I just heard another musical performance from the Toilet Paper USA alternative half-time show, this time by Lee Brice. It’s a perfect caricature of a country-western song.
I just want to catch my fish, drive my truck, drink my beer
And not wake up to all this stuff I don’t want to hear
Like the same kind of gun I hunt with, just killed another man
The only thing mine ever shot was deer from my deer stand
I just want to cut my grass, feed my dogs, and wear my boots
Not turn the TV on, sit and watch the evening news
Be told if I tell my own daughter that little boys ain’t little girls
I’d be up the creek in hot water in this “cancel your ass” worldIt ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays
The direction, the finger’s pointing when everything goes up in flames
Saying I’m some right-wing devil ’cause I was down South, Jesus raised
It ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays
Pathetic whiner. This has got to be a joke — if I were asked to write a mocking satire of a country-western song, I’d churn out something that bad. He already gets to do all the things he listed, except that he doesn’t like to hear anything he might disagree with. This is a song about a world where everyone who has a different opinion than he does has to be silenced, while he whimpers about being persecuted.
I usually try to make excuses for despising the whole country-western genre — there are a few artists who break the boring goddamn conventions — but no, not any more. These people are anti-artistic leeches.
“Jesus raised” – spot the problem right there.
There is a video on YouTube by a channel called There I Ruined It from two years ago making fun of “bro country music”. People in the comments joked about how they could put it in the playlist at many parties and people wouldn’t even notice. THEY thought they were joking, but again, satire proves a more accurate reflection of reality than anything else.
Quite literally a conflict that could have been solved by turning off the TV and going fishing instead. With stakes that high, surely this man is the most persecuted man in our time.
Pretty sure he can do ALL that shit he mentions. Where’s the problem.?
The problem is that he might hear some lib telling him about gun deaths and trans people. He doesn’t want to hear any of that downer stuff.
“I’d be up the creek in hot water in this “cancel your ass” world”
What the actual fuck does this mean? These aren’t real phrases people use.
Creeks aren’t fucking hot.
It is a song but not a good song.
The actual idiom is, “Up a creek without a paddle”.
You rarely hear it these days because we are an urban society and most people have never paddled a canoe or kayak on a creek.
“Cancel your ass” doesn’t make much sense either.
He is apparently complaining that he will be persecuted for being an anti-Trans bigot.
Which ignores the current witch hunt going on in the USA which targets…Trans people.
The TL;DR version. He is a routine right wingnut idiot.
“It ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays?”
NewsHistory flash: it’s NEVER easy being country, in ANY country. That’s the entire effing point of most country music: it’s all about the small joys and great sorrows of ordinary life outside of big cities. “Being country” involves much tougher shit than having to honestly tell your kid what “LGBTQ” means.Then again, talking honestly about the reality of country life could lead to having to talk about why, specifically, it’s so hard and not up to the standard ideal. (Hint: it ain’t the Blacks, the wimmen, the libruls, or the transes who are making it hard.)
Family Guy used to play a song by Conway Twitty as a running joke. |
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qbxn2CI8vsg
.
An example of good country artists would be my fellow Swedes in First Aid Kit, but they are not confined to one single genre.
First Aid Kit – War Pigs (Black Sabbath cover)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=CLY7XZv92xg
Johnny Cash – I Walk the Line (Live in Denmark)
The real thing in a herd of charlatans.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=jh169rVMveA
Jesus, those were awful.
^ Conway Twitty or Black Sabbath?
The late night comedy shows covered the Temu version of the half time show. It was hilarious.
@gmacs #6
You’re right about it being nonsensical but; https://roadtrippingcalifornia.com/hot-creek-geological-site/
Read a piece a few weeks back recommending not arguing with these right-wing lunatics. It said their brains are hard wired to not accept facts. Not so much to accept facts but facts will have to make them change. Said their brains do not want to deal with having to evaluate new data and possibly change their beliefs. And that is the big difference between the libruls and right-wing lunatics, libruls can accept new facts and change what they believe and the other side cannot. So, arguing with them is useless.
Ylvis’ “Trucker’s Hitch” is better country and English isn’t even their native language.
(btw, the “instructional video” they watch can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEXcVvxmV3s It’s also country, just a different country. ;))
The purpose of arguing with reality-deniers is to show receptive bystanders there’s another way of thinking (and sometimes, such as the famous confrontation that undid McCarthy, it’s to shame them into the political wilderness).
Sorry it got embedded. I assumed it would just show the link since other posts did. What do I have to do to suppress that?
[meta]
Ridana, simple: don’t post the URL by itself.
Anything at all in front of it will prevent the embedding, though the input processor strips whitespace.
Can be anything from (a non-breaking space) or just a bit of text;
e.g. Ylvis’ “Trucker’s Hitch” is better country and English isn’t even their native language: https://youtu.be/TUHgGK-tImY works.
[addendum: only applies to videos, other URLs are fine]
@Stuffin @15: I’m really starting to wonder where these “you can’t ever reason with conservatives” pieces are coming from. Are legit psychologists and other scientists drawing honest conclusions from honest research? Or is it just another bunch of pseudo-scientists and scammers injecting disinformation to deter people from talking directly or standing up to loony-rightists?
I’ve certainly never heard of any similar sorts of articles insisting you can’t argue or reason with “hard-leftists”…
Note to “country music” fans:
Ever taken a look at who actually makes the money from your
whingeinglaments? Here’s a little hint: Nashville may be in the good ol’ South, but it’s got more than three stop lights, two general stores, and one part-time sheriff’s deputy. Among those things it has are Amazon’s headquarters for coordinating all US facilities construction and improvements (not just warehouses, either), ranging from contracts to wiring and communications specifications to planning for road improvements — and those people all have bachelor’s degrees, probably earned at some urban or close-to-urbanized college where they might encounter things they’d rather not hear.Or if you really believe in Jesus, you should try actually reading the gospels (Luke in particular… but then, if the attribution is correct, he was “city folk” himself, or what passed for one at the time — a physician). Too, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” sort of necessarily implies listening to some stuff you don’t want to hear and complying with it.
Of course, you country folk remain free yourselves to just cancel those you disagree with. It’s not like the South (where most “country music” originates, even if physically it’s elsewhere) hasn’t shown a tendency to do that before, like just at the other end of the state from Nashville on 04 April 1968. You even do it to some of your own.
Why doesn’t he just stay in bed with the covers pulled up over his head?
That seems to be what he’d really like best.
@ 18.Ridana : “What do I have to do to suppress that?” (Videos automatically embedding -ed.)
I cut the paste the code linked here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-5/#comment-2244446
which works really well.
[StevoR, that’s a plain old anchor tag. Because, as I noted, only nakkid URLs without preamble autoembed.
Did you not notice how Ridana’s parenthetical did not embed? ;)
(Knowing is easier and better than doing things by rote)]
@6. gmacs : Creeks aren’t fucking hot.
Not usually but there is a stretch of a small tributary river in the Amazon, that literally reaches boiling point as shown and discussed in this yt clip here – Shanay-Timpishka: The Amazon’s BOILING River… plus “hot”is a relatiev terms and some hot desert creeks reach relatively high temperatures and then there’s the colloquial “hot” as in radioactive which may apply to some highly polluted creeks, etc..
Our planets very first creeks back in the Archean wre pretty hot temperatures~wise given our planets surface & atmosphere was still extremely hot too.
Of cours einthe song its a terrible mixed / mangled metaphor com,binig the idea of being in metaphorical “hot water” with the ideoa of being up shit creek without a poadle as the Aussie saying goes often added to by the phrase in abarbed wire canoe..
Anyhow
Steve Goodman wrote the penultimate C&W song lyric
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got run over by a damned old train
Clarity fix & elaboration
Anyhow as used in the song :
the line is a terrible mixed / mangled metaphor combining the idea of being in metaphorical “hot water” with the idea of being “..up shit creek without a paddle..” as the Aussie saying goes often added to by the phrase ‘..in a barbed wire canoe!”
The line is also clearly a lie as well as revealing the singer’s transphobia because, sadly, in Trump’s ‘Murica, he wouldn’t be in trouble for erasing the reality of transpeople and denying their existence. Indeed, he’d be applauded and celebrated for it by things like, oh yeah, singing it proudly to a bunch of other transphobic willfully ignorant bigots and klowns who seem far more disturbed by trans people existing than they are by the reality that Trump is a pedo who is in the Epstein files literally more than a million times and that Christianist Trumpists are regularly found to be child rapists among their many other crimes.
Awww hon, I hate to break it to you; you aren’t being “cancelled” for your views, you’re being ignored because you’re tone-deaf and whiny.
@19 Thanks for the tip. I didn’t notice the . before the links in earlier posts, so I assumed bare links were ok.
Their vision of Jesus appears to be a bearded white guy in a plaid shirt and MAGA cap driving an F150 with a rifle on the rack behind the driver. All Yellowstone wannabe cowboy types.
Evil thought inspired by StevoR @28:
Just think about “gender reveal” parties — you know, the ones with fireworks, that sometimes set off wildfires — and ponder (and savor!) the confusion fifteen-or-so-plus-or-minus-a-lot years later when the subject of that party turns out to be…
nonbinary.
or gender-fluid.
or gender dysmorphic.
“I wanna be a redneck insulated from the real world and any consequences that follow from being a redneck.”
Fucking grow up. Or in redneck language “man up”.
@ 28 StevoR
If he told his daughter little trans boys ain’t little girls he’d be up the creek in “shoot your ass” world.
@16 Ridana
Here’s another good country song, this time in German language.
Lyrics here.
So he shares the opinion of the father of the first person narrator of the Ode to Billie Joe. Somehow blind indifference has switched from an implied evil to an unattainable virtue in C&W music in just on half a century.
It Ain’t Easy Being Country (Redneck Lament)
Sparkin’ with my sister
Ain’t none of your business, mister.
It’s just a country thing
I got a blister on my ding-a-ling!
I’ve always had an eclectic taste in music that ranges from funky blues to classical to rock and even to SOME country, but what passes for country music these days is just so vapid. My nephew had me listen to several of his favorite country songs a couple years ago, and I was bored to tears – bland and formulaic was the impression I was left with.
OTOH, we went out for live music last weekend and our chosen band’s opening tune was Wichita Lineman, a bit rocked up. Came home and had to listen to a few versions of that “classic” country song, enjoyed every note sung by Glen Campbell, that’s one tasty country tune.
Make Country Music Great Again!
It’s even worse than it sounds!
There are only about five, certainly less than 10, country songs I would listen to if I heard them somewhere. All by singers long dead. The rest are variations of “My Wife Ran Off With My Hound Dog (I Don’t Know Which I Miss Most)”. Or maybe “…(She Can Go But I Want Him Back)”. Snark, yes, but only slightly.
In accordance with this article, and as the incredibly knowledgeable and experienced musician in our group says:
‘It may be country western, but it is almost never music’
My thoughts when I heard clips of this being mocked by comedians were pretty simple.
In response to this “cancel your ass” world he sees, him and everyone like him voted Trump in and made us deal with THAT mess.
Fuck him. Fuck them all. Fuck all their stupid, self-important whining about being “canceled” because they can’t handle NOT being able to cancel anyone who isn’t just like them. I don’t care about what they say or what they imagine they hold dear. Their extra special snowflake asses can all shut up and fuck off. Their concerns are meaningless.
Why? Because we already know where they want to take us. We’re already THERE and it’s an awful place to be. So the best thing we can do is tell them to STFU and ignore them. If they want help they can get in line like everyone else. Because we all got screwed when these jokers got their way. We’re losing an ongoing class war and these people sold us out in return for hearing phrases they like on tv.
Discussion of C&W always reminds me of The Blues Brothers:
“Pardon me, ma’am, but what music do you play here?”
“Oh, honey, we got both types, country and western.”