Waylon Jennings, You Need To Get Down To CMT And Kick Some Ass, Lively.

First of all, let me preface this with a little disclaimer: I reckon that this particular stab at satirizing the current state of certain elements of the music world has been done better—probably many, many times already—by men whose business it is to poke fun at the entertainment industry. I do not, in any way, consider myself at the forefront of the “social commentary” or “parodizing” market…I leave that to the late-night TV humorists and people who get paid to spend hours perfecting the wording of their critiques. That said, this is still my website, until DJ Hyde throws it thru a table, so I’m going to type what I damn-well want to. I was watching a little Country Music Television the other day, since I have a pretty limited channel selection, and Spike TV made the poor choice to play some muscle car show rather than Star Trek: TNG reruns. Now, let me defend my character for a moment by saying that I’m NOT a country music fan, by and large; but every once in a while I get nostalgic for my roots as a shit-kicking sheep rancher, and I imagined that CMT would be the place to go to seek solace from the bustling city life of Southern New Jersey. I was wrong. I said that I am not really much of a country fan, but I will admit that—at times, in my past—my revelations of self-discovery have shown me to be something of a “closet” country fan. I can appreciate a good song about a barn dance or a bar fight, so long as it’s carried off with the proper amount of “hillbilly badass.” With that in mind, and hours of quiet Sunday morning to kill (and something of a hangover that prevented me from stomaching either Cartoon Network or another viewing of “Groundhog Day”), I stopped on the CMT Top 20 Countdown, to check in on what was happening in the world of rodeos and big trucks. What I saw appalled me. The men who were being touted as the next big thing in country music were metrosexual pretty boys, playing bad sugary-pop music with the slightest bit of twang in their voices. One of them looked remarkably like Dave Grohl with cowboy boots, and sang a terrible song about finding love in the big city and losing it because of being on the road with his music tour. Terrible. The next one was even worse, featuring a remarkably pretty-looking combination of Trent Reznor and Scott Speedman, who went by the name of Keith Urban, and played the piano all the way through his sappy, whiny, pop-trash music video, which not only featured ZERO pick-up trucks, but also shamelessly utilized at least THREE separate computer-generated special effects. Pathetic. By the way, Mr. URBAN, you can’t garner credibility in the country music world by choosing a stage name that is the direct opposite of the scene that you’re trying to represent. I could continue at length, describing the horrendous “musicians” who were being portrayed as country stars on America’s foremost-televised purveyor of the style, but this article would get too long, and I might just grow angrier and angrier as I relive the torturous programming I was subjected to that morning. What I want to know is, what has happened to the entire genre of country music? I remember the good old days, where country musicians were the manliest men in the music industry—John Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare, and many more—the kind of men who you could see getting into barfights every night, staying up drinking and fighting until all hours of the morning…the type of men who could sing songs about sorrow and anger and violence and loss with the sort of legitimacy that these modern “Jason Mraz-in-a-10-gallon-hat” pansies could never even dream of. Even the women of country music—a group of musicians whom I’ve largely been unable to become interested in throughout my life—used to be better. Vicki Lawrence made a huge hit for herself with her classic tune, “The Night That The Lights Went Out In Georgia”—a song about dealing with infidelity by killing people, then letting your brother hang for your crimes. Tim McGraw once assured me that he was an “Indian Outlaw,” and—goddammit—I believed him. Apparently, however, I was lied to, or maybe he’s just gone soft, because I witnessed a pathetic excuse for a song from he and his wife on the Top 20, which proved once and for all that Tim McGraw is just a pussy-whipped bitch boy. A good country song needs to have at least one of the following elements; your truck breaking down, your woman leaving you because you’re a drunken, abusive lout, your dog dying, getting drunk as hell and getting into a fight, or killing people in an old-west-style shootout. If you have all of the aforementioned elements, you are officially a cool motherfucker. However, not one of the “Top 20” songs in country music today, according to CMT, had any of these elements. It’s a sad state of affairs, and it makes me sick. I can’t even think about it any more…*turns off his computer in disgust* NEXT WEEK: Why has rap music sucked for years now? How come “Bone Thugs’N’Harmony” were the last good rap group? Will it ever be “HammerTime” again? Is it considered “justifiable homicide” if you killed the black dude you work with because he only speaks in rap lyrics?