Seeing you recommend Garth Brooks of all things is surreal as all hell.
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.
