Monday music musings — 07.10.13

A comment, at Saving Country Music:

Has it occurrd (sic) to you that just maybe the the men are just making better music right now. Luke Bryan isn’t sexist! He talked about his concern for the lack of women in country music.

You know what those last two sentences are? Modern country music’s version of “I’m not racist. I have a black friend!”

Well, maybe the analogy doesn’t fit exactly, but you see what I’m getting at. Just because Luke Bryan hamfistedly bemoans the lack of women in country doesn’t make his own music any less sexist.

And as for the “men making better music” bit — we’ll take that one hand-in-hand with Jason Aldean’s pronouncement that the Luke Bryan song discussed here is “a big ol hit so apparently the fans love it which is what matters.”

You know what else was a big ole hit once upon a time? Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View. 10 million-plus copies sold, and its singles were all over the radio in 1995. Barely two years later, the used-cd stores had so many of them that they stopped buying them back. Fast-forward to now — well, Sunday — and four of them were on the shelf at Half Price Books at IH-10 and Huebner.

Of course, even if I am not a fan, I still do think that comparing the music of HatB to Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, et al. is really quite an insult to the former. After all, you’d never hear them sing a song with a line like:

“I wanted to look for you. You walked in, I didn’t know just what I should do. So I sat back down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself.”

No, Aldean and his ilk are far from the country equivalent of Hootie and the Blowfish. They’re country equivalent of glam metal. And I’m going to call it right now. About 10 years from now, 15 at the latest, people are going to be talking about this “bro-country” bullshit the same way they talk about disco and glam metal now. So we’ll see who wins in the end.

Tags: music