Country hasn’t always been the Luke Bryan’s and Toby Keith’s and whoever else has been playing on country radio for the past 20 years. Singing songs about “sittin in your truck out by the lake, 80 miles from Santa Fe.”
Country music was about feeling detached from your labor, feeling alone, running from the law, punching your boss, and getting high. It was about rejecting urban sprawl. It was about bandits, freight trains, and growing up poor. In fact… one could argue that country music is historically the most left leaning genre of music to date. From Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, to Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, to the modern artists in the alt country music scene today. Country music is made for us. And it never went away, it became harder to find good country with the commercialization of the genre. Capitalism put its filthy fucking hands in OUR music and soiled everything we loved about it.
So if you think you don’t like country music you and consider yourself a leftist.. I think you owe it to yourself to do some research into the genre. Those songs I used as examples above are great. Other examples of amazing older country songs are
Guy Clark - L.A. Freeway
Johnny Paycheck - take this job and shove it
Loretta Lynn - Coal Miners Daughter
Steve Earl - The Mountain
I could make a very long list of great old country songs, but I’ll stop there. Some newer songs to check out
Tyler Childers - Hard Times
Bella White - Just like leaving
Benjamin Tod - I Will Rise
I could make an equally long list of great modern country songs. You’re just not going to hear any of them on the radio. If you listen to those songs and still just don’t like them, that’s fine. I just think as leftists, tankies, anarkiddies, whatever you call yourself… we owe it to country music to give it more than a once over from what youve heard on the radio.
So yeah that’s my post. It was going to be a comment on @DasKarlBarx ’s post about country music but I felt this deserved its own post.
Acoustic guitar is a terrible instrument in the hands of 99% of its players.
Country that uses fuller production is just worse pop. Literally just trying to be pop music with a cultural affect except that culture is a conscious attempt by capitalists to capture, alter and eventually produce their own self-conscious consumer base.
There's an interesting story to be told about country being Capital's attempt to produce an identity and culture for upper-middle class whites after The Blob ate everything they originally had but the aesthtics of the thing are lacking severely.