Revisiting Country Music

I heard somewhere that as one gets older they slowly solidify their musical tastes.  New artists and genres become less interesting to us and we settle into our musical palate.  I know this is not true for everyone, but for me and a big portion of adults, I think it is.  They say it usually happens in that amazingly quick time span from the end of college to your thirties.  All of a sudden, you find yourself relistening to the music of your high school and college days.  I am not sure if it is just a human need for nostalgia and sentiment or if our brains decide we don't have enough space and processing power to add anything else.  That is not to say that musical tastes don't evolve or that you can't have an eclectic range of genres.  Nor does it mean that you cannot discover something new.  But somewhere along the way, we lose the need to like the current musical trends.  Sometimes, if you are like me, you become a bit cantankerous about the lack of quality popular music.  It is especially disappointing to see your offspring laying around the house with Airpods listening to crappy music as you yell at them to take out the trash.

I got to thinking about all of this the other day as my family and I were heading out to the lake.  We were listening to our Amazon Music playlist via Bluetooth on our car radio when all of a sudden the Bluetooth stopped working.  With no aux cord, we had rode old school, listening to the FM dial.  The only station that came in with any solid signal was a country music channel.  Now, I love old school country music from "Waylen and Willie and the boys" to the country music of the 80's and 90's.  Somewhere in the 2000's something changed.  I am not sure if it was me, or if it was country music.  I blame the music!  In the last twenty years or so, I just think country music lost some of its soul, or some of the "three chords and the truth" that resonated so much with me and many others.  I felt like it had become pretentious, fake, generic, formulaic, and relying on style over substance.  And I still feel like that, but in that hour or so of listening, which is the longest I have listened in some time, it made me reevaluate the current style in country music.

Country music, in many ways, has become an interesting representation and example of the American experience.  A kind of e pluribus unum type of thing.  In other words, when you listen to country music, you hear influences from all across the musical spectrum.  Hard rock, hip-hop, and pop were all well represented.  It wasn't just the musical style or arrangement of the songs, but it was lyrical as well.  As I listened, it became obvious to me that country music is a melting pot of different cultures, an amalgamation resulting from a world that has been shrunk and interconnected by technology and the internet.  It made me think about how students at the high school I work at dress like "aggies" (aka hicks, rednecks, etc...boots, wranglers, flannel shirts and Bass Pro Shop hats) bumping Post Malone from their Ford F150's.  

While I still don't like current country music, for a brief moment, it reminded me that during all of our racial strife currently, America has done an amazing job of bringing together swaths of people from all sorts of backgrounds, cultures, and socioeconomic stations and allows them to interact in creative ways.  Combined with the freedom to borrow, innovate, and adapt we learn to create a space and manner to build a culture together.  The  current racial tension is not caused by the average person, but from the media, the Twitter blue checks, the ideological demagogues, the politicians, and those envious for fame, power, or both.  Those people are walking on the "fightin side of me."