Country Music Objectively Sucks, Part Two

How Has the Music Gotten Here?

Garth Brooks

When Garth Brooks hit the scene in 1989, my local radio DJ said of him: “This kid is so young, his skin still shines.” His breakthrough single, “Much Too Young To Feel This Damn Old,” had a simple acoustic arrangement and a spirited singalong chorus. Later songs like “Rodeo” and “Friends In Low Places” cemented his reputation. This guy felt like a country singer.

But unlike former rodeo champion Chris LeDoux, whom Brooks helped shepherd to stardom, Brooks always seemed embarrassed by country music. He recorded covers of Little Feat, Don McLean, and KISS which got progressively less distinct from their originals. He hired sidemen without country credentials. Prior to his Chris Gaines album, when he announced his next CD would not be country, many fans shrugged and said, “How’s that any different?”

Through it all, paying audiences rewarded Brooks for his ambivalence. He sold out arena venues, and moved more albums than anybody but the Beatles. Fans ignored his burgeoning gut and documented extramarital affairs, and his winning streak ended only when he took himself out of the game. The music scene Brooks left behind had been permanently changed in his image.

Country musicians have always felt torn between raw authenticity and commercial success. The honky-tonk of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell gave way to the Nashville Sound championed by Chet Atkins. In my childhood, radio provided the field where spare, muscular Outlaw Country competed with more commercial Countrypolitan. In pure dollar terms, slick, highly produced country has always done better than the honest, naive stuff.

Retracing music history, though, these subgenres didn’t squeeze each other off the air. A country station might play a slick track by Ray Price or Dottie West, and swing without pause into Kris Kristofferson or David Allan Coe. Honky-tonk survivor George Jones revived his career with his crisp Atkins-produced duets with his wife, Tammy Wynette. Different influences mingled, but it all remained country music.

Tammy Wynette
and George Jones

Why, then, today’s dominant divisions? The genre’s slick half runs the commercial airwaves, while traditional-minded acts like Robbie Fulks, Neko Case, and the Drive-By Truckers get squeezed to the Internet ghetto. Why is radio driven by music that verbally acknowledges the honky-tonk past, but sounds more like 1970s Southern rock? The answer may come from outside the music itself.

Garth Brooks’ electrified country-lite ascendency coincided with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which significantly deregulated mass media. Where once, companies were limited in the number of outlets they could own, and their ability to dominate regional markets, now companies like Clear Channel and Sinclair could own nearly all the radio in an area. And these conglomerates demanded returns that would make Mexican drug lords blush.

Country Music is big business. Country is the most common music radio format in America, with a more unified audience base than rock and pop genres. Thus, singles that can follow Brooks’ highly commercialized model have unprecedented reach. Get your song picked up by conglomerate media, Cowboy, and you can wipe your ass on Benjamins.

Studio labels and radio conglomerates conspire to push songs onto the airwaves that, apart from twangy vocals and the occasional fiddle, are indistinguishable from classic rock programming. Taylor Swift and Luke Bryan make money by attracting large crossover audiences. The fact that traditional country listeners, like me, drift away in droves, doesn’t matter. There aren’t enough of us.

But historically, slick country doesn’t produce music that lasts. Many artists honor the idea of Skeeter Davis or Charlie Rich, but nobody actually listens to them. Acts that didn’t have the same influence in the short term, like Dwight Yoakam or Billy Joe Shaver, remain listenable decades after they laid their music down. Of course, music studios have to pay their bills right now. But that doesn’t justify artistic short-sightedness.

Chet Atkins

When I saw Darrell Scott in concert, he made a point of emphasizing what he did as “real country music,” then ticked off on his fingers: “pre-Toby, pre-video, pre-mechanical bull.” The audience applauded forcefully, because we knew what he meant: country music isn’t about selling more copies. It isn’t about winning. Country music is about telling the truth. And the truth is seldom commercial.

No one audience should monopolize the genre. Just because I don’t like Blake Shelton doesn’t mean he should go away. But only one kind of music now dominates the country mainstream. The competition and difference that made the country of my childhood has largely disappeared. Without that, the sound has become incestuous. That’s why country music objectively sucks.

PART ONE:
Where Has the Music Gotten?

Country Music Objectively Sucks, Part One

Where Has The Music Gotten?

Hank Williams

Blake Shelton’s annoying country anthem “Boys ‘Round Here” begins with this strange boast:

Well the boys ‘round here
don’t listen to the Beatles,
run old Bocephus
through the jukebox needle
at the honky-tonk
where they boot stomp
all night (That’s right)

So... let me get this straight. The Beatles broke up in 1970, while Bocephus (Hank Williams, Jr.) hasn’t had a significant chart hit since 1990. So Shelton seems to declare that “the boys ‘round here” embrace their parents’ pop culture as a means of rejecting, what, their grandparents? That makes plenty of sense.

We see the same problem in Brantley Gilbert’s “Country Must Be Countrywide,” when the artist boasts: “In every state, there’s a station/Playing Cash, Hank, Willie, and Waylon.” By “Hank” he must mean Hank Williams, since nobody calls Hank Junior or Hank III “Hank.” And nobody listens to Hank Snow anymore (your loss). So that’s three dead superstars, and one who hasn’t had even a minor hit since 2002.

Jason Aldean’s strange country rap “1994,” an invocation of novelty artist Joe Diffie, who hasn’t mattered in nearly two decades, merits mention here. But nothing more.

I love country music. My parents had me singing with George Jones and Tammy Wynette about the time they got me onto solid food. Ask me anything I’ve ever learned about environmental science, and maybe I’ll remember something about storm clouds; but I remember all the words to Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night.” Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger album is the pride of my collection.

That’s why it bothers me when mediocre stars playing uninspiring music dominate country radio. Brantley Gilbert’s right, I’ve never lived anywhere in America where you can’t dial in a hillbilly station; but since the middle 1990s, the music has grown small in its ambitions, blandly slick in its execution, and timid in its themes. But artists attempt to establish their credibility by name-checking superstars they scarcely resemble.

June Carter Cash
and Johnny Cash

Shelton seems proud that his boys are “keeping it country,” a turn of phrase Gretchen Wilson also uses in “Redneck Woman.” I don’t know what it means in either case. But from Shelton, it sounds especially weird coming from the mouth of a man singing in a twang-rap hybrid. His song seems designed to reach white suburban youths who would never actually put a quarter in the jukebox for Bocephus.

Country music, with its conservative rural ethic, has a long history of looking backward. Waylon Jennings’ “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” complained, in 1975, that country music had fallen in love with its own mythology and lost its roots. The title character in the Bellamy Brothers’ 1985 hit “Old Hippie” “gets off on country music, because disco left him cold.”

But today’s over-the-shoulder credibility grabs feel different. By name-checking older artists, Shelton and Aldean seem to admit the music they and other hitmakers record today can’t hold a candle to their heroes. This feels like a tacit confession that the crap Nashville studios push out under the country music rubric isn’t very good. They’re saying what I’ve said for fifteen years: today’s country music objectively sucks.

I still listen to Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, and Johnny Cash because their rustic authenticity speaks to me in ways Top 40 cannot. The very lack of studio polish means that nothing stands between the musician and the audience but a guitar. When Hank sings “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” by damn, I believe him.

When the Dixie Chicks recycle Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” or Darius Rucker cuts the gonads off Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel,” I don’t feel that. I’m conscious, hearing these songs, of the studio environment, the background vocalists holding lyric sheets, and instrumental tracks someone will dub in later. In today’s country music, the producer, not the soloist, is the star.

Waylon Jennings
and Jessi Colter

Not that good country music doesn’t exist. Acts like The Gourds and The Old 97s still record recognizable country music that maintains that raw cry from the heart. They just persevere without mainstream radio support. Johnny Cash won a Grammy for Unchained and a CMA award for “Hurt,” despite being ignored by radio for the final two decades of his life.

If anyone doubts that country music objectively sucks, I dare you: Google the Bellamy Brothers’ 1982 hit “Redneck Girl.” Then Google Gretchen Wilson’s 2004 “Redneck Woman.” Go on, listen to them back to back. I’ll wait. Then tell me, with a straight face, that country music is not on a decades-long slide.

Part Two:
How Has the Music Gotten Here?

First Contact and Nightfall

S.G. Redling, Damocles

When the crew of the human exploratory vessel Damocles settles over the planet Didet, they think they have a years-long observe-and-report mission ahead. But mechanical failure forces an emergency landing for which neither the humans nor the Dideto are prepared. Suddenly, a beach drenched in eternal sunlight plays host to negotiations that will change two species forever.

Redling’s second novel, and first out-and-out science fiction, blatantly combines elements of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood with Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” to create a cerebral journey sci-fi devotees will find comfortably familiar, yet engrossingly new. Redling keeps focus on the scientific aspects of first contact—language and cultural barriers, incompatible technology, finding food—without ever losing pace or bogging down in jargon and effluvia.

Linguist Meg Dupris feels like an alien on a ship full of engineers and scientists. Where her five colleagues deal with empirical precision and absolutes, her discipline relies on guesswork, delicate balances, and false cognates. But on the surface, her affinity for the fuzziness of language and culture makes her indispensable. Sadly, it just doesn’t make her any more liked.

Loul Pell has been seconded to peon work since his thesis on how to handle First Contact got him laughed out of respected public service. But when the tall, lithe humans land on his planet, he accidentally finds himself between them and the trigger-happy generals who stand completely unprepared for interspecies dialog. Only Loul and Meg have the kind of thinking required for something as imprecise as First Contact.

Where many writers skip past such mundane details as language and technology, Redling revels in such specialized detail. These species have no C-3P0, no TARDIS translation circuit. They have to painstakingly overcome the simple barrier that their languages, learned gestures, and other forms of communication, have no correlation. Making contact requires diligence and trust.

Redling spares no detail, relaying brass tacks with the kind of humane care few authors have captured well since Asimov. But where Asimov believed technology and dispassion could close the gaps in human fallibility, Redling trusts “hard” science to readers’ wisdom. (Self-regenerating crystal propulsion? Pshaw.) Instead, she focuses on traits which make us, and the aliens we encounter, most innately human: the ability to build bonds and communicate.

As Meg and Loul make incremental linguistic gains, slowly developing rapport and a working pidgin, Redling’s shifting perspective allows readers to see First Contact from both perspectives. The Dideto evolved under different conditions, leading to profound genetic distinctions. (Apologies to Butler, but there will be no species melding tonight.) The two races explore the similarities, and differences, between them, some lovingly, others with profound distrust.

Yet the races share remarkable resemblances. Loul communicates through text messages, loves comic books, and is known to his friends and colleagues as a “nerd.” Just as in human society, the powers that be mock and belittle nerds for their excessively specialized interests. Until, that is, they need a nerd’s expertise to bridge gaps that generals and presidents find abstruse.

As First Contact lingers, though, complications arise. The humans cannot yet return to their damaged ship, and Meg doesn’t want to leave Loul yet; but The Purpling approaches, that one night per decade when Didet’s seven suns all set and the sky goes dark. The Purpling is a Dideto religious celebration, but it’s also the time when their world is at its most vulnerable. Someone must make a decision, but they lack the vocabulary to explain.

Perhaps nowhere else in this long, careful book does Redling so blatantly channel another author. But she doesn’t just imitate one of science fiction’s most beloved moments; she also seems to refute it, arguing that Asimov, that pedant, missed the point. She proposes her own interpretation of that moment, one which will follow readers as surely as Asimov’s slant does.

This perhaps proves what Redling does so well, that other writers strive after but fall short: she takes the components that readers love, and makes them her own. A plot breakdown would make this novel feel bloodless, derivative, and flat. But Redling injects it with such verve and purpose that it develops its own momentum, separate from the classics it mirrors.

I grew up on science fiction, but have found so little recently that recaptures the smart, cerebral wonder of my youth. I’m pleased to report, I’ve finally found it. No ray-guns, no chest-bursters, no nuclear whatsits impinging the mitochondrial do-funny for Redling. Just a high-browed psychological peek into the cogs that make us most profoundly, vivaciously human.

Self-Publishing Delirium

Maxwell Perkins

Two friends with literary aspirations recently voiced desire to escape the publishing grind, dominated by media conglomerates who demand higher profit than drug lords, and print their own books through subsidy publishers. As a reviewer, I receive (sometimes after specifically refusing them) numerous such books. To my friends, and anyone else reading, I request: in the name of all you hold sacred, don’t do it!

People who subsidy publish are nuts. Not everyone, of course; some are sweet people with noble intentions who want more creative autonomy. Some buy into hype without sufficient research. Some think they’ll be the next breakout sensation, like Christopher Paolini. But subsidy-published authors have a disproportionate likelihood to be jibbering, delirious, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs unhinged. Avoid their company.

Authors who pay to “publish” through Outskirts, CreateSpace, and AuthorHouse choose not to submit to informed scrutiny before turning their words loose on the audience. These companies don’t publish works so much as print them. They provide no assistance on manuscript preparation, physical design, or efficient publicity. Most important, they provide no editing services, which such authors consistently need.

Some people see the word “editor,” think “copy checker,” and respond that their best friend, spouse, or roommate did the proofreading. But editors don’t just untangle grammar; they serve as surrogate audience, carefully anticipating paying readers’ response to a piece of writing. Without such intervention, subsidy-published authors show no sign of awareness that human readers exist at the other end of the continuum.

Legends recall young F. Scott Fitzgerald pushing a manuscript variously titled The High-Bouncing Lover and Under the Red, White, and Blue on several uninterested publishers. Because the book relied on concept more than execution, staff readers bounced it out the door. It took a visionary, Maxwell Perkins, to see Fitzgerald’s embryonic genius through his unfocused prose, and coax The Great Gatsby to maturity over three strenuous years.

Walt Whitman

Many subsidy-published authors refuse such difficult nurturance. I receive inchoate, sprawling books that clearly haven’t seen correction since the outline dribbled off the authors’ fingers. These manuscripts, often formatted with tiny type and little margin to cut costs, look like the first drafts they probably are. Such authors demonstrate overt disinterest in their audience, expecting praise for their every brain dropping.

Several subsidy publishers advertise that classic authors like Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf published their own books. That’s true, they did. Their work stood so far outside the mainstream that they had to take publishing into their own hands. That’s a legitimate reason to publish your own book.. But Whitman and Woolf didn’t just have their books printed; they undertook the full publishing process, which isn’t easy.

Authors like Dara Beevas and Joel Friedlander write on this topic. If you would publish your own book, you must assume full business responsibility, including not just hiring a third-party editor, but also a designer, marketer, and publicist. You must stop thinking like an artist, and become a legitimate entrepreneur. This isn’t Field of Dreams; they’ll only come if you build something worth seeing.

Subsidy publishers discourage such frank humility. Because technology cuts printing time to weeks, even days, the lag between scribbling your first draft and seeing your book on Amazon.com can run remarkably short. But this doesn’t mean you’ve published a book, only that you’ve printed a manuscript. And in pushing an unfinished book onto the market, you’ve stolen time and resources from paying customers.

I’ve read authors who base entire books on half-remembered lectures heard two decades ago. I’ve read authors who recite bigoted stereotypes as contributions to interracial dialog. I’ve read authors who think plagiarizing 1970s pop songs and Victorian quatrains makes them poets. These authors have two traits in common: they paid to publish their own books. And they thought that having a byline entitled them to unstinting public praise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Again, self-publishing is both possible and noble. My friend Jerry published his first novel with a mainstream conglomerate, who dropped the ball on publicity, letting his book languish. He’s published multiple books since then, going guerilla on contemporary digital platforms. But he has taken the full entrepreneurial approach. He doesn’t just print his books, he publishes them. He pays the costs, and reaps the rewards.

Online retailers are choked with books published without scrutiny, often looking scarcely better than mimeographed liberal newsletters from the disco era. Even if your book shines like silver, it will not emerge from the morass of such books. Save your money for the real grind. Because it may be difficult and dispiriting, but it continues to exist for a reason.

Barukh Atah Adonai

Rabbi Ted Falcon and David Blatner, Judaism For Dummies

Until recently, Jewish people and their faith were lumped into two categories in the public imagination: either stereotyped lawyers and entertainment executives, or abstract cultural “heroes” like Anne Frank. That is, when they weren’t hated for centuries-old fictional slurs. But recent trends have moved Judaism to a central position in public discourse, without necessarily answering important questions in outsiders’ minds.

Rabbi Ted Falcon and David Blatner come from a background in multi-faith outreach and cultural clarification. They have experience answering queries, some of them quite naive, and know what doubts and misinformation linger most in outsiders’ minds. They spot the gap between reality and what people think they already know. That makes them good choices to write a “For Dummies” book about the faith that founded the Abrahamic tradition.

If you’ve ever read a “For Dummies,” this book’s format is familiar. It’s designed to read out of sequence, dipping into the reference as questions arise. But it also rewards conventional reading, as the authors progress in inquirers’ most common sequence, from broad strokes of belief, through the people’s history, into brass tacks of practice, finishing with fine detail about what makes Judaism unique.

In their introduction, Falcon and Blatner say they write for two audiences: non-observant Jews interested in rediscovering their heritage, and outsiders curious about one of Earth’s oldest continuously observed religions. As such, the text is essentially bilingual. It gives a plain-English survey of Jewish religious precepts, then for those who want it, proceeds to a detailed investigation of exacting practice. The authors are good about defining terminology.

Jews have maintained their identity as a people over centuries of diaspora, in largest part because they have retained their traditions in ways other scattered peoples have not. Their elaborate mix of written history and oral tradition, bound in ritual that gives observant Jews a body of shared experience, preserves their mutuality. This includes their tradition of controversy, which outsiders have long mistaken for disunion.

Falcon and Blatner do a remarkable job keeping the balance between Orthodox and more Liberal traditions, especially considering that some parties in such divides consider their opposite numbers apostate. Controversy is at the heart of Judaism, as any Talmud student knows. Our authors carefully recount such debates as influence readers’ understanding, while remaining studiously neutral themselves—sometimes, the debate matters more than the solution.

Rabbi Ted Falcon

Not that they are completely impartial. They say some controversies aren’t worth having. They completely exclude Messianic Judaism, as even the Israeli Knesset does, saying it constitutes a wholly separate religion. Also, though they address humanist Judaism briefly, they preponderantly assume Jews share belief in God, while they admit the word “God” admits multiple definitions. “Israel,” after all, means “he wrestles with God.”

The authors include glossaries of Hebrew and Yiddish terms, useful in understanding Jewish thought, and several standard Orthodox prayers, including the ritual blessings, famed for their salutation: “Barukh atah Adonai.” Because Judaism, like any religion or philosophy with a long history, has its own vocabulary, these glossaries help readers understand more, better, faster.

I initially felt frustrated that the authors didn’t cite sources for some of their claims, especially for important rabbinic controversies, which they report in a “some say... others say” manner. But Appendix C cites several valuable books, magazines, websites, and organizations for readers wanting in-depth study. I still wish the authors integrated their citations, but they do pave the way for readers who’ve had their interest piqued.

Christian readers will especially enjoy this book. Our Sunday School history of Judaism often stops in the late Second Temple period, ending when the Gospels diverge from the Talmud. But Judaism, like Christianity, is a living faith. We need to understand where it is, now, if we want to understand where we came from ourselves.

As inclusive as this book is, readers should remember what it is not. Falcon and Blatner craft a synoptic introduction to the Jewish religion, not the Jewish people; you’ll find nothing about Jewish art, culture, or non-religious history. It’s also a layperson’s overview, not a rabbinical textbook, and will make nobody more spiritual, or more Jewish. Remember, this is Judaism for Dummies, not Judaism for the already learned.

But for non-observant Jews seeking a connection to their heritage, or Gentiles wanting deeper understanding of Judeo-Christian roots, this book makes a good primer. The authors’ plain English explanations, laced with gentle but pointed humor, keeps the reading brisk. Any readers interested in browsing Jewish beliefs have here a good reference to begin their research.