Monday, January 30, 2006

Nü Country: worse than Backstreet, Britney and Korn combined

Ug. Nü Country isn’t too far off from Nü Metal or Boy Band pap from late 90’s. Actually it’s worse because with Nü Metal and shitty pop music, at least the people making it know they are creating music for kids and brain dead morons. There’s no shame in making kid’s music, it’s just when Marilyn Manson pretends that he’s NOT making music exclusively for pimply teens, it gets me riled. Nü Country meatheads are making music for grown ass adults and don’t even think twice about how bad it is.

Nü Country just fucking sucks in so many ways. I saw a billboard for a new (not Nü) country station in Denver called “Willlie 92.5.” Well, I love Willie (as in Nelson) so I tuned in to check out what they had going on. The station claimed to play “wide open country” meaning they don’t play the same old crap that competing station KYGO would play. I took this to mean that “Willie” would actually play Willie and maybe some Johnny, Merle and quite possibly some Hank. But no. It was the same horrific, bad pop country that masquerades as country music.

When I had ankle surgery awhile back, I went to a physical therapy place that pumped KYGO over the speakers every time I went. I’ll go to great lengths to bitch about how much I hate that shitty, shitty music to you dear reader, but in a situation like that, I keep my mouth shut and let the lady work on my surgically repaired ankle. Besides, how could I write about it if I didn’t suffer through it?

KYGO plays the worst of the Nü Country. The Allan Jackson’s, Kenny Cheesney’s and the man I believe is responsible for continued terror attacks, Toby Keith. I like country music; I’m listening to a great Hank Williams record called “Turning Back the Years: Essential Hank Williams Collection” as I type this right now. So it’s not like I don’t enjoy the genre. It’s just that Nü Country is terrible pop music done with a southern accent and vaguely (and sometimes not so vaguely) nationalistic overtones. But really the bottom line is it just sucks harder than golfer Phil Mickelson’s uptight white guy face. This music is powerful bad.

So I gave “Willie 92.5” a listen and all the promos said things like, “we play all the country music unlike those other stations.” Oh yeah? So how come when I listened for that hour, I only heard eardrum piercing crap like “Honky Tonk Budunkadunk,” (seriously, that’s what it’s called) and some awful sad bastard ballad where some wuss sang about drinking wine and crying over a woman. Drinking and crying have always been themes in country music, but never have they been handled so poorly and wimpily than they have in this song. When Merle Haggard sang about drinking wine, he was doing it in a shitty bar or laying in an alley, crying over his lost love. In the Nü Country world, these creeps are taking a bath and sitting in front of the fire in their slippers. This is the sonic equivalent to having Slayer start singing about using moisturizer and shopping at IKEA. So sad, it shakes me to the core.

Needless to say, I won’t be turning on “Willie” anymore because the station dropped the ball so quickly after I tuned in that spending any more time listening would only waste precious seconds of my life that I would could spend listening to the sound of my own breathing. If I was Willie (not “Willie”) I’d sue these bastards for soiling my good name.

JR

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too am shaken to the core by these deceitful and loathsome excuses for men. When I sang about bringing my gun to town and killing a man, and my most affeminant song "A Boy Named Sue" was even tough, the thought of pussies in country music would have never crossed my mind.

J Reidy said...

it's shocking isn't it?

mr cash, i have to tell you, there's this dude, kenny Cheesney, and he looks like he could blend in at any gay bar, yet he's held in high regard by the macho, war mongering, wal mart shopping dullards how are now the main consumers of YOUR music. he even was married to a beautiful movie star, yet he couldn't satisfy her for some reason.

and then there's keith urban...who isn't "urban" at all. he looks like a skinny jon bon jovi but his songs are much worse if you can believe that.

i'm sorry you're dead, but at least you don't have to witness this firsthand. i loved the last batch of albums you put out! do you think now that you're dead, you can release more ala biggie and tupac?

JR