...in comments to this post:
You are seriously jealous or something. You seem to forget that Shania is a global megastar and long eclisped your little country station.As I said immediately after, the only thing Shania Twain ever "eclisped" was the level of teh suck that she established for herself to begin with. I really don't give a damn about her success or the lack of it. What I have the problem with is the fact that she was marketed as a country artist and radio people gave her airplay that would have been better spent on artists who weren't using the country genre and radio format as a jumping-off point to other genres. I am every bit as disgusted with that as I am the Dixie Chicks using the platform they were given as a result of their success as a platform to spout off political crap. As for me being jealous, that's just about the most damnably pathetic argument I've seen as of yet. I am quite happy with my life and my musical tastes, what the hell would I have to be jealous of?
I don't begrudge Shania Twain her success. She makes pretty decent bubble-gum pop, I guess, but to call it country is, to put it mildly, an insult to the genre and everyone who made it what it is today. As for the selling the records without "catoring" to country radio...well, there are a lot of people who sell records without kowtowing to the ridiculous confines of country radio. Maybe not in the tens of millions, but they do make a pretty fair living as far as I can tell; if they couldn't make a living at it I'd guess they wouldn't still be doing it. And even if they did sell millions of records, you wouldn't find us as their fans using those numbers trying to justify our tastes as so many of Shania Twain fans do. And yeah, it IS "so many." I have seen more people than I can count over the last ten years use that EXACT argument. They think it's such a big deal and I don't understand why. Granted, I think it's cool that somebody like George Strait can go platinum singing George Jones and Guy Clark and Bruce Robison songs like he did on his latest cd, but even if he didn't I'd still like him and buy his cds and go see him live when I could. I suppose the Shania Twain and Faith Hill fans feel the same way, but still I can't help but think they're more than a little bit insecure. If they weren't they wouldn't find any validation in the fact that millions of others share their tastes. But that's just what I think about that.
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