During a long drive the other day, we ended up in a particular part of Kentucky where we couldn’t find anything but country music. I’m not a fan, generally, though I have been in situations where I’ve heard a lot of the music. Not so much over the last five years.
A particular song “These Are My People,” by Rodney Atkins came on. As I listened to it, I realized that it struck me as incredibly condescending and pandering to its audience.
Some lyrics:
There was another one about a “Doublewide Paradise” but I couldn’t hear the lyrics enough to know if it was a parody.
In any case, lyrics like these seem to be saying, “Hey, if you’re listening to this you’re really stupid and you think I’m one of you just because I say so.”
So much of it seems to glorify lifestyles that the singers wouldn’t live, in a sort of “It’s great you guys are so homey and poor. I’m not, but it’s GRRRREAT you are!”
Am I the only one who gets this impression from a lot of country music? I recognize that there’s an element of solidarity to it, but does it have to be so insulting?
(And has there ever been a genre of music that is more self-referential? Every other damned song seems to remind us, at some point in the lyrics, that it’s a country song. But that’s a minor annoyance and not relevant.)
And millionaire rock stars sing about sticking it to the man and millionaire rap stars talk about life in the ghetto. All of them are built around identification with their audiences. (Heck, emo is about nothing at all except identification.)
I can’t imagine that Atkins meant that song to be condescending or that his audience would think it so. They’d far more likely nod, and think, “yeah, that’s just the way it is.”
I also don’t see country songs as proclaiming that they’re country songs more than rap songs proclaim that they’re rap songs.
Basically, either you identify with the (average, non-brilliant, vast majority of) songs or they sound like moronic crap. But that’s no more true of country than of rock, rap, and emo, or any other type of popular music.
Condescending is a drug addled millionaire singing “Imagine No Posessions”.
Country music, like every kind of music worls best when it reduces the universal to the personal. It has done that ever since “Wildwood Flower” and will continue i guess, to do so…
How can you say such a thing after hearing “Music Soothes The Savage Beast,” or after hearing Dolly Parton explain that the attraction of Country Music is that it tells a story.
Apologies to William Congreve and to any composer of opera.
Isn’t it condescending to teenagers to sing, “I wanna Rock and Roll all night, and party every day”?
Lots of people live in double-wide trailers. What’s bad about having songs written that celebrate their lives? Or should they just be embarrassed for who they are?
I find it interesting that what you dislike about country music is what attracts me most to it.
Country music is not the one injecting value-judgments into the lives of their listeners–that is your interpretation based on what you feel has value. Country music singers and listeners are aware that they are looked down on by many in society, and they could give a rat’s ass. They are proud of who they are, they are proud of the hard work they do to put food on the table, the double-wide trailer they earned**, and values they have grown up with. They perceive themselves as imperfect, rough around the edges, but ultimately built out of a noble cloth that most people living in their Ivory Towers can not perceive.
(to quote Tim McGraw, ‘‘I may be a real bad boy, but baby I’m a real good man.’’)
So what you perceive as condescension is actually pride. Though I live in Michigan, and am a college graduate who doesn’t drink, don’t currently live in a trailer or really get very excited about God or patriotism, I can connect with the music in a way that I can’t with rock. You don’t have to attend college for your life to have value. Indeed, many country songs are about the value their relationships have, their knowledge that this is what it most important and their active choice to pursue family life/love/God/whatever. They are happy not buying into society’s expectations of success. And frankly, I don’t blame them… all of that stuff is empty, it really IS relationships that matter the most.
Some of the most beautiful country music songs, by the way, address these issues of class very straight-on. When’s the last time you heard a Top-20 rock song celebrating the working class? I love trucking songs. The kid in the trailer next door to our house when I was growing up had a trucker Dad. It’s an incredibly difficult life to lead, especially when you have a family. There are so many beautiful country songs about this it makes me feel like dancing. Finally somebody singing about the way life really is for so many people. I think of most rock music to exist in the realm of fantasy – or at least the melodramatic. Country music is just as simple as most people, and I like that.
That’s my interpretation from living in a place where crushing poverty, lack of education and opportunity, and double wides are the rule, not the exception.
The idea that people should be proud of majoring in “beer and girls” and living hand to mouth and drinking too much strikes an incredibly false note to me, here in Appalachia.
How about loving others, enjoying life and working hard? Giving everything you’ve got to make your life good? Are those things people are allowed to be proud of? Because that’s what those lyrics are celebrating.
Weird, you’d think I’d hear it. I’m not saying such songs are nonexistent, (i.e. Rush’s ‘‘Working Man,’’) but they tend to be more rare. Most songs I hear on the rock radio nowadays are about failed relationships… of which we all know country music also has its share.
I don’t think of double-wide trailers as anything even remotely approximating crushing poverty. My mother lives in a double wide, and I don’t think of her as impoverished or uneducated. (She has a university degree in Mechanical Engineering… and her place is a hell of a lot bigger than our 1 bedroom apartment!) The songs that I’m aware of don’t generally talk of not being able to feed their children or string two sentences together, they just mention they live in trailers and don’t typically live a high-class lifestyle… something they are proud of because they are vividly aware that it really doesn’t matter.
My point, if I have one, is that the songs are selling contentment with living in a double wide that the people living in the double wides (if the people I know are any indication) aren’t exactly content with. In the songs, it may not matter. It seems to matter to the people I know, they just don’t have (or don’t perceive themselves as having) any options, so they’re forced to make the best of it and dream of something else when they buy their lottery tickets.
I hear something propaganda-ish about the music, that people should be content with their lot. That they should stick with their kind and not strive for anything more. That’s what I hear in those lyrics I quoted.
I grew up on a farm and while I currently live in suburbia, I am proud of where I came from. I got a cushy office job that sure beats scraping barn floors, but I will never turn into a yuppie. There’s the pride thing. I believe it is similar to people who grew up in ghettos listening to rap songs about being toughened up by growing up in rough neighborhoods. We are proud of where we come from in part because someone else thinks it is something we should be ashamed of. “It may not be pretty, but it’s real.”
Don’t all music genres pander to their target audience?
The problem with the song mentioned, and modern country music in general, is that they’re not proud of themselves for any good reason–they sound proud of themselves because it couldn’t occur to them to think anything bad about anything. The country airwaves are saturated with optomistic songs without any note of bad times and it reeks of Stuart Smalley/new age feel-goodism. The reason traditional country made so many great poverty songs (“Coal Miner’s Daughter”, “Coat of Many Colors”, “Mama Tried”, etc.) was because they showed how tough times could bring out the best in you. Also, older songs didn’t stint on showing the bad side of rural life and thus earned your trust. Since the newer country artists don’t really accept self-criticism, their emotions seem fake.
I think I understand a lot better now what you’re trying to say. I would argue that the singers write about it not only to underline the fact that there’s nothing to be ashamed of, but also to draw attention to the reality that so many live that often goes ignored in the popular media.
I just re-read the lyrics to the song you heard, and I have to admit that is one that kind of rubs me the wrong way because it specifically mentioned a lack of education. The lyrics to ‘‘Doublewide Paradise’’ have very little at all to do with being poor, but I’ll agree to hate it on the grounds that it’s by Toby Keith.
Try these classics on for size:
I don’t think the songs really sugar-coat the realities of living paycheck-to-paycheck, but the truth is, a lot of people really don’t have a lot of choice. They’re born working class and they die working class… and a lot of people lead very satisfying lives anyways. I acknowledge the importance of challenging class stratification, but these songs aren’t about society’s acceptance of it, they are about individuals living it, coping with it, and transcending it. I find that inspirational, not condescending.
I think is a legitimate criticism. I’ve only been listening to country music on a regular basis for about two months for the first time in years. I grew up listening to the stuff, so what I’m familiar with is what was written in the late 80s/early 90s and some of the ‘‘classics.’’ I think it may be accurate that modern country music acknowledges the hard realities of rural life less often than it did before. I think this could very well be because some of the up-and-coming artists don’t have a clue. Loretta Lynn, for example, lived everything she sang, which is one thing that makes her music so powerful and enduring.
Maybe such rock records haven’t been recorded recently but a lot of them exist. Most of Bruce Springsteen’s songs are written from a working class perspective as are John Mellancamp’s. Of course in the case of Springsteen, the songs are often about the desire to leave behind such a hardscrabble existence (e.g., “Born to Run”). I haven’t heard enough of today’s country songs to know if that sentiment is also present.
Incidentally, this could be just my own weird idea, but does anybody think that with a few Brit-to-Yank alterations, Pulp’s “Common People” might work as a country cover?
Ah, I see. For the record, I was born in 1983. The music of ‘‘my time’’ was Nirvana, The Peppers, and Green Day, and though I loves me some classic rock (Rush, Queen, Aerosmith, Heart), I’m not familiar with too many artists of that era.
Actually, your statement, along with InstallLSC’s observation, makes me wonder if there might be an overall trend in music in general moving away from discussing class issues honestly the way it once did?
