crossover artists like Patsy Cline and Eddy Arnold having pop hits in the early 60's. He replied by putting his hand in his pocket and jingling the coins there.
Nashville is and has always been about business, the flexibility required to focus on keeping the customer satisfied means there is always room for "outlaws" going against the Nashville consensus in case the customer changes his mind (ask Willie Nelson how that can work out). THiThe forces pushing Co-Cola and the NBA are leaning on Nashville the same way, but those corporations don't have the outlaw option Nashville does. These new outlaws are just exploiting an opportunity that Nashville is (mostly) leaving on the table, the Trump model of saying the quiet parts through a bullhorn, with a Power-Point presentation.
I do recall Waylon and Willie were about a way of life and of looking at it, not specific political choices -- and certainly not *these* choices. I mean, Johnny Paycheck was pissed that "She Got The Goldmine, I Got The Shaft," but he didn't go off about the Violence Against Women Act.
You are correct, sir (though She Got The Gold Mine was a Jerry Reed hit), Waylon and Willie and the boys worked to avoid alienating that Armdillo World Headquarters audience that was their base, and the white grievance industry was limited to AM radio.
Today's post makes me want to rewatch Nashville. It's been 22 years so I'm due anyway. And I have a feeling that movie contains Answers -- like why does this genre of music so often seem tortured by politics in a way that no other genre does? So many of its singers and fans worked up in angry defiance because other people aren't obsequious enough. Alas. Anyway, over the past decade I've only added one country album to steady rotation in my apartment: War Surplus by Becky Warren. Not knowing much about country music (I used to like the Sirius Outlaw Country channel? I can name one Garth Brooks song?), I have no idea where Warren stands in the pantheon. I just think that album is great. She could open for Springsteen nooo problem.
"Apple, Amazon, Google, Starbucks AND PEPSI are among more than 150 companies that signed on to a letter released Wednesday calling on Congress to pass legislation that would expand the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority voters."
Goddammit, where's a man 'sposed to get his colored sugar-water from?
Point is? We know that there’s a shit ton of conservatives desperate for the most disgusting pandering that can be provided. Brown is just another scumbag providing fixes for the addicts. And y’all know that like any pop music, country’s mostly shit.
That said, I do respect Brown or his people taking a little agency for his career — unlike the martyr queen Britney who needed 15+ years of abuse to realize that maybe she could oppose a conservatorship so fucked up that a famously estranged parent who had nothing to do with her career put in charge.
He definitely found a gap in the market. I get strong Dave Portnoy vibes from this guy.
Buddy Brown, idiot-savant of brown-nose country
Isn't that white-nose country?
The ass is white, the nose is brown
White noise country
Tread carefully about Britney: the conservatorship was installed because she was declared mentally disabled & her entire life stolen from her. That might set you back a bit in the confidence needed to resist an absive, estranged parent & a court system who doesn't see you as fully human, even if fabulously wealthy. The problem is more than it's taken 15+ years for her fans (& some [too few still] of the public at large) to recognize that disabled people have rights & stand behind her.
"A considerable crime is in contemplation. . ." as Sherlock Holmes would say. Her "conservators" basically 5150'd her and turbocharged it for 15 years.
I would also add that she didn't come by her "martyr queen" status all by her lonesome; she was in the Mickey Mouse Club for cripes sake. Child actors are cajoled into performing by being continually told they are God's gift to creation, then when they grow old enough to make their own decisions are lucky not to go completely 'round the bend.
Point is primarily what seems to be ignorance-fueled passivity. I fully understand the initial need for a conservatorship but not taking so long to do anything about it. Brit was surely surrounded by awful people but the disconnect from reality to wait so long to do anything about it? I don’t know… Ditto appointing an estranged parent.
" I do respect Brown or his people taking a little agency for his career" -- well, sure. Swindle, comrades! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Rock_%27n%27_Roll_Swindle
That he’s pandering to deplorable shouldn’t take away from taking some agency for his career, a rarity in show biz. That his music is shit is secondary.
Disagree about Britney -- do any of us know enough about what's going on in her life to judge her? -- agree with the rest.
Fifteen-odd years to get a clue about responding to the conservatorship? That’s obviously indisputable and a point that can be judged up to a point.
Then again, it’s a very rare celebrity that knows much beyond their career. Or less than that.
Wow. I mean, just, wow. Conservatives really are going all-in on making America a White supremacist nation.
I would like to think that American voters will reject these people as the fecal matter that they are, but I fear that we may be coming to the point where what the voters want won't matter any more.
"coming?" Wrong verb tense.
The stridence comes from the fact that they know that they've lost the hearts & minds. I mean the boots may still be coming, but the war for the soul is lost
Once the boots win, hearts and minds will soon follow.
This has rarely proven true, even if it takes centuries to push back. As your local indigenous nation or former colony...
Early results on how white people would handle those boots have not been encouraging tho
Which is why we're seeing all this voter suppression stuff. The conservatives are a minority and they know it, but they think they're entitled to rule America and the world anyway. They want what they want, and they don't care how they get it or who they have to hurt.
I know what I want, but not how to get it
I wanna destroy __________
American Apartheid, Chapter Three.
They’re the party of the ruling class so their dedication to destroying democracy to preserve the entitlements of said ruling class is understandable. Disgusting but understandable.
The only way America is "anal-retentive"
Let’s be honest, gun violence awareness programs are discriminatory against people who kill with guns.
I'll shoot the first man who tells me gun violence is a problem.
There are only two types of music I don’t enjoy – opera and contemporary country – so to say I’m not this guy’s audience is an understatement. But although I’d never thought of it before I’m kind of surprised *more* contemporary country performers don’t release songs that are just “Trump, Trump, Trump, n-word, n-word, n-word, libtard, libtard, libtard, cancel culture, cancel culture, cancel culture.” Seems like it would be a gold mine.
This has been Episode 17,439 in our running series, Conservatives Can’t Do Art, They Don’t Understand What It’s For.
Contemporary, commercial country seems to be experiencing a schism: instead of sounding like warmed over Skynyrd or 80s power ballads like it did in the first decade and a half of this century, there are a lot of songs that I hear in passing that incorporate rap and contemporary R&B cadences in their top lines (that Walker Hayes song is a perfect example) as well lifting the sonics: 808-style drum machines and beats, autotuned vocals, etc. Not a surprise, since that’s how music gets done in America.
I really look at Buddy Brown (who only seems to be able to write in the key of G. Good thing he’s got a capo) or Aaron Lewis as a counterreformation that’s not going back to Porter Waggoner even David Allan Coe, but to all that schlocky 80s and 90s country like George Strait (who Brown namechecks), Alan Jackson, Lee Greenwood, etc. It’s reactionary, like everything else in conservative American culture, and reactionary in a Cleek’s Law way. “I’m against the thing you’re for, since you said you were for it.” It’s formulaic in the same way as the contemporary stuff too: red, white, blue reference, check. Defiant, you can’t tell me what to do line, check. Trucks, muddy boots, etc., etc.
"Buddy Brown (who only seems to be able to write in the string of G...)
FIFY
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking down my nose his musical simplicity. I’m a big fan of untrained musicians, having been one myself. Side note: There was an anecdote that producer Tony Visconti told that Marc Bolan only knew a few open chord shapes and barre chords on guitar, and that guy ruled. That’s just an excuse to post this, really https://youtu.be/5Ud_X5eTln8
Musical simplicity is no default, eps. if youre trying to win fans. Many punk bands seemed to get by on two chords alone
Reverb Motherfuckers included?
“Modern country is just bad rock with a fiddle.”
—Tom Petty
"Seems like it would be a gold mine."
I had the same thought, maybe it says something good about musicians? That people try to make a life in music because they have something they want to say, and for them it's not about appealing to a target demo to make lots o' money.
Hey, some day, please give opera another chance. Start with "The Marriage of Figaro" or "Tosca", with subtitles if your Italian is as near-{non-existent} as mine.
You want creativity from people who focus on co-opting and ripping off? Of course it’s impossible.
Recently at a gas station in the Boston metro area, I was privileged to overhear “Redneck North of the Mason-Dixon” blasting from a pickup truck. I lead a very sheltered life.
In the early 80's I picked up a couple of weeks work wiring a county building in Erie PA. It was Morning in America and you took whatever work you could get. Paid prevailing wage though and was only 6 hours away so fuckit, off I went to the shores of Lake Erie.
After the first week the Drywall guys showed up. It was some local contractor. Drywall guys get paid by the sheet and they are always waiting for all the other trades to get their shit done. When they finally get the OK to start, they tend to work straight through until the job is done. We went in one morning and the Drywall crew was already there busting ass. It's really something to see - they work fast! A lot of time they are up on stilts. Amazing. So they're working and their tape player is blasting this country music. Turns out it was Johhny Rebel - hard-core ugly racist music. Pure distilled sonic hate. It turned my stomach and I'm from super racist ass Ohio farm country. I had no idea there was such a thing. Somebody had a talk with them because the next day they played the same Led Zeppelin/ Pink Floyd/Aerosmith as the rest of us, so It wasn't the country music they liked, it was the racism. This was Erie PA, remember- not Greenville Sc.
I worked with a guy years later who told me how his single mom, a truckstop waitress in a place off of Interstate 55, outside of Cape Girardeau , used to burn cassette tapes of race records and sell them to the truckers for extra money. He was a pretty good guy , seemed like.
Johnny Rebel's biggest "hit" was "Klassic Klan Kompositions ."
Yikes.
Bobby Brown can’t ink a deal because Nashville is too leftist? I’ve heard some bullshit excuses for why a talentless hack isn’t awarded a golden ticket to Billboard’s top 100 (“They don’t know how important the accordion is to the history of real country music!”), but Bobby, it’s Tennessee, where they fire people for promoting vaccines for teens.
Buddy Brown . Bobby Brown was the guy with a prerogative. Plus he's Black. Definitely a different person.
or a different prerogative, at least...
Buddy can't get a deal because no one has shown a white grievance audience is as profitable as the hip-hop crossover audience has proven to be. Nashville is happy to embrace anything that sells.
Can't fault Buddy Brown, King of the Kountry Krooners for his career choices. Why, The Real President of these United States proved that there's money, Big Money in being an out racist fuck knuckle.
That's hardly a recent thing -- there's always been money in that banana stand
Well, eventually there wasn't, not that I'm _suggesting_ that we burn contemporary country to the ground for the feeling of freedom it'd give us, briefly.
Of the attempts of rightwingers to provide evidence that they're contemporary and edgy there is no end--I'm so old I remember Paul Joseph Watson proclaiming "Conservatism is the new punk rock", or for that matter W.F. Buckley Jr. writing imitation James Bond thrillers (in one of them Blackford Oakes fucks the Queen, if I remember right). But I have to say that ghetto lyric gives me the willies.
Gives you the Willie Hortons, you mean.
I love poseurs of any stripe, and Aaron Lewis seems like a good-un. His momma is Jewish, he was born in Vermont, and he grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. Was a conventional love-song rocker who never saw a day of military service, and now he's all "Am ah the only wun willin' to bleed and take a bullet for bein' free?"
And hey, Buddy boy, any black person jogging through a white American suburb has a greater chance of being threatened by a McCloskey or shot dead by a McMichael than your scared little white-boy ass in a hillbilly truck.
Fuck these shitheels.
Also, not for nothing, more likely to die in one of those corporate mercenary missions we call defendin freedums
The stolen valor in country songs like this is much more scurrilous than any sort of rockroll dude posing about being a junkie badass.
How does a good ol' boy get lost driving in Atlanta? I can only imagine it happens when leaving Mercedes-Benz Stadium buzzed on Bud Lite and Southern Comfort, refusing to use GPS because it was "designed by queers and Japs," and pissed at your 2nd wife because she had the temerity to call you and ask you to say goodnight to your boys, Gunnyr and Jaxsin.
"Gunnyr and Jaxsin" is art.
A good ol' boy doesn't get lost driving in Atlanta because they're not going near there in the first place. Closest they're getting is White Flight Ballpark (north suburbs) or Neckcar Motor Speedway (south suburbs).
I'm sure that's why they moved the Braves out of the city.
"Every time they play a Springsteen song?"
You mean they are actually listening to *ALL* the words to his songs, and not just the chorus? Maybe there's hope for them after all!
Like Roy says, these racist codes are a big big part of the "wounded honest worker" trope of contemporary country. This weekend I was singing karaoke in Burlington Vermont and a nice young man sing some song by Toby Garth Cracker Keith Clint Black Snowroach whoever and the line of it was some thing about "how everything would be great if we all just follow the Bible / follow the law of the land, /not the law of the jungle." And I'm like oh which jungle are we talking about, sweetheart?
There's a classic story where someone asks Chet Atkins what The Nashville Sound is. You need to understand that the Nashville Sound referred to crossover artists like Patsy Cline and Eddy Arnold having pop hits in the early 60's. He replied by putting his hand in his pocket and jingling the coins there.
Nashville is and has always been about business, the flexibility required to focus on keeping the customer satisfied means there is always room for "outlaws" going against the Nashville consensus in case the customer changes his mind (ask Willie Nelson how that can work out). THiThe forces pushing Co-Cola and the NBA are leaning on Nashville the same way, but those corporations don't have the outlaw option Nashville does. These new outlaws are just exploiting an opportunity that Nashville is (mostly) leaving on the table, the Trump model of saying the quiet parts through a bullhorn, with a Power-Point presentation.
I do recall Waylon and Willie were about a way of life and of looking at it, not specific political choices -- and certainly not *these* choices. I mean, Johnny Paycheck was pissed that "She Got The Goldmine, I Got The Shaft," but he didn't go off about the Violence Against Women Act.
You are correct, sir (though She Got The Gold Mine was a Jerry Reed hit), Waylon and Willie and the boys worked to avoid alienating that Armdillo World Headquarters audience that was their base, and the white grievance industry was limited to AM radio.
Today's post makes me want to rewatch Nashville. It's been 22 years so I'm due anyway. And I have a feeling that movie contains Answers -- like why does this genre of music so often seem tortured by politics in a way that no other genre does? So many of its singers and fans worked up in angry defiance because other people aren't obsequious enough. Alas. Anyway, over the past decade I've only added one country album to steady rotation in my apartment: War Surplus by Becky Warren. Not knowing much about country music (I used to like the Sirius Outlaw Country channel? I can name one Garth Brooks song?), I have no idea where Warren stands in the pantheon. I just think that album is great. She could open for Springsteen nooo problem.
So could Iris DeMent. Wasteland of the Free is very good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqDpL0YCvI
“Coke ain’t get served in my kitchen”
Uh oh...
"Apple, Amazon, Google, Starbucks AND PEPSI are among more than 150 companies that signed on to a letter released Wednesday calling on Congress to pass legislation that would expand the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority voters."
Goddammit, where's a man 'sposed to get his colored sugar-water from?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/companies-call-on-congress-to-strengthen-voting-rights-act.html
Goddammit, where's a man 'sposed to get his colored sugar-water from?
Mexico
“I don’t like the color of that sugar water…”
His next cover: (apologies for the language):
https://www.streetdirectory.com/lyricadvisor/song/wuoefo/nigger_nigger/