Bryan Curtis has an excellent piece at the Daily Beast on the current state of country music. Well, the state of commercially successful, Grammy-nominated country music anyway. As you might expect, it’s depressing stuff. Basically, you have a choice between Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift and perhaps the best that may be said of this is that it might be marginally less gruesome than the era of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. Marginally. As Bryan explains:
To reduce Taylor vs. Carrie to style points would be a mistake. Their music has deep thematic differences, too. If you favor Swift, you are embracing a Weltanschauung that says that all of life is a high-school melodrama. Swift’s aesthetic is unapologetically teen angst; her songs can be divided into “Yay!” or “Darn!” From the former, we have a freshman girl told by a guy that he loves her (“Fifteen”), a crazy, head-over-heels crush (the excellent “Hey Stephen”), and an unrequited attraction to the star wide receiver (“You Belong With Me”).
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