Matt had been hearing a lot about the dark underbelly of the internet that is Big Hollywood, so he went to check it out and was immediately rewarded with this incoherent rant from Brian Cherry about the danger Miley Cyrus poses to America. It seems Cherry believes Cyrus is a mole designed to lure good Christian country fans into thinking unclean thoughts by pretending to be a good girl but actually being a naughty temptress. There are many problems with this argument, starting with the fact that Miley Cyrus doesn’t play country western music, as far as I can tell.
I can picture the steps that led Cherry to write this rant. I’m sure that the level of success reached by a dimwitted teenager spawned by a talentless hack annoys him. I can sympathize. But since he’s a member of the wingnut tribe, he believes that everything goes back to the tireless struggle between good conservatives and evil liberals, so he assumes his annoyance must be political in nature. Also, she’s female, and that reminds him of how much he hates that genuinely good band the Dixie Chicks. Thus, stupid rant.
But I think Matt and his commenters missed what was really awesome and hilarious about Cherry’s rant. The commenters at Matt’s immediately went to listing a number of famous non-Dixie Chicks liberal musicians (forcing me to point out to them that they forget Dolly Parton), and Matt didn’t really interrogate the source of Cherry’s claim that Cyrus is some sort of leftist Trojan horse, which is her sexy naughtiness. Which is what he has to lean on, because Cyrus probably knows less about politics than she does about writing songs. So in order to make his already-incoherent argument not sound even more incoherent, Cherry hangs his complaint on a verifiably false assertion—-that country western music is “family friendly”.
Listing the liberal country musicians out there misses the point, since a lot of them have historically locked horns with the country music establishment, which Cherry is correct to assume is pretty conservative. But conservative isn’t the same thing as “family friendly”. For example, Loretta Lynn’s songs have always acknowledged the existence of sex, but she didn’t really face the radio censors until she released a song celebrating the birth control pill. And this was a woman who wrote a song where the narrator suggests that if her husband wants to come home drunk and ready to fuck, that he should stay in town—-and it’s implied that he should pick up a hooker instead. Cheating, drinking, murdering: all considered common, respectable topics for country song. (Unless the Dixie Chicks do it, of course. Then everyone acts like story songs about murder are all of a sudden super offensive.) I ran a Genius list off the song “Jolene” (which implies infidelity, divorce, and seduction for the hell of it) to generate a goodly mix of country western songs just out of my collection, and I got this:
*A song about fighting by Johnny Cash.
*A song about being left by a cheater by Patsy Cline.
*Ramblin’-ness by Waylon Jennings.
*A song about drinking yourself to death by Ernest Tubb.
*A song about infidelity by June Carter Cash.
Just to name a few.
But Amanda!, you might say. You’re talking about that old country. Maybe nowadays mainstream country has cleaned up its act? This is a very good question, one that will take some research from me, because my relationship to what’s going on in mainstream country western has grown distant and weak ever since I stopped going to the honky tonk I used to sing karaoke at all the time. However, I did used to hear a lot of modern country western just a few years ago, and it seemed that the drinking-cheating-violence thing was still going strong. The main thing that changed was there seems to be an uptick is songs insisting that the singer is more redneck than thou, a classic case of protesting too much that really points to how much country western music is about generating a nostalgic fantasy more than reflecting a lived reality. But I digress. I decided to look at the Billboard country western charts and the lyrical content therein to see if country radio can really be considered “family friendly”. I even listened to some of them. Here to serve!