Thursday, August 20, 2009

Times change, but bad excuses are timeless.

You know, it's funny. I write posts like this, in which I state my position and do my best to back it up (and I was thinking I did pretty good in that particular instance), but still I get half-wit responses like this one:

Oh pistolero...quit you're whinning!!! The times...they are a'changin! Don't pick on Keith...he's a nice guy!

I'd love to know what Keith Urban's being a nice guy has to do with his tired attempt to justify the kind of music he does. Changin' times notwithstanding, middle-of-the-road pop-country music is still middle-of-the-road pop-country music. (And you KNOW, of course, what they say about what's in the middle of the road.) As for whining? Far from it, really. In fact, the more I think about it the more I realize that maybe I should be grateful that Nashville country has by and large gone to hell. Were it not for that, at least a couple of the presets on my Sirius radio might be taken by the new-country channels instead of the ones that play the old rock and metal. If that were the case, I might very well never have discovered the greatness of Iron Maiden, Metallica, Pantera, Megadeth, Queensryche, Anthrax or Dream Theater, to name a few. And that, for lack of a better term, would have sucked big rocks up off the ground. But I am still so very tired of the "times change" excuse. It was a cop-out when Tim McGraw said it almost a decade ago and it's a cop-out now. Sometimes change isn't so good...unless one wants to call it a GOOD thing that I don't really consider country to be my favorite genre so much anymore.