Why is country music so widely disliked?

[bump]

@Exapno_Mapcase

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.

That’s my issue with it; the whole commercial “Country” scene seems to glorify a sort of unsophisticated / ignorant worldview that I don’t think does anyone any favors. Rather than use their art form to effect any kind of change or thought, many artists and producers use it to reassure their audience that being uneducated and rustic is ok, and that it’s ok to not aspire to much beyond farming and “being country”.

For example, “She thinks my tractor is sexy” is a song that people seem to take at face value and think is some sort of anthem, even though I’m sure it had to be intended as tongue-in-cheek. It’s that kind of thing about country music that I can’t abide. (and FWIW, that’s a problem I have with a lot of rap music as well)

[Slithy_Tove]

Odd, because I am a lower-class white person who grew up in the counrty. I’ve milked cows and dug rocks from fresh furrows by hand. I’m too young to have plowed with horses, but I’ve worked with old famers who had. And what I’m reminded of when I listen to Country isn’t those old folks but instead cynical corporate executives who pander to the lowest common denominator. When I drive further away from these Atlanta suburban wannabees who eat grits with silver spoons, and towards Asheville, things get a little smarter and genuine. As many posts have cited and linked: the good stuff is out there.

[thicksantorum]

@LonesomePolecat

Many of them clearly are prejudiced against lower class white people, and anything that reminds them of the existence of lower class whites, e.g. country music.

As a white person from the Rust Belt, I take offense to lower-class whites being associated with country music.

[control-z]

@Regallag_The_Axe

Pop country is garbage, plain and simple. The songs in the above post are definitely not the same genre as, say, Hank 3.

Hank 3 definitely agrees that pop country really sucks (NSFW lyrics.) He’s going Straight to Hell (NSFW lyrics.) Love me some Hank 3. He plays everything from straight country (with a few cuss words) to bluegrass to metal, and some interesting experimental stuff like his Ghost to a Ghost album.

Most pop country is so cheesy and syrupy that I can hardly stand it. But like someone said upthread, 95% of everything is crap. I like Miranda Lambert and Jamey Johnson. Miranda is a bit close to pop but I like her music. Jamey is good old-style country like Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings. Alan Jackson isn’t bad either, he’s not outstanding but I like about every one of his songs.

[the_diego]

I hear country recording artists (even those not named and regularly performing in places like Vegas) tend to be rich.

[NDP]

@LonesomePolecat

Many of them clearly are prejudiced against lower class white people, and anything that reminds them of the existence of lower class whites, e.g. country music.

I guess that’s why Bruce Springsteen is also widely disliked.

[Horatio_Hellpop]

Plenty of Country fans don’t like the “'Murica, boot up yer ass” style either.

[BigT]

My thing with the accent is that it seems like it’s intentionally annoying. It takes the part of the accent that all of us try to get rid of and accentuates it. It sounds like when I intentionally put on a hick accent.

Country singers who sound like normal people with a twangy accent don’t bother me. I just never hear them anymore.

[Larry_Borgia]

It seems like a lot of people here have a very narrow idea of what country music is. It’s a lot more than pop country. There’s alt-country, classic country, bluegrass, and other sub-genres. Also, Country has had a huge influence on rock and pop.

[Green_Bean]

@Odesio

You’re right that country music usually doesn’t have to try to be edge but it does have some edgy themes. Kenny Roger’s “Ruby” is a pretty dark song about a Vietnam veteran who has been crippled, will likely die soon and his wife is stepping out for the night to get the lovin’ he’s no longer able to give her. He goes on to say that if he could grab his gun he’d “put her in the ground.” “Coward of the County” has a gang rape and “Lucille” is the plight of a man whose wife has left him alone to raise their kids.

Ha, yeah. Just yesterday I was trying to decide which song was sadder, Ruby or Jolene. I decided on Jolene. What thinks you?

[syncrolecyne]

To me, most mainstream country music today fills the niche that soft rock or adult contemporary had in the 1970s and 1980s - music that is largely mid-tempo, melodic, well-produced, and inoffensive in an office or commercial. I suspect the same sort of music fan who disparaged Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles in 1975 dislikes country music today. In fact, most of today’s mainstream country music is closer to those groups than it is to anything released by Buck Owens or Tammy Wynette.

Most alt-country and bluegrass fans today would have been folk fans in the past.

[Jackmannii]

Hmm, just today at lunch I was reminiscing about one of the very few times I have ever complained to restaurant management - it was when my favorite local barbecue place started playing country music instead of the blues.*

It wasn’t only because country is a fetid load of decaying dingoes’ kidneys, it was partly because I thought it might attract the wrong element.

Country is instrumentally trite and loathsome, its lyrics are nauseating and its women singers all tend to sound as though they’re fortyish and have overindulged in tobacco and drink (I’m always surprised to find that some of them are not unattractive). There is approximately 0.000000012% of classic country and western that I’m not actively repulsed by (i.e. Six Days On The Road, a nice drug song).

*my complaint was effective - they promptly went back to the blues.

[Sahirrnee]

@Werekoala

I love the stereotypes being displayed openly in this thread. Here’s a challenge - find a radio station that plays current “pop” country music and listen to it. Tell me how long it takes before you hear an anti-intellectual, nationalistic song.

Seriously, you’d think every R&B/Rap song is about busting caps in ni**a asses while yo’ ho pops and drops on your whistle, then lighting up some shag from Jamaica. Sheeeeeee…t.

:rolleyes:

Probably why a lot of us don’t like rap either.

Don’t even get me started on disco. As someone I knew once pointed out, when you listened to a disco station you couldn’t tell when one song ended and the next began. It was all the same.

[DonLogan]

Everything is widely disliked.

Except Sara Lee.

[Beware_of_Doug]

@Slithy_Tove

Odd, because I am a lower-class white person who grew up in the counrty. I’ve milked cows and dug rocks from fresh furrows by hand. I’m too young to have plowed with horses, but I’ve worked with old famers who had. And what I’m reminded of when I listen to Country isn’t those old folks but instead cynical corporate executives who pander to the lowest common denominator. When I drive further away from these Atlanta suburban wannabees who eat grits with silver spoons, and towards Asheville, things get a little smarter and genuine. As many posts have cited and linked: the good stuff is out there.

And there are millions upon millions who can’t relate to the good stuff, because their whole idea of (America, music, themselves) depends on accepting at face value whatever cynical (corporate executives, politicians, preachers) tell them.

[Beware_of_Doug]

Maybe not so much in the deep south, which is always its own culture, but in the blue highway regions of places like Indiana and Ohio, a lot of people have no identity left but that of Red State Americans. Anything unique and local about them and their place has been scoured away by opinion makers, who treat them as interchangeable units good only for voting, working, buying, fighting and dying. It has been one helluva successful campaign by any measure - all the more so because the subjects are all but unaware of it.

[Shodan]

[QUOTE=Sam Lowry]
It’s popularity is part of the reason it’s widely disliked.
[/QUOTE]
Reminiscent of Yogi Berra’s line about a restaurant -

Nobody goes there - it’s too crowded.

Regards,
Shodan

[astorian]

What I’ve often said of politicians holds true of music and many other things as well.

“When we like or dislike a politician, we usually have perectly sound reasons. When we LOVE or LOATHE a politician, it usually has little to do with the politician himself and much to do with what he stands for in your eyes.”

It was perfectly logical for a conventional Sixties liberal Democrat to like Hubert Humphrey, and for a conventional Republican to dislike him. But the degree to which liberal Democrats worshipped John F. Kennedy and the Republicans despised him was not at all rational. Kennedy was loved AND despised far out of proportion to anything he actually did as President. People loved or hated JFK because of what they THOUGHT He represented (whether he actually represented those things or believed in them was irrelevant), or because of what people perceived about his admirers and his detractors.

That is, when we’re rational, we judge a politician by his record. When we’re irrational, we judge him by 1) how he makes us feel, and 2) whether we think he’s One Of Us (yay!) or One of THEM (ugh!).

A hard rock fan in the Seventies disliked many genres of music, but he never worked up the kind of hatred for, say, country or classical music that he did for disco. He never chanted “Country sucks!” or “Classical blows!” Disco made him angry in a way no other genre did, and it wasn’t really about the music per se. It was about what he thought of the people who liked it. Rock fans associated disco with places like Studio 54, where Beautiful People frolicked and regular guys were kept out by snooty doormen who decided if you were cool enough to get in.

Even if MOST people who liked KC & the Sunshine Band were just regular folks who enjoyed dancing, an image was locked in the rock fans’ head: “Disco lovers are elitist wusses who think they’re better than me!”

Well, a secular urban liberal has his own image of what a country music lover is. That image often has nothing to do with reality, but that’s irrelevant. An urban liberal hears a banjo or steel guitar and immediately thinks, "This is one of those songs that says, “Hot damn, I luv Amerikkka, and I love Jesus, and I love the flag, and I hate queers.”

If an urban liberal just doesn’t LIKE the music, that makes perfect sense. There’s no type of msuic that everybody likes. But if he loathes country msuic with a passion, it’s probably not about the music- it’s about what he perceives (rightly or wrongly) about the people who love it.

MANY of us use music as shorthand, and judge others by the music they like. We immediately decde that someone who shares our musical taste MUST be part of our crowd, and that people who love certain other genres CAN’T be part of our group.

[Troutsqueezer]

I used to like country music along with other genres but as I’ve gotten older I don’t care for it anymore. In fact, over these past few days I’ve been cleaning out my mp3’s on the hard drive because with around 7000 songs, it’s too much to back up and I hardly listen anymore. As I cull the songs, I noticed that almost all the country music sounds the same to me now so I have no problem hitting the delete key for 95% of the country artists.

It is the same scenario for all the “oldies” music I have been storing over the years.

[Jackmannii]

@astorian

Rock fans associated disco with places like Studio 54, where Beautiful People frolicked and regular guys were kept out by snooty doormen who decided if you were cool enough to get in.

Huh, and all this time I thought disco music was derided because it sounded like shit, displaced rock music on the radio and the people who liked it dressed like wannabe gigolos.