🎶Got an old truck🎶
🎶Got some beer🎶
🎶Got an old dog🎶
🎶Got a weird sense of nationalism that won’t let me identify with anyone but people who look exactly like me🎶
When I was a preacher I did a sermon around that episode. It's got a legitimately great message at the end about the perils of trying to make spirituality hip.
They really, legitimately did. I had many people tell me it was their favorite sermon ever.
It was one of my better ones, because it focused on what the church was doing well and what it was doing wrong, both from a social and a spiritual standpoint.
It's easy for a church to turn into a Chistian Club, where it's more about seeing your friends every week than anything else. And that's not all bad. With the decline of the Church we are losing some of the social glue of communities. It's a place where a bank executive and a bagger from Walmart can be legitimate friends without barriers between each other.
But the flip side of the Christian Club is they can become isolated and focus so much on the internal community and friendships they've built that they stop reaching out into the community at large. And while a lot of people here appreciate the lack of religious folks on every corner, it can prevent the members of the Church from benefitting the community at large.
In much of the country, the church had the fastest boots on the ground in an emergency for centuries. When now, programs like the United Methodist Committee on Relief can deploy huge resources all over the country with zero paperwork.
I once saw them buy 20 acres of land to build a evacuation/mid-term housing camp for fire refugees for cash money within hours of a disaster declaration. When the national guard arrived they set up their command station at a site the Methodists had prepped for them - it was incredible to see.
And they stayed working in that community for the better part of a decade until everyone had a home again.
But with the move to make Christiandom more hip, cool, and marketable it's become more inwardly-focused and has been enriching the Osteens of the world while abandoning the call to aid others and playing into the hands of the political right.
Religion isn't for everybody. But the church is capable of doing so much good in the world, and an important part of making it great again is to stop trying to market it like a business that's competing for the attention of the TV station and book deals, but to simply practice the kindness and compassion that we preach.
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But the church is capable of doing so much good in the world, and an important part of making it great again is to stop trying to market it like a business that's competing for the attention of the TV station and book deals, but to simply practice the kindness and compassion that we preach.
Even billionaires pick on a charade of "charity" after exploiting and benefitting off of atrocities they caused after they're on the top.
It's really easy to call yourself a force of good, when you pretend to fix the problems you created to get to the top.
making it great again
Like the crusades? Hoarding wealth for the rich? diddling children? forced conversions? missionaries bringing diseases to native people?
No blooody thanks mate, religion going extinct would be a net positive for the world. There are genuine non-profits who don't use the fear of god and hell to help people without a need for a sky daddy. They can take your place and your sermons will not be missed.
Where do you go every Sunday morning and Wednesday night plus the occasional breakfast and weekend event to meet with a hundred people from all walks of life in the community and plan events to support the town?
If you don't think that a small local church can be a profound force of real, tangible good in a community then you're incredibly ignorant. The church has been the primary social safety net in small towns in this country for centuries, and right now that net is crumbling because religion is dying and nobody is stepping in to fill that social void with something else.
Put up or shut up.
But the good there isnt the church part; its the community anf social ties; being a third space. You could do this about nearly anything else. Hell, for the sake of argument; get a 3d printer and hold a fucking pirate wh40k league, with a book club for the novels and figurine painting workshops, and the audience might be different, but I bet the results would shake out pretty close. Diversify it a little (hold d&d on Monday nights, board games and tacos on Tuesdays) and the results will be even better.
The church has been the safety net because religion gets special treatment, and all the other safety nets get aggressively violently cut to shit (see: 'the black panther party for self defense' for a prime well documented example, or how 'food not bombs' get arrested for terrorism fucking routinely. Watch the biography 'Judas and the black messiah' for how that happens.). This is the exact same reason Iran(and a lot of the middle east) is the way it is; when they killed all the socialists and anarchists, the only organized radicals left to fight a government the people could not abide were the islamofascists, because religion got special status.
Youre not better than the rest of the athletes; you're just cutting corners in the foot race. Possibly on an e-bike. If you're not willing to tear down the institutions that make this so fucking hard, then you're not really aiming for systemic good; youre aiming to keep your monopoly on conscience, with state enforcers floating you wherever youre going on an easy convenient river of blood. Fuck, this even happens in your holy book doesn't it? It's like a whole thing the one time religion doesn't get special treatment?
I know you probably don't mean to do this, but then; what, may I ask, is the symbol of your faith?
You can have all the good sides of religion without the bad sides if only you try. You don't need a god to have a community. But you'd rather focus on helping one of the worst organizations in the world survive than build a better one. As for your question: soup kitchens. Book clubs. Swingers clubs. Sports clubs. Etc. There's literally hundreds of places where that's true.
PS. Loved the little typo/Freudian slip where you said that only someone incredibly ignorant could think that a small church could be a profound place for real, tangible good in the community.
Positive adjective, rual noun
Cold beer
Warm night
Red pick-up
and something about hunting or fishing thrown in there and you now have a modern country song
Removing the tracking so they might not immediately associate our accounts when I click it. Probably know it, love Bo.
The alt country folks have too, but that’s also because they didn’t like the sound Nashville was peddling
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That strain of nationalism predates 9/11. Sometimes even out of those same outlaw country artists. Johnny Cash did Man in Black, but also Ragged Old Flag.
Then there's Dixon Dallas:
He's bouncing off my booty cheeks, I love the way he rides
I can hardly breathe when he's pumping deep inside
I kiss him on his neck and then he kisses on my bussy
Call him daddy while I holler "Man, that boy so damn good lookin'!"
What bro country sounds like to people who don't like bro country https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CORANvT8l9A
Every time I make fun of country I’ll sing some made up lyrics like “got a girl in my truck and my truck in my beer” so I definitely laughed when I heard this parody because it’s basically the same thing.
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I knew what channel it'd be before clicking. "What RHCP sounds like to people who don't like RHCP" is an instant cult classic
There's still some outlaw type country out there. Just have to search more.
Ford truck month country is a blight tho
Outlaw country still exists and garbage pop country has been a thing since the 60s. Stop listening to the Top 40.
The people that like classic country: Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, early River Shook (fka Sarah Shook)
For county Rock: Brent Cobb, Wilco, The Old 97's, recent River Shook
For more modern country: Kacey Musgraves, Honey Harper, Margo Price...
And the list goes on.
Country post-punk is an amazing invention.
heavy breathing intensifies
...somehow I'd missed that band (and entire subgenre, frankly). Thanks for the tip
Edit: holy shit, what the fuck did I just listen to? The first few songs off of 3D Country are like Jimi Hendrix singing with The Velvet Underground turning psychedelic folk into grungy soul with lyrics like Zappa trying to emulate Dylan
holy hell ty for this it's so good. also gonna throw out Pinegrove for anyone who has ever wondered what would happen if Midwest emo, but country
Toby Keith is the prime example of that. His early stuff was great. Should've Been a Cowboy is one of my all time favorite country songs. And then he got obnoxious and shitty, but man did he make a lot of money off racists.
Can we start a petition to make the good "country" music be called something else and all of the any other genre, but with a fake accent and nationalism just be country? The name is tainted by decades of shit music and shit people that only care about WHITE MERICA.
Other way around for me.
Theres country, and there sugar (read:twang) colored pop for those who dont want to admit they only listen to pop music.
The settled on term is "alt country", though a lot of country fans prefer to other modern mainstream radio country as "bro country" since alt country implies that alt country is a departure from traditional country despite being more of a return to classical roots than an intended presentation of departure from the norm. I often tell people if Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton were starting their careers today they'd definitively be put in the alt country bucket.
Which also gets me to an important point I wish more people would take into consideration: genre is a constructed element of music, largely stemming less from artistic movements and more from radio formats. The modern day music landscape has much less to do with artistic expression and much more to do with what advertisers thinks will sell tires, cheap beer, and fast food combo meals. Even deconstructed genres like hyperpop stem from the record industries need to assign everything to a specific radio format and artists wanting to put a spotlight on the commercialization of one of humanities oldest endeavors (song / dance).
Havin BBQ in the backyard,
Bombin Iraq in my heart,
Ate too many beans,
Now it’s time to fart.
Even good country had its nationalists. Marty Robbins made some certified bangers but he was also a nationalist who made a song in support of the Vietnam war.
Yeah, that was a bummer. I first heard "Big Iron" via Fallout, but I listened to all of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs and absolutely loved it.
Then I heard his songs that were less Old West and more Cold War.
And they don’t drink Bud light anymore ever since Budweiser treated a trans person as a person who has a right to exist.
Yeah, it needed to be some bud heavies or whatever piss flavor water they are drinking. I think the creator picked Pabst because of the colors
Following the Chicago fire and the destruction of their breweries, Milwaukee breweries were able to step up to provide the masses with beer. Transporting the beer on ships traversing lake Michigan breweries like Best were able to grow and expand.
Philip Best only had daughters, one of them married a ship captain that had worked on the transport ships. He ended up more or less running the brewery. Out of appreciation for his contribution in 1889 they renamed the brewery Pabst Brewing Company after Captain Pabst.
The company also was a successful cheese producer and the cheese side was eventually bought out by Kraft.
Some old timer drank too much beer, pissed out his arse,.and it got recanned because it was Prohibition or the Depression or something similar?
I never noticed the way the guy on the right reacts when Hopper yells Heineken. Either that was unscripted or he acted it out way more energetically than anyone thought he would.
omg thank you for pointing that out. I'm pretty sure Hopper was just playing himself in that movie, I'm sure that guy's reaction was genuine.
The woman averts her head from the camera at the same time.
Country music in the 50s: I tripped and fell into a burning ring of fire and fell down down down
Translation:
Fell in love with a married woman and I'm going to burn in hell for my sins cause I'm a bad man
In fairness it was never good to begin with. But as we all know, no matter how bad things might be, they can always get worse.
"Country" isn't even a single genre: it covers a ton of different styles and has been around for over 100 years.
There's probably a song you like that you don't even realize is "Country" because it sounds nothing like the garbage on the radio.
To be fair as a outsider ghost rider in the sky and ring of fire are both pretty fire and today old town road and cot nai Jo are probably the only actual songs that come to my mind as country music today so with that selection one sounds a lot cooler than the other