I used to hate country music. Then love it. Then hate it again. Then love it again. Then hate it again.
For different varying reasons, as time has moved forward.
I hated it in the 80s because all the middle aged losers my parents age listened to it on the radio and it was just plain silly.
Then my dad’s love of Johnny Cash rubbed off on me, around the time of a western renaissance in the early 2000s, and I loved it instead.
Then bro-country happened, and I hated it.
Then Tyler Childers and Morgan Wallen and I loved it again.
Then Morgan Wallen turned out to be a failed american idol douche, actually, and what I used to enjoy about country music- the romanticizing of a rural impoverished americanna life, mutated into exactly what I hated about it.
The notion of romanticizing poverty seemed suddenly absurd to me, now that I had stability. A simple life. Simple pleasures. Marriage, a family. Is it all just a cope to somehow come to grips with being one of life’s losers? To view it in whatever desperately narrow light and context one must to enchant the stale hell around us?
Another lie of sorts, it seemed, and I went back to hating country. Or at least just viewed it as a substandard art form and soothing tonic to unfortunate people.
But then after a while I realized something else. It’s not about celebrating poverty. It’s about celebrating life, despite poverty.
It’s about the fact that everyone alive with good health and some degree of freedom is already 90% equally privileged, regardless of class status.
If you can watch a sunrise. If you can earn an animal’s trust. If you can fall in love and make love. If you can craft something of your own, and contribute to your own community, you’ve already won it all.
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