Any casual fan of country music will have noticed the abundance of “I’m country so I’m better than everybody else” songs out there. Basically, these are songs which celebrate the hillbilly/backroads/backwoods/country/small town/rural lifestyle by repeating the same clichés we’ve all heard over and over and over and over and over and over again.
To prove how mindless this is, I will now write a few lines off of the top of my head which could be the basis for one of these songs:
You may think we’re a bunch of hicks
But we still love livin’ out in the sticks
Throw a banjo in there, a few lines about trucks, working hard, and having fun on Saturday, along with an annoying-yet-oh-so-loud electric guitar solo, and it’s a hit. (I’m shuddering here when I think of this.)
This is what Gretchen Wilson redneck mania seems to have morphed into lately, and it’s really starting to get annoying.
However, there is still music being made which doesn’t conform to the latest trend, and that is what gives me hope:
Zac Brown Band: Free – They released “Highway 20 Ride”, which was a sparse, thoughtful ballad, and it was a big hit. Still ballads aren’t generally radio friendly, and conventional wisdom suggests they needed to next release an up-tempo, mindless-celebration-of-the-country-life type of song, especially for the current summer months. However, they instead released, “Free”, which is another sparse ballad. Seriously, nobody releases two ballads in a row. It’s career suicide! Yet, they did, it’s doing well, and for that I’m happy.
Dierks Bentley: Up On The Ridge – He just released an entire album of acoustic/bluegrass songs. No electric guitar solos to be heard. Sure, the song "Up On The Ridge" is an “I’m Country” kind of song in its own right, but it’s still does it in an original sort of way.
My favorite song on there so far is "Fiddlin’ Around", because it has about eighty-seven fiddle solos in it:
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