Shitty patriot country music has always been a thing and there are still tons of Outlaw country artists right now. This is literally just like those "rap in the 90s vs rap today" memes that ignore the fact that trap has been a thing since the 90s and old school hip hop is having a Renaissance right now
JPEGMAFIAs newest material is clearly inspired by 80-90s hip hop. As well as 70s jive.
Pretty much all of Griselda and the dozen or so artists under their umbrella. Billy Woods & the rest of the Backwoodz Studios group are incredibly boom-bap inspired, not to mention all the "lofi" artists rn who are pretty much just old school rap. Turn off the radio and stop listening to algorithm-created Playlists and you'll realize that there are still active artists in pretty much any subgenre of music you can think of
Also there aren't only American artists, listen to artists from different countries and you'll find a lot of great stuff, some of them even rap in English. I'm biased towards the French scene myself but there's loads.
That's true. French hip hop in general is really good, Gasoline's album A Journey into Abstract Hip-Hop is one of my favorite instrumental albums of all time
Also wanted to add that I keep lo-fi on at my house constantly at a low volume just to set the mood
Ayo
Ayo
Ayoayoayoayo
Brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt-brt
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
I too am curious about this. I still have some old school hip hop that I listen to. Living Legends and their songs “Never Falling Down” and “Moving at the Speed of Life”.
From my other comment
Pretty much all of Griselda and the dozen or so artists under their umbrella. Billy Woods & the rest of the Backwoodz Studios group are incredibly boom-bap inspired, not to mention all the "lofi" artists rn who are pretty much just old school rap. Turn off the radio and stop listening to algorithm-created Playlists and you'll realize that there are still active artists in pretty much any subgenre of music you can think of
This is also ignoring The Alchemist and all of the artists he works with, who's basically doing what El-P did in the early 2000s
Check out NAS's Kings Disease 3(my fav). The man is 50+ still putting it down. He even got Lauryn Hill on a track, smh. Dropped another album yesterday and has another one coming soon next year. Crazy
I'm going to see Wu Tang and Nas in a couple of weeks. Until they all die off, I've still got hope.
The good stuff is still out there. You just have to know where to find it. Commercial radio and things like that are driven by what the younger generation want to hear, which is fine for them but it's just not my thing. Im into rap that has substance and lyrical content
Hey, if you're in the USSA, that shit's been blasting in your ears for years, decades even. The only "star" ever created by a vocal talent show was Carrie Underwood,
What do they drink now? Since their precious Bud Light gave way to WOKENESS.
Coors was among the first companies to extend benefits to same-sex partners and was named the Corporation of the Year by the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, despite being a right wing company in general.
Didn't know that, I was just commenting on what the unhomed Bud Light drinkers drink now. I don't drink any of that shit because it's not good beer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They’re still pretty right wing afaik, but it shows what concerted action between employees and the community can do.
I go Yuengling. Best of ALL. It's not available in my home state, but they said a year or two ago that they were partnering with IIRC Miller-Coors, got a deal to brew their beer using M-C facilities. And they'd service almost every state. Still waiting for that day. 😔
There's lots of good old fashioned country out there. You just gotta leave the mainstream behind. You'll find men in touch with their emotions. You'll find women who won't settle down. You'll find fine American classics. You'll find new classics waiting to be known. And Mckain Lakey!
The country music community may be problematic, but country music itself is wonderful. And many country musicians are fantastic, unexpected people. If you want country like it used to be, dive into Melissa Carper's catalogue. She's the master of the brand new old time song.
An absoluteky outstanding song by Cash btw. If you haven't checked it out, I suggest you do so. Even if you have zero interest in Country do yourself a favour.
I know this is obvious, but Cash's beliefs are endlessly fascinating. The same man who recorded "Ragged Old Flag" also wrote "Man in Black" and covered "Out Among the Stars." The latter is a song about a kid who commits suicide by cop because he doesn't feel like his life matters.
All of Johnny's covers are fantastic. His cover of Tom Petty's Won't Back Down with Tom singing backup vocals, for example.
Honestly that song always brings a tear to my eye.
His rendition is a masterpiece.
We listened to the song in English class when I was about 14 years old and we discussed it quite a bit afterwards. I guess it was kind of a first transitioning into adulthood for me, seeing how much is going wrong and hurting people. Since then about 95 % of my wardrobe is black. It's a statement and a reminder for myself and I want need to carry it everywhere I go.
I dislike a lot of country music, but Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson are practically a genre in and of themselves, seperated from even the outlaw country genre they started.
Do yourself a favor and listen to the Americana genre. All the blues and western inspired folk, without the bootlicking!
Heard a lot of this growing up like Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, but also Canadians like Lightfoot and Stan Rogers. Lately I've enjoyed some of the IWWs compilations of workers' songs, Utah Philips etc. Phil Ochs is up there too.
My mother's from an assimilated Mennonite background and it was one of the non-Christian genres that was permissible to her parents, because of the pacifist and civil rights sentiments in a lot of that music at the time. Also it lacked the sex and drugs themes which rock had. "I Aint Marching Anymore" and "Where have all the flowers gone?" I remember hearing quite often.
Twenty hours in and it's up to me to remind people that Dolly Parton is the full package?
- She's got tunes, OK 'I Will Always Love You' is a bit cloying but the rumour is that she also wrote Jolene the same day
- She supports other women. When porn star Julia Parton was around and telling people that she was Dolly's cousin, Dolly's public response was something like, 'She ain't my cousin but I can't condemn what she does... it's not like I ever tried to hide my breasts. Good luck to her.'
- She produced Buffy The Vampire Slayer through her production company Sanddollar. She kept a low profile publicly but behind the scenes was very supportive of the show because it provided good role models for young women.
- She funds the Dolly Parton Imagination library which mails free books to kids under five.
True, the only thing I remotely have an issue with is her southern revisionism restaurants.
Southern revisionism, it was a trade dispute not about slavery. It's not wrong really just I dunno whitewashed and myopic.
It shocked me the first time I met a real anti-Semite, in real life, in Tennessee. I've worked in a lot of places all over the world and I've seen plenty of racism. No one else topped that guy in Tennessee. Other places racism was mostly contained to 'they stay over there and we stay over here.' Tons of problems but living together but apart was possible. That doesn't speak to every experience obviously. That old guy in Tennessee wanted another Holocaust, plain and simple. Anywhere else he'd get the shit kicked out of him, there it was tolerated.
Had someone try to sell me on the merits of the Ku Klux Klan while working at a factory in Tennessee, I was a staunch Libertarian at the time so i guess he thought i might bite, he told me how they helped the community out and kept people safe.... the guy was dead fucking serious, and when I asked him about them being racist he just changed the subject... Still feels like a fever dream...
What happened next? Was he mocking you or telling a joke that he thought you would enjoy?
What a strange encounter
I suspect the NZ bloke was racist and immediately linked all Southern Americans with racism, so felt comfortable opening up.
Ngl as a non-american if I met a dude in a bar and he's was from 'the south' especially Texas or Florida I would be sitting there expecting some kind of anti-'woke', anti-minority, anti-women, anti-brown comment eventually. At least until I had sussed him out for a bit
Can confirm. I'm a 6'4 big bearded mountain looking fucker in the Bible belt, and people REGULARLY think "he agrees with me about this painfully mundane thing so surely he agrees with me that trans people need to shut up and dress appropriately (or whatever)" They'll often be saying the quiet part to me out loud within 5 minutes of shooting the bull with a total stranger.
I drove through Alabama once. That was enough. What a shit stain state? Experience the racism there, even if sort of second hand, was surreal. Sucks I know some people that were forced to move there.
I unfortunately see a lot of white guy with a heavy (and fake) country accent does a "redneck" version of a popular rap or hip hop track and seeing other white people say "Now that's how it should be done!"
Modern "country" is a plague and I hate it. Its the only genre I can't listen to.
I guess that's just the next evolution. Old country was basically gospel that wasn't about religion. Country in the 80s and 90s was basically old rock but about cowboys, trucks, beer and being cheated on. I suppose by now you have to transition to the kind of music that was the in thing in the 90s to keep up with being the appropriate number of decades behind.
Is almost the same thing with Brazilian sertanejo. Was once about the bucolic reality in the rural side of the country, now is about bragging about being rich, going to pointless parties and drinking a lot of alcoholic drinks, f-cking everyone...
And listened to by the same people who complain about rap music doing the same thing (in their eyes, anyway).
Plenty of good modern country music out there, you just have to look for it. Tyler Childers and Colter Wall are some famous ones that spring to mind, but there's many others.
I mean that's the case for any genre. Time filters out the bad stuff from the past, the good survives to reach new generations. Now we get to do the filtering for future generations.
Nah, I'm sure there's plenty of amazing songs we'll never get to hear. I'm just glad I heard this absolute banger before I died
NSFW I think https://youtu.be/U6zMjIZwbBk?si=54WM9wWCzVSv41S2
I'm guessing you meant Corb? If so, he has the odd song, like The Truck got Stuck, that are more mass appeal. But he has so many amazing songs
Lol yes. He's a country guy who still sees the medium as a storytelling tradition. Really appreciate it.
I really love "Sarah Shook and The Disarmers" as well. They actually go by River Shook now I think, but the band still uses their dead name.
A bit more on the folk side than country, but "Nick Shoulders and The Okay Crawdads" is one of my absolute favorite bands these days. They just put out a new album too and I can't recommend it enough.
IIRC Fighter Jet Pin-Ups, Mitch King. What I'd do is I'd use Spotify to tune to the song's/artist's "Radio" & it'll pull up a shit ton of songs that have a similar sound, OR songs & artists similar enough that other people also like.
That Spotify algorithm is so fucking well-tuned, man. And it gets better with each passing day.
Meh. Depends on band/genre. There's Green Day is Metallica's kill em all radio for some reason. I love both bands, but they're not really related.
There's static-x and Korn in megadeth's radio.
If you go to cannibal corpse's radio, out of 2.5 hrs of music/40-50ish songs, you'll see 6 songs by cattle decapitation, 4 of which from the same album. For a genre with hundreds of bands, that's piss poor variety. And ofc bunch of other bands in there there aren't death metal such as slayer or venom.
Sorry, end of rant.
I wanted to do a "to be fair here, Cash had songs with stupid lyrics, too", but all I can think of is "Ring of fire" and that one is just a harmless metaphor about love.
I'd argue that Ring of Fire is a metaphor about forbidden love that you know is damning you but the feelings are too powerful to resist.
Rather than a harmless metaphor, I find it an incredibly powerful metaphor about the pain and suffering caused by helplessly loving the "wrong" person.
Plus, there's an opportunity to make STD jokes.
It'd be a more powerful metaphor if he wasn't a massive manwhore and his "love" wasn't any fan with great tits, or his second wife's sister.
Yes, so is "hey porter" or "boy named sue", but those are sung jokes of a sort which gives them a purpose ;)
And A Boy Named Sue was written by Shel Silverstein, so you can't really pick on that one.
You absolutly can pick on it and you should, and you'd wholeheartedly agree if you knew the sequal song Shell wrote.
Basically tells the story from the dads perspective.
Tldr the dad fucks the boy.
He didn't write several of his songs. That's really common. Many writers are not performers.
I don't think modern country even uses metaphors anymore. Before anyone comes at me, I'm well awair that there's some fantactic country writers out there.
That's because modern country is squarely focused on (far) right leaning people and they are utterly deaf, dumb and blind to any sort of metaphor, sarcasm and subtlety.
It's why these pricks go nuts for songs like Killing in the Name, not realizing it's a song that explicitly hates on them saying stuff like "some of those who work forces, are the same that BURN CROSSES".
They only see and hear that title and have no fucking clue what it and the rest of the song is actually about.
Way back when Nirvana, Tool, RATM and all the great early 90's bands were coming up, there was another.
A dingy Swedish band named Clawfinger.
They had a debut, self released album named Deaf Dumb Blind and it's most well known song was named removed.
The song sprung outrage with the conservative right in the US, because back then they pretended they were against racism and the use of that word.
Clawfinger was similar in lyrical meaning with Rage Against the Machine, most of their songs were protest songs.
(guess I'll link it as I can't find how to do spoiler tags ...)
Rember when Cobain wrote "rape me" becuase he had to hit people in the head with the message because the song "polly" went right over it?
It's always wise to satisfy the requests of time squirrels. Keeps them away from one's nuts.
I loved ‘a boy named Sue’ but it was ‘the Man comes around’ that sold me. Heard it first during the OP of “Day of the Dead” remake, and there is no other song that comes close to fitting with this opening
I think Orville Peck might be my gateway drug into country. I don't imagine there's too many gay cowboys out there, but surely there's other stuff I'll like.
I don't imagine there's too many gay cowboys out there
I always get the sense that there are quite a few. Maybe even most of them.
I highly recommend Buck Meek.
He's the guitarist for Big Thief but his solo albums are some of the best country I've heard in a long time. And free from the toxicity of modern country (as far as I can tell)
Thanks for the suggestion! I would consider this more folk punk than country, but it's got a Johnny Cash vibe to it for sure. I like it.
I would like to add The Devil Makes Three to the list of redeemable country music. I guess they are more bluegrass/folk punk, but they shred and the lyrics are good.
The Nordic nations are societies. They care for one another. They don't resent their taxes being used to aid and elevate the other members of their society. They root for one another in more than empty rhetoric.
We the US are just a bunch of rugged individuals competing against one another at eachother's throats due to decades of propaganda by our owner class to keep us divided, isolated, and distracted from what they've inflicted upon our former society.
There's a reason they hide behind gates and door guards, they know what they've done to this country outside their steel towers and golf clubs.
With some gumption, a can-do attitude, and good ol' fashioned work ethic, the odds will be ever in your favor!
Nordic societies are also largely homogenous. Sweden has seen massive increases in violent crime and poverty ever since they started allowing anyone in. America has a very similar policy with immigrants and it’s really difficult to create such an insular culture with such a large landmass and variety of people. Americans to view themselves as -Americans and you don’t get the same with the Norwegian’s or Icelanders. I’m all for the Nordic model in Nordic countries (less Sweden until they clean up their policies that are turning their country into the third world) but America needs a different form of social welfare, starting with UBI, universal education, and socialized healthcare.
Sweden has seen massive increases in violent crime and poverty ever since they started allowing anyone in.
That is wrong. Crime has slightly increased due to more population in general.
America has a very similar policy with immigrants
No, it hasn't and never had.
less Sweden until they clean up their policies that are turning their country into the third world
You're way more in danger of that in your corposucking neoliberal shithole.