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My Wednesday column on Taki`s Magazine is up. It`s a reflection on the permanent features of country music that you notice from an HBD-aware perspective:
Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard’s Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new.
A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I’m talking about when it comes to music is a certain knack for seeing the forest through the trees.
From that 30,000-foot perspective, the answer to what’s new in country turned out to be (as with most genres of popular music in the last couple of decades): not much.
When we lived in Chicago, my wife used to take guitar classes from the alternative country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, who would fulminate amusingly to his students at the Old Town School of Folk Music about the indignities he’d had to put up with as a songwriter in Nashville. As Fulks phrased it in a song about Nashville with a title that’s NSFW:
Hey, this ain’t country-western!
It’s just soft-rock feminist crap!
