Award Shows, Politics and Cleavage
Well I hear tonight is the CMA (Country Music Association) Award show. My forecast: well-coiffed hair, low cut dresses and rock music. I nostalgically recall a time when the men wore hats and the women covered their bosoms. But the surprising thing is not that I can recall such a time but that it was so recent. We're talking the early '90s.
Garth Brooks ruined country music because he brought two things it couldn't afford - money and pop music. Money and popularity corrupt, which is why I blame the disaster that is the Ohio Republican party on the Democrats. If the Dems didn't suck utterly, we wouldn't have had one party rule for the past fifteen years and one-party rule leads to corruption as surely as bubble-wrap leads to popping sounds. Same with the national party come to think of it. In a two-party landscape, a party can suck, but we can't afford for it to suck for a prolonged period of time. (That's not to excuse the Republicans, it's just that one-party rule is like watching someone walk a tightrope - you're not surprised by an accident.)
But back to country music. It was the early 90s and the most lascivious CMA performance was Patty Loveless's "That Kind of Girl", which, I don't have to tell you, would be considered tame now. The irony is that the music was traditional* and promised stability. Randy Travis sang of "forever" and you couldn't help thinking the genre would stay so, at least long enough to outlive my goldfish. History should've told me otherwise. I didn't start listening until around 1990, but I've since heard that the '80s were glitzy - think "Rhinestone Cowboy" - so it's always been a moving target. I just didn't think it moved so fast.
George Strait is an interesting case. He always moves with the times while keeping his stuff about 1/3rd more traditional by volume. He seems to keep this quasi-religious balance between pleasing himself and pleasing the audience, though some of his audience (read: me) would be pleased if he pleased himself. Was it video or professionalism that killed the radio star?
* - i.e. heavy on fiddle, steel guitar, light on the drums, pro-family & pro-God, etc..
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