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Do Si Do To Hell For All I Care
Alright all of you television cowboys, its time for you to fess up to your facades. You prima donnas hide behind digitally enhanced photos, fake haystacks in your videos and contrived all-American personas but its time for the truth to be told...
The only livestock you cowboys ever handle are the pig-faced spouses you dangle from your gym-buffed arms. You're saddled up sensations baring striking likenesses to gay porn stars. All of you rawhide Romeos are about as roughneck as Richard Simmons. You're soap stars with fake southern accents. How many of you really know how to ride anything other than someone else’s coattails?
And as for the Country womenfolk; you whores wouldn't know talent if it hogtied and bull-stomped you. You're tarted up trailer trash batting your eyelashes while the Nashville record industry pounds you doggy style. You’re all just a bit too willing to botox yourselves into the CMT limelight. I understand wanting to get out of grave situations, such as what your useless lives must have been for you to consider corporate prostitution, but selling your self-respect only caricaturizes your social "ascent". You let marketing teams tell you what to eat, when to shit, what workout to do to mold your bodies to be appealing to teenagers, but somewhere along the way music fails to be a priority, or even a factor. The women who came before you paved a hard road just to be heard and taken seriously and now you're bludgeoning their triumph by becoming mass-manufactured mannequins.
Modern corporate Nashville Country airwave pollution would make Hank, Lefty and Johnny turn in their graves. The birth of Country/Bluegrass music stemmed from overworked, downtrodden, white, mountain folk with no other outlet than to beat on buckets and twang homemade banjos; wrinkled, beaten-down white slaves with tears in their eyes and blood on their hands. The commercialization of any form of music is unfortunately inevitable, but the attitude in it should at least remain the same among those who churn it out. Otherwise, it falls into another genre of music altogether. I don’t know what the hell Nashville has been churning out for the past few decades but it ain't Country. It's Radio-friendly pop garbage with a twangy affectation. Watered down rodeo-romping white noise for the MTV generation. There's no grit, frustration, anger or real tragedy in Country vocals anymore. It's a uniform to be worn by pampered pin-up models who, for the most part, can't even write their own shitty songs.
Record executives are the biggest joke of all. Strip a person of even rudimentary musical knowledge, fashion sense and judgment and you have the modern record executive. Welcome to the world of parent-funded marketing majors with myopic decision-making skills. Sitting back as their asses get larger, pretending to have their finger on the pulse of America when in fact, their fingers are so far up their asses all that spews from their mouths are streams of shit. The critics await executive decisions to see who the next big thing will be. Giving power to these people is a worse death for music as we know it than tossing every musical instrument in the world into a huge dump site and setting fire.
The core Nashville songwriters and studio musicians puke out assembly-line product with all the enthusiastic fervor of car wash employees; passionless, blue-collar, union slobs slaving mindlessly for a paycheck. If they hadn't lucked into their current lackluster careers, they would be panhandling their way to rent. We'd see them pawning stolen electronic equipment because they're too lazy and stupid to hold down a 40-hour. The only thing their hands are good for other than milking the same three chords in every song is scratching their Cro-Magnon heads.
Country Music has become so mechanical in nature that it doesn’t even sound like humans make it. It appears as if the set same loop is used for each obligatory song used to format a standard album. Change the names and photos on the CD covers and you have an industry ready for mass-marketing. The herd awaits the release of their new favorite Country charlatan with blue-light special anticipation.
The only thing that is worse than the modern Country song is the modern Country fan.
Country music fans make up a generic Wal-Mart brand of humans. A blindly eager mass ready made for consumption of wallet-sized creativity. Introducing the Sam’s Choice bulk-quantity-family-pack human. They’re unfit, academically-challenged troglodytes with play-doh-like taste; people who never fully close their mouths and drool lines of melting Flavor-Ice onto their NASCAR t-shirts. They live for State Fairs, Baptist revivals and Elvis sightings. Every single one of them should have been aborted. They keep the low-end of our economy thriving by lacking the gumption to climb out of minimum-wage complacency. They complain about their place on the totem pole yet whine about the splinters if they attempt to climb higher. They're white Mexicans with no reason to be so other than possessing passive-aggressive stupidity. They whore being poverty-stricken and ignorant as if it gives them a right to be socially retarded. They want music that speaks to them not realizing that the people who write it are con artists of evangelistic proportions. Songwriters don’t care that it costs most fans four hours worth of wages for one CD. They create their fan base by appealing to people who can’t think for themselves. Somehow, I don’t think this is what the pioneers of Country Music envisioned. They had raw grief for their and their brothers' condition. They wanted more for the common man. Now that common man thrives on being a serf. It takes a lot more strength to build confidence in yourself than to accept the fact that you’re stuck in a toilet. Misery loves company and when there is a whole music industry glamorizing it, you tend to feel pretty safe. And don't even try to convince me that these slobs have a sense of humor about their condition. If corporate Country Music has such a huge funny bone, why doesn't it allow for more lyrical diversity? It protects its niche market like a slave-owner watches his cotton-pickers.
Musicians have become much too gutless when it comes to songwriting. They write mold-fitting, cookie-cutter hooks that carbon copy themselves. Nothing has merit or value anymore unless it safely remains underground. If you are willing to disregard talent, integrity and self-respect, there may be hope for you in the music business. Nashville could be your town after all! There do remain songwriters who refuse to grab their ankles to turn a buck, but they are few and far between. Musicians are so desperate to get out of asking people if they want paper or plastic that they will swim through a river of snot if there is a record contract on the other shore. I wholeheartedly understand wanting to increase ones financial flow, but musicians, remember YOU are the ones with the real power. No slave owner could have prospered without those doing his gruntwork for him. Likewise, no record executive could get fatter without someone else writing the music. Think of how red-faced those Music Row clowns would get if musicians went on an artistic strike of sorts. Imagine the fear a musician could induce by only writing music with heart and attitude. If every musician played and wrote as he set out to do when he first picked up an instrument, record executives would have no choice but to cave in. I realize what I suggest is unrealistically romantic because musicians will most likely remain the sheep they've proven themselves to be, but it sure would be nice to turn on the radio and hear music one day.
Why is it people insist on turning everything of value into toilet paper? Why does the music industry remain in the hands of those who exhibit no sense of style? Why are the masses so easily entertained? Why is the public only given a choice between eating cold shit or warm shit when new music is being dispensed? The slave end of the music industry is screaming out for a revolution. I'd even take the leap to say that the public wouldn’t even mind variation in what is offered up as mainstream. With the explosion of satellite radio, it is clear that people are bored with the same old same old. They want more bang for their buck and richer entertainment. I await the revolution! Let it come fast and furiously, demolishing the vices of the fat suits who have for too long sugar-coated their incompetence.
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Dominick DeSade is an independant writer and active musician in the Nashville area. Beginning in June, Dominick will have a regular column on the Music page showcasing artists from the Nashville music scene. Thanks Dominick! ~WC~
Copyright ©2006 Dominick DeSade
Written By: whiskeychick
Date Posted: 4/23/2006
Number of Views: 342
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