Why No Obscene Country Music?

[Odieman]

Another Kinky Friedman song from the early seventies (his band name was the Texas Jewboys) was an answer song to Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”…it was called “Asshole from El Paso”

Keith

[racinchikki]

*Originally posted by jaimest *

I have no interest in racist country (I suspected it existed somewhere), or even locker room porno. I just thought it would be great to hear country singers sing the truth once in a while, and tell us what they really think

Good luck.

In the alt.country genre there are plenty of songs and artists who take this tell-these-folks-the-truth attitude, but it’s not widespread for a couple of reasons.

Mainstream radio country is just too straitlaced. There seems to be very little freedom of choice of material for most of the mainstream country singers; so-called “pop country” is what’s selling now; that’s what’s being produced and released, therefore. There’s a kind of business being run very tightly on Music Row. You have to stay within the bounds of COUNTRY, and it’s just “not done” to have obscenity in a country song. Country is, after all, the good ol’-fashioned stuff. It’s like right wing politics.

Also, you’re a lot more likely to find innuendo and hinting - a kind of humorous form - than out and out swearing and obscenity, even in alt.country and the looser, less governed types of country music. It’s just the way the genre is. For example, a song by Austin alt.country singer/songwriter Charlie Robison:

…The girl I’d been eyeing all evening
She took me round back and we sucked… down the rest of that bottle
And things really started to click
Well, we kissed on the boxes of liquor
And she reached down and grabbed her some Dick…el and added some cola
Far be it for me I should pass
For I thought that if I drank another
I’d certainly need me some ass…pirin on the next morning
I’d tried not to make me a sound
‘Cause the girl who was sleepin’ beside me
Had gained herself 200 pound…ing on my bedroom window
My dad yelled to jump out of bed
But she woke up from all the commotion
Insisting she give me some head…lines she’d read in the paper [etc]
[sub]from “Life of the Party,” by C. Robison, available on the Lucky Dog Records album Step Right Up[/sub]

It’s typical of rap to be full of obscenity. It’s typical of country not to be. That’s just the way it is. :shrug:

[Glenoled]

Isn’t all country music obscene? I know most of it makes my ears bleed…

[black_rabbit]

What about Mojo Nixon?

[red_dragon60]

And Johnny Paycheck? Heck, his real life is obscene.

[50]

Thanks guys for enlightening me more on this subject.

Heres a story, I was at my cabin, in the middle of nowere, with a friend, we were piss drunk, theres always 10 or so different bottles of stuff to choose from, including Jamacian overproof rum, and we were schrooming, its like 4am and I found this tape to play in the cheap radio, and it was that Coe guys tape, and we listened to this thing over and over just busting up big time, it was a really bad dub of the tape so we had this thing cranked up…well you get the story, but I never knew who the artist was that gagged Linda, and made the evening so fun.