It seems that a lot of people dislike country music. I’m wondering why. You’ll often hear people say “I like a lot of music, but not country music.”
(I myself am not a big fan of country music, but here I’m just asking why it’s so widely disliked. And I’m not insulting people who do like it, or trying to start a country-music-bashing thread. I’m just looking for reasons.)
I’m not an American, but maybe it has something to do with the kind of people usually associated with liking country music - rednecks, hillbillies, bible belters. Even though there are a lot of artists that resist that kind of stereotype (the Dixie Chicks come to mind) that severely dings the cool factor of country music.
I think it just depends where you are. Where I live, everyone likes (or at least tolerates) country music.
Frankly, all musical genres have their audiences. I would have to look up record sales and whatnot, but I’d guess that country does alright compared to other genres. I drive all over Indiana, and I can always find at least three country FM stations at any given time.
Actually it may be the most popular music in the world. A lot of Americans don’t like the C&W music ‘scene’ that is perceived to be catering to dumb rednecks and the like. It is a very broad genre that hard to characterize in simple ways. Some people may love the rock&roll end of the country spectrum, and hate the crying in your beer type stuff. Some people may hate the twangy, corny stuff, and then love the vocals of the same very talented artists in more melodic works.
That’s part of it. Another part can be illustrated with a joke. What happens if you play a country music record backward? Your wife comes back, you get your pickup truck back, your dog comes back to life… Same themes over and over again. Of course you might say that’s true of any music; but in country music they seems particularly overused. ‘I gave him my love and he cheated on me’, ‘I gave her everything, and she cheated on me’, ‘I’m just trying to live my life, and the government wants to steal my money’, ‘I got drunk’, ‘I got drunk and started a fight’, ‘I got drunk and got thrown into jail’, ‘I ain’t got no money, and my truck needs fixin’ and if I had the money I’d buy a new one, but I’d keep the old one and fix it – but not too much, because it has character’, and so on. And there’s a good deal of Bible-thumping.
Musically, a lot of people don’t care for slide guitars. Many of the lyrics are drawn out in sort of a ‘pleading’ manner, which gets a bit obnoxious after a while. The costuming is weird, too. Rock bands pretty much gave up matching suits in the early-'60s. (Of course there were later bands that used costumes as part of their ‘band persona’. KISS and GWAR come to mind, and Alice Cooper liked his proto-Goth look.) Country singers held onto the Western-inspired, Liberace-flamboyant leisure suits too long. And the big hair. They were ripe for mocking. Last time I looked, they seem to be going for the rodeo look. It just seems corny to me. (Of course corn is grown in the country!)
In the '70s there was Progressive Rock. Instead of short ‘pop music’ songs, bands performed long pieces that explored over-arching themes and complex musical composition. Punk rock protested the status quo; sometimes angrily, and sometimes satirically. New Wave continued the social commentary, and talked of love and fun in the modern world. Grunge deconstructed the synthetic New Wave, generally exploring contemporary issues (personal and otherwise) without the ‘over-production’. And so on. Country music seemed (seems) stuck in the past. Same old themes, same old music.
That said, there’s some Country music I like. There were a couple of songs by Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood that I liked back in the '90s. k.d. lang has a wonderful voice, and she went places other Country singers wouldn’t go.
And Johnny Cash was The Man (in Black).
I can’t say I’m deeply into country music like I am with the blues or “golden age” hip-hop, but I do really love “classic” country music: Hank Williams Sr., Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, George Jones, etc. all that shit is amazing.
Of what little I am exposed to, as a 35-year-old lifelong Marylander, what I don’t like about “modern” country music is it seems to all be either cheesy, idiotic, cloying, patriotic pandering, or just pop music with a pedal steel thrown in. Seriously, hearing them knowing nothing about them I would never categorize Faith Hill, Shania Twain, or The Dixie Chicks as country music. Even Miranda Lambert, who I like and is worlds more “country” than those others, is not especially “country” to me.
It’s because modern country is the music equivalent of daytime television.
Well, if you don’t like country music, you better like western, because there’s only the two.
I like some country music but most of it grates on my nerves.
The twang, and you’d think there was nothing more to life except for lying, cheating, and crying in your beer.
However, back in my going out partying days the country bars were always a lot more fun than the rock bars.
It’s because we currently politicize everysinglething in this country.
Here’s a good place for me to let off a little steam about a news report I saw from an Orlando, Florida TV station online the other day. Two very polished people with scarcely any accent at all (how did they do that?) were showing a video of a news event in which a woman from one of the Carolinas was speaking.
At the end of the clip the talking head woman said sarcastically, “And she has such a cute little country accent, doesn’t she?”
It seemed obvious that the announcer was insinuating political thought crimes or inferiority due to the others’ accent.
Ticked me off. But it got me to thinking. Do I ever do that? Spent some time running through various types of accents that, if I hear them, I may make unfair assumptions.
Yeah, I do that. Ugh. I’m reminded of that old saying that every time you point a finger at someone else you’ve got three more pointing back at you.
Because people love their hound dawgs, skinny-dippin’ in the creek and their pickup truck doesn’t mean they’re human trash. Sometimes human trash is all slicked up and has a perfect accent.
Country is my favorite kind of tree.
You have to distinguish between classic and modern country. Modern county is pop music with an accent – that right there is pretty bad already – but then I really hate it because is it hyper-sentimental, nationalistic, calculatingly written to appeal to white trash, and extols simplicity to the point of anti-intellectualism (pick your own link).
Country music contains multitudes. The biggest issue is that claiming to dislike country music is considered “cool” for a variety of reasons - pretty much all mentioned upthread:
So yeah, it is easy to jump on the Hate Country bandwagon - so many folks do. Too bad - lotta good stuff out there. I got Dwight Sings Buck - Dwight Yoakum doing an album of Buck Owens covers - and damn, each one is a 3-minute polished jewel - very Hank Williams in their simplicity and power…
My wife went through a spell of listening to country music. She’s emerging from it because she finds the lyrics mostly inane, especially on love songs, and because it gets repetitious.
When I listened to some of the ones she liked I reintroduced her to 70s southern rock, like The Outlaws. It’s not a good thing when some of your best music is a retread of another genre’s work from four decades ago. Having a good beat and being good driving listening is just one aspect of music. Very little country is as musically adventurous, as diverse, as complex, or as deep as rock can be. Production is surprisingly limited. You don’t always have to replicate a live sound. Albums can be anything you want to be.
The simplicity of country is held up as a virtue by its fans. There is a snobbery to insisting that complex art is better than simple art, but avoiding complexity isn’t inherently a good thing. That snobbery goes back a long way, to the time when rock itself was considered too simple to be good. But rock music changed in a way that country music hasn’t.
I try not to bash any genre of music and I try find something out of each one so that I can at least say, “I guess it’s not all bad.” When I worked at Six Flags as a youth, I would sing along to the country and western songs that were piped in on the PA system. They all had a lovable quality to them. To this day, I still find myself singing or humming those tunes.
But I think the reason why country in general isn’t appealing to me is because it’s too foreign to my cultural experience. I did not grow up listening to it. No one I know listens to it. My ears are used to focusing in on the rhythm and soulful sanging of R&B or the drum or the guitar stylings of rock. With country music, my ears can only hear the unfamiliar aspects–like the whining, stretched-out vocalizations and the steel guitar. My brain doesn’t know what to do with these things. Hence, listening to the songs requires some effort.
I also that the culture represented by country music also is a turn-off for me. So it’s not just that it’s different. It’s different in a particular way.
There’s probably a country song with that lyric.
George Strait had one that was similar – “Every time you throw dirt on her, you lose a little ground.” 
how true it is or not
There was a study that showed people who listen to country music are more likely to commit suicide
see if this link will work
[URL=“http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2579974?uid=3739704&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102358883941”
I’ve noticed that a lot of it is just… smug. A whole lot of “you city folk couldn’t understand”. Couldn’t understand the way we’re partying at some bar or bonfire, couldn’t understand the way we appreciate our families or loved ones, couldn’t understand the way we love our nation, etc. Someone singing about watching their daughter graduate and how she used to make daisy chains and you can just imagine the head-nodding “Yup, we sure notice these things and love our families more for them” going on.
I suppose there’s an amount of urban music about going to clubs and buying expensive crap and hanging out with expensive women but you don’t have the moral superiority oozing from that genre of music.
That’s one way to solve the problem! 