xch00F wrote: 503n5i
I think a lot of ppl's issues with country can be boiled down to two main issues: corporatization of the genre and the genre's sincerity, which sounds paradoxical but lemme explain
all of the "bad" country music, aka the shit that plays on the radio, has mostly been garbage for decades and decades. look up "nashville sound." a concerted effort to make country music smooth and saccharine and palatable to as many people as possible, trying to combat the rising popularity of rock and roll. this has been par for the course since like the 50s, if the industry puts this much time and effort into making the music as formulaic as possible, it ends up being just as shit as radio pop music. at least radio pop has some room to explore different musical elements like timbre. compare the electronic sounds in pop music spanning from the 70s to now lol.
but on the flip side, the "good" country comes from an incredibly sincere and genuine place, emotionally speaking, and a lot of ppl nowadays don't seem to know how to deal with that. imo a rly good example would be dolly parton's jolene. I'd struggle to take anyone seriously who says this album is "bad" in the sense that it's musically incompetent, or not technically proficient, it's very clearly not. but it is heartfelt and warm and that's very difficult to parse if you're the kinda person who's jaded/cynical/wrapped in layers of self-protective irony. I had to write an essay about this album for a college class recently and it was honestly a kinda hard listen lol. pet sounds by the beach boys is like this for me too, it's very hard to listen to because it's just too... happy?
there is an ambiguity when interpreting sincerity to me, i find it so hard to rlly know whether the songs i think are hard to like are like that because of insincerity and its like, i feel i often refuse to let myself view it that way when so many people appear to like it so much... even though its entirely probable that a significant proportion of those people themselves may have more revealing reasons for liking those songs, but... is that conclusion really up to me to decide on their behalf? bc when i see people love something and fixate so much on it, even if it tastes to me of a sensational lens, something about the predominance of it makes me slink into the shade questioning myself for scrutinizing that
in any case, i listened to those two examples you named!! i liked them a lot with respect to their sentimental textures and flavors but on a first-listen basis im kinda just making uncritical judgments since i seemed to like them immediately ^-^ also reading the comments is usually my go-to behavior bc im normally bad with literary interpretation on my own esp when there is a lot of historical and intertextual context for why a song is made the way it is, why the lyrics are written as they are, and what role it has in the background of its time period in comparison with how it would endure over the years... mostly bc im not at all acquainted with that and my only real cultural "home" is vague pockets of internet culture with various undertones that fill in the politics of the demographics who make them
tysm for sharing that background too!! that helped me understand it a little better, or at least it makes some sense to me, altho i imagine there will be a lot of lenses to look at it thru bc many many listeners will not have quite the same awareness either whether they dont like country on of having mostly heard nashville sound country music or instead actually do like it and had started that way since childhood. its messy to me and i dont get it entirely but... thats often at the center of my fixation, the ways people grow to like/dislike certain elements of music, why someone likes acoustic instruments and alt indie, why certain people cant seem to make certain kinds of music, why certain music only seems to broadly and widely appeal to specific audiences
i love happy music myself, but just, they're specific kinds i can't quite distinguish with words yet rn;; i dont know how else to describe the trouble i have with other songs along those "smooth saccharine palatability" notes, but as an example, those classic lyric videos w/ the stereotypical mountain background and subjects that are so hard for me to connect with and feel for... yet it means so much to someone else who could apply it in things like, in my orbit of various cultural circles, fanfic and animatics and gorgeous animations and deeply engrossing character-focused storytelling with so much thematic substance... and then i just wish i really could have understood from the beginning, but its like im so far from that :
(
in my case, it's partly an envy or hunger for all the kinds of experiences and joys people have, wanting to love what they love so i can feel that joy myself too, wanting to embody people that im not, wanting to understand people and their experiences thru all the ways they were informed by who they were and where they were and how others perceived them and how their characteristics may in some cases be fundamentally influential in their interactions with everything despite wishing they were irrelevant, either by way of how their interactions with others are shaped by external perception, or by their own doing bc they may be predisposed to smth as much as it hurts to consider
idk, its exhausting, but that's one of a few general places of where im coming from, and also tysm for responding, i really love this kind of expansion of thoughts on topics like these :
) humans are so interesting and weird and Exhaustingly Impossibly Awful and genuinely incredibly heartwarming and creative
wafer has a lot of fun dariacore maps too
