Hip-hop is huge in France, probably more so than in Britain…
Johnny Cash’s music sounds nothing like country music. I love Johnny Cash. So I guess the key to getting me to like country music is to make it sound nothing like country music.
To me, country music is fully of twangy, cracking voices, and/or twangy guitars and banjos. Johnny Cash sounds about as country as Elvis Presley.
Conversely, although Lynyrd Skynyrd is considered rock, it sounds like country to me and I’ve never been able to stand it. (At least not Free Bird or Sweet Home Alabama.)
saywhutnow?
Hip-hop for old white guys:
I explained myself in the rest of my post. I can only assume you’re just clowning now.
(Which I’m cool with, by the way.)
You did–but saying what it sounds like “to you” and saying Johnny Cash isn’t country music is, to be mild, an idiosyncratic definition of country music. Cash is one of the all-time great country music artists. Do you mean to say that you dislike the sort of country music that plays on FM stations owned by Clear Channel? Because that ain’t country.
And that’s called Irony!
Glad it’s appreciated 
If someone ever asks me what a typical Doper is like, I’ll point to this thread. It’s another “I can make it better and cheaper at home” faux elitist bullshit. I say faux, because when Kendrick Lamar got a fuckin’ Pulitzer for his lyrics, the real elite weighed in and deemed rap worthy.
Not liking rap is one thing, claiming total ignorance smells of something else, though I’m not sure what of. I don’t follow celebrity gossip, and live far from the U.S. but I have at least some notion about who the Kardashians are. I have a hard time thinking the people in this thread saying that they have no clue about rap, since they avoid it, aren’t being disingenuous.
Questlove of “The Roots” and “The Tonight Show” made a 201 song hip hop playlist for Keith Olbermann. I’m sure it’s 100x better than what your roommate is playing.
Relevant link:
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on the Dope in ages.
As an older white guy, I agree with the OP. I do not like any form of rap or hip-hop. The whole genre does not appeal to me in any way shape or form. There are some borderline songs I do like, Epic by Faith No More or Fight For Your Right by the Beastie Boys. Both contain enough hard rock to make them listenable. I absolutely hated attending my grand daughter’s high school basketball games due to the rap that was blasted at every break in the action. In my own private hell when my time comes, would be having to choose between listening to rap or country for eternity.
All I know is that 99% of the country music I’ve ever heard sounds the same. I don’t know if that’s Clear Channel or not.
Charlie Daniels is the one country music star that I know of as an exception (I often say The Devil Went Down to Georgia is the only country music song I like, but that’s kind of a hybrid country/rock song). If Cash is considered country, then okay, that’s another exception. Anything else I’ve heard on a country music station (new and old) sounds like garbage to my ears. It makes me cringe.
I grew up hearing a lot of that because my mom was a fan, and it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Just FYI, this is going back at least to the 80s, I’m not talking about just recent country music.
“If” he’s considered country? For real?
There’s a whole subgenre of country that I’m not much of a fan of–the Toby Keith style, to be specific. But Willie Nelson, and Dolly Parton, and Emmy Lou Harris, and Johnny Cash, and Robert Earl Keen, and folks like that, they’re amazing.
I was in my twenties before I realized that radio country music wasn’t the only kind, and realized how good country music could be: lyrical, subtle, funny, gutwrenching, political.
I mean, how many songs in other genres reference 18th century horror ballads?
To bring it back to the OP: Folks saying stuff like that about country music are why I just about never make any commentary about hiphop. I don’t know much of anything about the genre, and the fact that I’m not a fan of much of what I hear just points to my own ignorance of the genre, not to any flaw in the genre itself.
Well said
Eh, there can be definite flaws in any genre, and to say that I don’t like what’s played as “modern country” doesn’t mean that I can’t like both older stuff and related music like bluegrass. Like anything else, commercialization and being “safe” is an issue for radio play, with the classic example shown in this YouTube clip. Sir Mashalot: Mind-Blowing SIX Song Country Mashup - YouTube
Seems to be the day for this one…
Perhaps if we mix it with some hip hop for you…
