Showing posts with label shawn fleetwood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shawn fleetwood. Show all posts

Saturday, October 1, 2022

Oh Goodie, A New Scold Weighs In

 

Country music used to be about the human condition, or at least about the things people cared about, or laments for what might have been. Rarely was it aspirational.

There stands the glass

That will ease all my pain


That's what always separated country from pop. Face it, country was rarely happy, because real life isn't always happy. Sometimes it is. I mean, one can let loose on a Saturday night; stomp their heels on a plank dance floor, twirl their partner into their arms to a two-step shuffle, but more often than not, although the music is bouncy, the lyrics are dismal.

Though we both tried, our love still died, and now she's gone from meBack to the only life she's known 

Back where the music's loud, back to that swinging crowdThat's where my baby feels at home


Country fans recognize life for what it is and still press on through, and a thumping bass guitar and a four-four drum beat sure don't hurt.

Probably the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals picture things the way they want them to be, while conservatives see life as it really is. The benefit of viewing the actual picture is that one understands people for what they are ~ messy, laden with childhood traumas that seep into everyday life, yet they've plowed through the pain and created a life that's the best they can muster.

Enter someone named Maren Morris. 

I knew nothing about her music, so I pulled up a couple of YouTube videos. I learned that she really likes to drive and that she has a voice that, while not terrible, doesn't resonate like a Tanya Tucker or a Patty Loveless. She's mediocre, like ninety-nine per cent of today's country artists.

Yet, this Maren girl is nothing if not sanctimonious. She relishes picking fights with the wives of fellow artists, schooling them on how to think, then sobbing self-pityingly into her Twitter feed when everybody in the whole wide world doesn't kowtow to her ideology.

Maren, baby, pay your country dues and then maybe we'll talk.

“I hate feeling like I need to be the hall monitor of treating people like human beings in country music,” she mewled recently in an LA Times interview; all the while spewing epithets like "Insurrection Barbie" at her fellow "human beings". 

Apparently Maren's cause de jour is hacking off the breasts of pre-teen girls and loading them up with testosterone in the name of compassion. If Charlie Rich were alive today, he'd set fire to her manifesto and snort with abandon as it went up in flames.

Shawn Fleetwood of The Federalist captured this dystopian tale better than I ever could, but what I do have to back me up is fifty-plus years of studying country music, understanding it, bathing myself in its baptismal waters.

“I think there are people in country music that want it to be niche.“They don’t want it to expand. They don’t care about it becoming more inclusive. It’s theirs, and everyone else is an other, or woke, or whatever.", Maren said in her interview.

Ding! Ding! Ding! 

Yep, country music is mine, Maren! Keep on drivin' that car until you reach utopia.

Hint: Utopia never comes.