The Degradation Of Country Music
Country music may not be your cup of tea. The twangy music and often depressing lyrics are not for everyone. Me? I like a lot of older country and by older I mean Johnny Cash but I mostly mean George Strait and Clint Black, Hank Williams Jr and Dwight Yokum. Modern country is mostly trash, with snap tracks and a borderline pop sound. Regardless, what country music is really about is working class White people, people who drive trucks for a living or farm or swing a hammer. Working class blacks have their own musical genres, country has always been understood to be White music, even the occasional black country musician like Charlie Pride doesn’t sound like a black singer (his hit Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone is a classic example, if you didn’t know he was black you couldn’t tell from the way he sings).
My point is that country music, despite arguments about the origins of the genre, is widely understood as White people music. We all know something else, anything distinctly White must be destroyed, from Southern history to beloved White fictional characters in movies and TV shows.
That brings me to a confluence of news stories.
The other day I was driving some Amish young ladies and they like to listen to country music in the van. A song came on, multiple times on different channels, that I hadn’t heard before called “Bury Me In Georgia”. It sounded like just a typical pop music with a twang song but I looked it up on Youtube. The singer is a guy named Kane Brown and he looked a little…off. So I looked him up on Wikipedia.
Brown was raised in rural northwest Georgia and in the Chattanooga, Tennessee, area. He is multiracial, with a white mother, Tabatha Brown, and an African-American father who is also part Cherokee. In 2018, he told People magazine he did not know he was biracial until he was 7 or 8 years old: “I thought I was full white… I found out that I was biracial, and I still wasn’t thinking anything of it, but then I started getting called the N-word … I learned what it meant, and that’s when it started affecting me. I got in fights over it when I was little.” His father has been incarcerated since 1996, and he was raised by his single mother.
Maybe he was called nigger in 2000 but I really kind of doubt it. He definitely has a mystery meat thing going on….
Whatever, that isn’t that big of a deal but of course for Them, Kane Brown is a goldmine because he allegedly overcame “racism”. For example this story from Billboard:
The title is chock full of woke bullshit. Proving the “traditionalists”, aka White people who like actual country music, wrong. The future of country that county music didn’t know it had. Hahah, those dumb rednecks didn’t know they needed a mixed race kid who barely qualifies as a country musician. Then there is this from the article:
With songs that are meant to slide into a playlist between Khalid and Carrie Underwood, Brown’s closer to what the average American actually looks like, in a generation where identity is more fluid — and crucial, and debated — than ever. Brown is biracial, and while he hates to be taken as a token, he understands his significance as a rare nonwhite face on Music Row. Nor is he trying to blend in. He doesn’t, for example, have a deal for a line of cowboy boots. Instead, he’s a New Era brand ambassador for the 2018-19 football season. In Brown, fans see themselves — and it’s resonating far beyond Nashville.
An “actual American”? A bi-racial dude with a White single mom is pretty typical for White women with mixed race babies and a missing baby daddy but actual Americans have always been White Americans. The whole story is full of less than subtle mockery of White country music fans who don’t care for his music, mocking them as “traditionalists” in a music genre that has always revered traditions. Actual country musicians respect Hank Williams Sr and Patsy Cline, George Jones and Johnny Cash, understanding that they stand on their shoulders and often reference past greats in their songs. That is apparently wrong and They have declared Kane Brown to be “…inescapable, arguably changing the future of country forever”.
Then we have this week’s keruffle du jour: the attempted cancelling of Jason Aldean over his song “Try That In A Small Town”, a country song in the tradition of Hank Williams Jr’s “A Country Boy Can Survive”:
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For 43 dollars, my friend lost his life
I’d love to spit some Beech-Nut in that dude’s eyes
Then shoot him with my old .45
‘Cause a country boy can survive, country folks can survive…or Charlie Daniel’s “Simple Man”:
We tell our kids, “Just say no”
And then some panty-waist judge lets a drug dealer go
He slaps him on the wrist and he turns him back out on the town
But if I had my way with people sellin’ dope
Take a big tall tree and a short piece of rope
I’d hang ’em up high and let ’em swing ’til the sun goes downAldean’s song speaks of those who burn and loot in our cities in the name of “justice” but because he is an outspoken conservative and used imagery from black Lives Matter riots, it is “promoting racism and violence”. All of the usual suspects are out in force to denounce him and Country Music Television has pulled the video, while at the same time sales of his song are going through the roof. I bought it for a buck on Amazon even though I don’t really care for his music, making it the first song I have paid for in a very long time.
It seems odd to me that leftist people assume that a song denouncing malicious violence and rioting is automatically assumed to be talking about blacks. Almost as if They are saying the quiet part out loud about blacks and their propensity for violence. Also odd that music celebrating violence, which this song does not, is OK in certain circumstances:
Rappers gleefully “singing” about raping women or shooting cops just for the fun of it is dope because they are downtrodden or something, but a White guy singing about defending homes and businesses in a small town from those who would seek to burn, loot and murder (the original blm)? Well that is racist. There is a difference between promising to respond to violence with violence and promoting violence for it’s own sake.
Hopefully Aldean doesn’t back down one inch. Trying to placate people who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to country music in the first place is never a good idea but They will keep trying to wreck the genre because nothing White people like can be left untainted.