It feels like all my relatives listen to this shit.
it’s conspicuous consumption as identity performance
THANK YOU. coming from a place where it is endemic and now living in the NE I was very confused about the love my rehab roomie had for it until she told me all about her extensive cop and conservative family and it clicked. Everyone else up here that listens to it that I personally have met is the same, and it’s never the kind of stuff I don’t mind hearing either (George jones or Gary Stewart or Delbert McClinton or even some patty loveless or juice newton). It’s always the trucks n flags n eagles shit, kinda reinforces the point
It’s not really conspicuous but yeah.
It can totally be conspicuous consumption. Have you ever tried to buy a new pair of cowboy boots? That shit is expensive. As is a lot of the other trappings of the genre/aesthetic like big trucks. Plus there’s an entire subset of people who spend a ridiculous amount of money to look like they’re dudes helping out on the family farm.
That’s not a country only thing but it definitely rubs people the wrong way.
Basically. White reactionaries in the middle class actually spend a good deal of money just so they can LOOK like poor people. Personally, I like to call them “cosplay cowboys”.
If you’re a poor fool like me who’s born in North America AND can’t afford to live in megacities like NYC, Montreal, Toronto, LA, etc. You know what I’m talking about.
Country music is not conspicuous. Which is the topic here.
I think the culture surrounding music is relevant when discussing it but even if we want to stick only to the actual music: steel guitars are super expensive and the lyrical themes of many country songs involve lifestyles most working class people are priced out of.
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It is when its being played in public
Go ahead and add the Midwest to that too.
:(
You’re right though, so many people here think they’re rugged country men while listening to a pop music with fake southern accents by people that grew up in rich suburbs.
Growing up I had to listen to Toby Keith singing about putting a boot up Bin Laden’s ass so many times it’s permanently burned into my brain even though I lived north of the Mason-Dixon at the time.
It’s the obsession with Americana
I just got back from the state fair and it’s all Cowboy hats and leather jackets
Like, just because you have a F-150 you take to Whole Foods and a horse you keep in a stable five towns over, that don’t make you a country boy
I went to suburban (read rich) Connecticut once, and ya that shit was everywhere.
I was eating Korean food for lunch today at a new restaurant and the food was really good but they were playing that basic, country-esque White people music and it was terrible. I was like "Why, God?”
Coming from the (non-coastal) Southwest with midwestern parents, I fucking hate country music with every fiber of my being.
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It became one of the default “not of the city” music genres. It became the background noise of white people.
also: shut up about your fuckin jeep
Surely the northeast should be listening to Folk and Maritime.
This is Sturgill Simpson erasure.
Sturgill Simpson just woke up one morning and decided to make like 5 new genres of music.
Wife truck dog beer gun gas
A.I.
Sure, I’d be happy to help create a song using those words. Here’s a short verse:
In the cab of that wife’s truck, under the prairie sky so wide,
With our loyal dog beside us, joy and love, our only guide.
We raise a can of frothy beer, to life, to love, to freedom’s song,
In this moment, we’re the toughest, with our trusty gun, we’re strong.
Fueled by gas and boundless dreams, we ride, two souls as one.
My high school band wrote a country song called “dead dog in a pick up truck” that talked about how my wife left me so we could audition to play at a local bar (which looking back was super sketchy to allow us in to begin with.)
something something white cultural identification something
edit: I mean this seriously, I just can’t remember what the exact terminology is for “participating in this [country music] culture as a way of reaffirming whiteness and the status quo that comes with it”
I always hated country music but got into it with Johnny Cashs American Recordings and after watching Ken Burns documentation “Country Music” I am even more open to it. It is a kind of grassroot music, music of the people.
