This is the Coming Apart Song: I’ve been tuning in to country stations after ignoring them for years, and I’m hearing a lot of songs like this one (from 2012):
I wake up, put a dip in, crack a cold one
Put my boots and my overalls on
This is the country boy song
I like to gig frogs
I like to gut hogs
….
Chew it up, spit it out
Crack a cold one and tilt it back
I’m tired of these city boys runnin’ their mouths
If their truck gets stuck I ain’t pullin’ them out …
I keep a twelve gauge by my water bed
Cause the next trailer over lives a meth head, uh huh
And that ain’t biscuits he’s cookin’ …
Gettin’ country drunk in the back of my truck
The night is young I’ma gonna get messed up
Didn’t commercial, play-on-the-radio country songs used to reflect a confidence in down-home values (faith, work, marriage, cheating) that formed the sturdy foundation for the country? Now songs reflect a partly bitter, insular, defensive subculture that worries it may no longer be the foundation for the country, and reacts by getting drunk and … well, screw you. I hadn’t realize the full extent to which the music reflects these real trends. It’s Charles Murray in three chords, I tell you. Also Trump, of course. If he could turn the bitterness into something positive, that would be a considerable accomplishment. …
it’s the end of the “Unravelling” before the beginning of the “Fourth Turning.”
Granger Smith’s entire output is an in-your-face expression of Jacksonian Merica (as Smith proudly calls it with no irony intended)
Maybe there was a brief time when that was true, but traditionally country music tends to be a bit dark. My woman left me, my dog died, I went to prison, and I got drunk are common themes. When Steve Goodman and John Prine wrote the perfect country song in 1974, in the last verse mom got out of prison in the rain and got run over by a train.