Some really good stuff there, thanks. I've experienced some scope creep of late. I splurged on a used pair of SE846. The new ones are insanely expensive. This was risky as I've done it before and got counterfeits; it's typical for thugs to embezzle the headphones from a music store, sell the individual drivers online, then use all the stuff that comes with it combined with cheap shitty Chinese knockoffs so that your $1000 stolen headphones becomes an $1800 haul off of eBay. These are genuine. Through an odd twist of events we had some 215s, some 535s and four different cables (and two different preamps) to play with and while I was expecting the 535s to be better than the 215s and the 846s to be not nearly better enough than the 535s to justify the $500 difference, I was shocked and annoyed to discover that thousand dollar headphones sound about a thousand dollars better than $100 headphones and about $950 better than $500 headphones. They're really good. But now I can tell the difference between a 128k MP3 and a 320k MP3. And I can bloody well tell the difference between a 320k MP3 and FLAC. And oh yes, children, I can absolutely tell when you put an inexpensive DAC between the file and the driver. And then you sit there going "are these good? Oh shit, these are good, OH CRAP NOW I HAVE TO LISTEN TO ALL MY MUSIC AGAIN" It's weird. I've probably listened to Massive Attack's Risingson a few hundred times in my life, often on very expensive systems. It's one of my "ring it out" tracks. But I hear it differently now - the chords aren't the same because I heard them through ridiculous drivers right in my ear canals and now when I hear it I hear the chords as if they're different notes. The effect persists when I listen in the car, when I listen to my little bluetooth box, etc. The psychoacoustic expectations of the song have permanently shifted. And now I have to download everything as FLAC again and seriously, begrudgingly consider fucking TIDAL because Google Play Music has been suckin' hard for a long time and isn't going to be getting any better and also, I hear how cheap it is now. Anyway. The audiophile phuckheads have their magic playlists so here's a taste of the tracks that have been in heavy rotation because they're just so damn good.
I grew up in the Wasteland, yo. When Curve came to open for Jesus & Mary Chain (who we knew because they had a song on MTV) we had heard of them only because they were next to "The Cure" in the bins at Sam Goody which was an hour's drive away. But my town of 11,000 people? TWO country music stations, AM and FM. I think it's fair to say that the only reason Grunge exists is because rock/metal had reached such a dead end. You can draw a line between Zeppelin and Guns & Roses that passes through Van Halen and Deep Purple but then you hit - Whitesnake? Skid Row? Please. Meanwhile the innovation had passed completely to rap and all the studio cats that had made their living in an era of precise, high-budget songwriting turned to... Hear these guitars? Hear them again? Same producer. That guitar song goes back to AC/DC or beyond, which he also produced. Thing of it is? You could listen to Aerosmith and your hair band buddies wouldn't give you any shit whatsoever despite the fact that this is a song for pussies: Country gets a bad rap because this cultural thing grew up around it whereby if you were cooooooool you couldn't listen to Country and if you listened to Country you were duty bound to kick the shit out of hippies. Call it the "Charlie Daniels wing" of country music - where songs about stomping queers and putting a boot up your ass if you don't respect the US of A lives. It's so abhorrent to everyone who isn't into country music that it's all they see. It wasn't until the '00s that we remembered Willy Nelson is basically a lovable old hippie with a hell of a voice who rawks harder than half the pussies they put up in front of you these days. Thing of it is? Genres were invented by the advertising agencies so that they could sell cigarette ads more effectively. The whole artifice is so pointless that it took them until 2014 to stop counting ringtones.. Most of the people who made the music - not the 1hit1ders that burned their lives up for studio time back when it was the only way to work, but the guys who wrote the lyrics and played the instrument and twisted the knobs - did whatever paid them. And that is how AC/DC, Shania Twain and Britney Spears can share a producer.
I love absolutely everything about hick hop. Hick hop is cultural appropriation grown self-aware. It's the South and white trash recognizing that they have more in common with black ghetto culture than they do with Lynrd Skynrd. What I particularly love is that it's a bunch of striving rednecks willing to play up their redneck image the same as rappers played up their street image. Is there anything less country than professional golfing? Yet here we are: Let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a genre that doesn't exist without Kid Rock... and that it went bizarre and virulent from there. That the production value and design is basically '90s Dre with the budget cut to nothing warms the cockles of my heart: Note that I came at this from the bottom; I had two alcoholic contractors that didn't listen to "Florida Georgia Line" (more on that in a minute) but started me off in the absolute gutter: You ask Pandora to spin you up a playlist based on Mud Cricket? You're in the land of Mini-Thin: Eleven million views for confederate hockey masks. We've been here before tho: "Florida Georgia Line?" That's the Fugees of hick hop. Take the scary white trash, throw them on MTV's cribs and sell them to teenagers at Walmart. Capitalism at its finest. Helicopters, explosions and Lauren Hill crooning over Enya. There's a marvelous contradiction at the heart of hick hop: an adulation of black music and a hatred of black people. The tension is delicious and the irony is almost unbearable.
The Asylum Street Spankers recorded an original they called "Hick Hop" back in 1997. This version is from 2008 and is relevant because Wammo (the singer) says basically everything you said in your post, as an intro to song. https://asylumstreetspankers.bandcamp.com/track/hick-hop It's also just a funny track.
Yep. Exactly. Rolling Stone declares Patient Zero to be the Bellamy Brothers' "Country Rap" To place it amongst its contemporaries, 1986 in Rap was pretty much the beginning. It's fair to say that country and hip hop were always going to come together, it just took 30 years for the crackers to get over their loathing of the darkies.
There's a great opportunity for some agitprop there if there exists anyone who would be credible to that audience who would want to take it. I've seen several trucks with Redneck Revolt stickers around town. If it's stupid and it works...Hick hop is cultural appropriation grown self-aware. It's the South and white trash recognizing that they have more in common with black ghetto culture than they do with Lynrd Skynrd.
