An absoluteky outstanding song by Cash btw. If you haven't checked it out, I suggest you do so. Even if you have zero interest in Country do yourself a favour.
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.
Twenty hours in and it's up to me to remind people that Dolly Parton is the full package?
She's got tunes, OK 'I Will Always Love You' is a bit cloying but the rumour is that she also wrote Jolene the same day
She supports other women. When porn star Julia Parton was around and telling people that she was Dolly's cousin, Dolly's public response was something like, 'She ain't my cousin but I can't condemn what she does... it's not like I ever tried to hide my breasts. Good luck to her.'
She produced Buffy The Vampire Slayer through her production company Sanddollar. She kept a low profile publicly but behind the scenes was very supportive of the show because it provided good role models for young women.
She funds the Dolly Parton Imagination library which mails free books to kids under five.
I unfortunately see a lot of white guy with a heavy (and fake) country accent does a "redneck" version of a popular rap or hip hop track and seeing other white people say "Now that's how it should be done!"
Modern "country" is a plague and I hate it. Its the only genre I can't listen to.
Is almost the same thing with Brazilian sertanejo. Was once about the bucolic reality in the rural side of the country, now is about bragging about being rich, going to pointless parties and drinking a lot of alcoholic drinks, f-cking everyone...
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 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.
I loved ‘a boy named Sue’ but it was ‘the Man comes around’ that sold me. Heard it first during the OP of “Day of the Dead” remake, and there is no other song that comes close to fitting with this opening
I think Orville Peck might be my gateway drug into country. I don't imagine there's too many gay cowboys out there, but surely there's other stuff I'll like.
He's the guitarist for Big Thief but his solo albums are some of the best country I've heard in a long time. And free from the toxicity of modern country (as far as I can tell)
I like the stuff that's about people in the shit. Two Cigarettes in The Ashtray, and all that. I'm a big Horton Heat fan, so it makes sense that their stylistic forebears would appeal to me too.