Tag: lyrics

This video, created by a music critic, was posted recently over at Gawker:

The creator, Grady Smith, explains that the video highlights how generic modern mainstream country music is.

I’m inclined to believe that all he’s really doing is highlighting how strong these themes are, symbolically, in country music. Complaining about country singers always talking about dirt roads and river bends is like complaining that hip-hop artists mention “the ‘hood” so often. The argument he could be making instead is that these symbols have become the content of the songs instead of being tools used to anchor the music in the genre while making more personal idiosyncratic statements, which is quite possibly what’s happening. Of course, even then you’d have to decide whether the narrative is even the point of the song or whether the song is just meant to be fun. That’s the case in a lot of Cajun music, for instance, where a song might consist almost completely of just the phrase, “Les haricots sont pas salés,” [The beans aren’t salty] because the point is to dance and the vocals are being utilized purely for their rhythmic potential.