When Did Country Music Go From Having Grizzled Badasses to the Spike-haired Douchecanoe Pretenders We Have Today?

‘When did country music go from good ol’ boys singing about being grizzled badasses who shoot their ol’ dogs to the spike-haired douchcanoe pretenders we have today?’

Even in the 1980s, , but the cultural homogenization taking place across various entertainment media. Today, we have a world that is increasingly ‘condensed’ and assimilated to piss-poor representations of the source material.

Fiery hip-hop rappers like 1991-era N.W.A., Snoop Dogg and Grandmaster Flash would look with disgust at Waka Flaka and Lil’ Wayne, claiming to be cut from the same cloth as their predecessors. In rock, we have One Direction, Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber considering themselves on par with The Beatles, Queen, Michael Jackson and Cher. The fact music is becoming more about your ‘look’, agent’s connections and social media manipulation than actual talent is quite evident, but I did not ever expect to find even country music is completely destroyed by today’s ‘make money fast and easy’ music culture, if you can call it that.

The impetus for my piece today started by accident, with me falling asleep while browsing late night tv. When I awoke, I was treated to a very touchy-feeling video that had a standard man singing about how his girlfriend feels like Carolina, smells like California and smiles like the Wisconsin rivers or some other nonsense.  It is shot in an Instagram-themed filter camera with orgasms bursting all throughout. At some point I expected Captain Kirk to beam down to Westward beach and show off his washboard abs.

The song and manufactured music is not that bad, if you call the music soft-rock.   There are plenty of soldiers who cry like schoolgirls when they hear the song, according to the YouTube comments.  But the problem I have is that the next 12 songs that played on that channel were the same song, performed by a different band.

Same camera filter.  Same generic voice.  Same girl running through Strawberry lilac-pussyfields forever eternal Spring shot by JJ Abrams using Kevin Arnold’s Wonder Years camera.  What happened?  Producers found a formula that sells and they are mass-producing it under the name ‘country music’, caring not what they do to the genre or culture.

The best comparison I can make for country music is the analogy of a picturesque suburb.  People who live in the Palm Desert of California may especially sympathize.

Neighborhoods in the Palm Desert area tend to be beautiful and highly manufactured.  Golf resorts, shopping strips and well-maintained lawns, roads and structures:  everything looks ideal and cookie-cutter, like a place a Stepford Wife would like to go for a natural tan in the winter.

The problem is that the Palm Desert, after a while, becomes very boring to look at.  You start to feel like you are suffocating after seeing the 34234th adobe-mansion sitting on a yard that looks like green turf.

This phenomena can be described as the Top 40 radio effect.

There is an easy-t0-sell advantage in mass-producing the predictable, as long as it is enough to keep an audience safely satiated.  No one wants Johnny Cash giving the finger to crowds of prisoners or guys like George Jones telling it like it is anymore.

Nah.  Women are objects that look like California and feel like Carolina.  Men are guys who spike their hair with astogel, wear faded Diesel jeans and squint into the sun like Jensen Ackles.