Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Just some more music thoughts...

I suppose some folks might read that last post and wonder, "why is it that somebody like Cody Canada can rag on mainstream country but it's not ok for Kristian Bush to do the same thing to the alt-country folks?"
Well, that one's rather simple. It seems to me that, where Cody Canada was talking about the quality of the music itself, Kristian Bush was more or less pulling a Toby Keith, mouthing off because of his own insecurities and not really offering a blasted thing as far as a well-grounded argument goes. (I wonder, does Bush think Johnny Cash was some kind of poseur because Cash didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?) It's funny, really...the one song that Sugarland's gotten the most recognition for is more or less the polar opposite of the three-minute positive-not-too-country uptempo love songs that they've become known for. And if you wonder where that came from, it was actually the title to an Alan Jackson album cut from a few years back...

This is a three minute song
To tell her that I love her
And how wonderful we get along
A sweet sentiment that's borderline slick
A lotta right and not much wrong
It's a little bit edgy, but softer than spaghetti
Weak yet redundantly strong
It's a three minute positive
Not too country up-tempo love song...
Sometime during another interview, Bush also said, "Eventually what you get is: 'I can't figure out which George Strait record to buy because I don't know which song is on which record. All 50 of them are great, but you can’t tell them apart.'"
Spoken by someone who has maybe one or two Strait albums from a certain time period and never really sat down to take in the nuances of each one. And he seems to be saying it like it's a bad thing. Yeah, I'll admit a lot of George's stuff sounds similar, but, huh...silly me, I thought that was part of having a signature sound. Strait's not the only singer one can say that about, honestly. Just for another example, at a glance how was Alan Jackson's Drive really that much different from Who I Am, the album that came eight years before? I know both Strait and Jackson have had a monumental impact on the genre, and it's a delicious irony that their respective catalogs will very likely be remembered 40 years down the road by a hell of a lot more people than that of Sugarland, but I still don't understand why Kristian Bush has to be such a jerk. It's not the fault of the people he slams that he's barely worth the shit on their shoes.