I live in a place where country music is very popular, but I've never been a big fan. It's gotten better, but it's not great. The only country artists I like are Faith Hill, Merle Haggard, Trace Adkins, and Carrie Underwood.
The point of this thread is this: Country music isn't the same "I lost my wife, my dog, my car" stuff it is anymore, and I want to know if other people like it now.
What do you think about country music? And while answering, watch this. A country rock song from Trace Adkins
Yes, anything that's not only composed with care and quality but in many ways transcends country's music's shopworn traditions (and in a genre all about staid traditions, that means something), it can be quite lovely. Time Well Wasted in particular actually plays within the typical country music structure but lyrically it upends country's many sacred cows, particulary turning blind nationalism into geniune populism... wonderful recent (well, 2005) country album, and country music isn't really an album-based style of music so often when someone in the movement decides to make an entire album-based statement it is quite special indeed, if of course it's done well.
I live where country music is practically God and I just can't handle it. Of course there are good country artists, and I don't generally mind if a band has country influences, but after growing up surrounded by the tons of painfully bad country artists it has become most certainly my least favorite genre of music.
I've been listening to a lot of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Townes Van Zandt in the last month....so yeah I'm more than capable of liking and loving country music. Some of the tropes and stereotypes of country music really are quite nice; slide guitars just sound wonderful, and I like the twangy timbres. Songs like this are as powerful as music can get I think:
A can't say I listen to any modern music that is completely country, but there are certainty a number of talented bands who have worked aspects of country music into new or different contexts, I really love some of Micheal Gira's (Swans) work as Angels of Light:
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