this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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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.
At least with propaganda it's the ruling class messaging the citizenry. In this case, at least for the most part seems self-inflicted and without purpose. People just gravitate to whatever fits their identity.
Well written.
Oh no, absolutely not is country music self inflicted. Modern country music is part of the same propaganda network as everything else in capitalism. The whole Nashville and Georgia country scenes have been connected at the hip with conservative money since at least the 1970s where Nixon had a country campaign song. Then there was Reagan showing up at the Grand Ole Opry. It's a useful vehicle to spread and satiate the thirst for white supremacy.
There's also Clear Channel Radio (currently iHeartRadio) which is run by ideological conservatives.
Also there's some kind of money floating around to suddenly promote the odd country song or two, like that Rich Men in Richmond song, or that stupid Jason Aldean guy. Every now and then you'll see a random headline like "country star fights back against woke-ness in new song." And that's the propaganda.
Parasites hopping onto a culture to exploit it for their own gains is not really the same as state propaganda. I don't think there's some shadowy group inventing this music to control the masses. Though politicians would no doubt pander to (or even weaponize) a group if they can. And people will absolutely try and profit off it.
It's just a bit of a leap to ascribe low brow music to some grand conspiracy. Or at least if that is, then every culture is a conspiracy.
I guess I don't see much of a distinction between those exploitative parasites and the state actors. I'm on the side of Althusser here, where the state is both a structural arrangement and a set of ideological norms. In that sense, you could say all culture is a conspiracy, as in a conspiracy to replicate the content and character of one's class interests.
I don't mean to say there's a shadowy group creating it, rather, there's a shadowy group that gives a platform and representation to things that promote their own interests. Or something they can flip around and sell back to you. Capitalism is crafty like that, like Che Guevara t-shirts.
Fuck clear channel. They ruined radio across the entire country
Don't forget the record labels. Mega corporations are the ruling class of our society.
I believe that mainstream country turned to shit in the 80s, not sure why. My theory is that it's down to the money men in Nashville turning out an increasingly phony product for commercial reasons, but I don't actually know enough about that aspect of the business to have an informed opinion.
Fortunately there's always been legit musicians turning out excellent alt-country or Americana, or whatever we want to call it. Also a lot of the older country musicians never completely sold out either.
Late 80s early 90s. When they started making 80s pop music with slide guitar and a twangy vocal and calling it country.
The final nail in the coffin was when country music radio refused to play Johnny Cash's Unchained album.
https://img.songfacts.com/calendar/15354.jpg
That sounds about right. I also think that at some point around that time the big Nashville labels decided that it made more financial sense to get behind a specific type of cultural and political messaging than it did to simply let the music be whatever it wanted to be.
Long gone were the days of Loretta "The Coal Miner's Daughter," and Johnny Paycheck "I Owe my Soul to the Company Store," and while we still had Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and their protogé young Steve Earle, for the most part mainstream country and western was turning into formulaic corporate crap.
That sounds exactly like the kind of slop in genres from video games to shows to movies that chuds attempt to sell to other chuds under the pretense of being "based" or "nonpolitical" mockeries of stuff they consumed before.