Given the success and popularity of Jason Aldean, and the unlikely (and beautiful) country remake of Fast Car, wonder what folks thought about these hits or the increasing popularity of country music in general. I largely ignored this genre until Burns’ documentary, but grew to like it.
If more background is needed, inspiration is from the below link. An excerpt:
In “Try That in a Small Town,” Aldean, the 46-year-old Georgia hitmaker, salutes supposedly rural values (honor, neighborliness, gun ownership) by warning the listener that supposedly urban pathologies (robbery, spitting at cops, burning flags) don’t fly in what some would call “[Real America]”. Around here, we take care of our own,” he boasts. But the music hardly brings to mind peaceful pastures or sawdust-strewn saloons. As soon as I heard the song’s grumbling guitars, drooping minor chords, and riff ripped from Foo Fighters’ Everlong, I felt transported back to my suburban-male adolescence, circa Y2K—a time when I lived in an oversize black hoodie, listening to the groaning of men with soul patches. Aldean’s song is country in name, but its sound is post-grunge alternative rock.
In the early ’90s, Nirvana and its peers opened space for a new strain of mainstream manliness: vulnerable about feelings of failure and alienation, but with a hard, noisy edge that no one could possibly construe as sissy. Soon came a flock of [melodically moaning] bands, such as Bush, Creed, and Nickelback, that sheared grunge of its punk disposition, creating a broadly appealing template for directionless angst. [Some popular country groups now say these groups inspired them.]
I’ve always liked country music but I haven’t listened to contemporary music since like 2014, and even then my interest was spotty. I mostly listen to 80s and 90s country. My husband played me Fast Car the other day and my son went absolutely bonkers and insisted we play it over and over. It’s a good cover but I’m not really sure it adds anything to the original.
A lot of recent country music sounds more like R&B to me, which isn’t my thing either. Then there’s the fact that I feel so alienated from the politics of many of these guys that it’s hard to enjoy the music.
Now grunge I do like, but the message of that song is so awful I won’t listen to it. It gives me big Sundown Town vibes. I can attest that country singers have had big Internet Tough Guy energy for ages.
I don’t think the country version is better than Chapman’s original. But it is very good, beautifully sung, and seems more unlikely than it probably should.
Seems like the Chapman cover is not like the Aldean “nickelback” style country that is popular. The first is OK, the latter is not. Is country music more popular than in the past? I used to love it, now not so much. Most of it now seems to be a more countrified version of Kid “Truck Nuts” Rock music. No thanks.
My theory is that grunge bifurcated the rock audience. Until the early 90s, boomer and Gen-Xer rock fans all listened to the same blend of classic and new rock that encompassed everything from the Grateful Dead to Guns & Roses.
(I’m being uber-general here. Obviously, not everyone liked everything equally. But that’s what the rock stations played.)
Grunge hit around the same time Garth Brooks became massively popular, and he was basically Bob Seger in a hat. Suddenly, people who liked the edgy direction of grunge went all-in for alternative, and people who didn’t enjoy alternative found rock-like comfort in the new Nashville.
As a result, rock basically died as a popular genre. Alternative splintered and (mostly) fizzled, but country just got bigger.