Wanna know what I don't like?

I often see people discuss their musical tastes in their blogs, so I’ve decided to go with the flow. However, in my attempt to go against trends, I will be discussing music I DISLIKE. Just to give you fair warning concerning future posts on this subject - most of this will involve country and/or southern gospel music.

Today’s example of musical homicide is (drum roll)…Loretta Lynn! While I hold no personal grudge or dislike for Mrs. Lynn, her work is a shining example of everything I hate about country music and her exploits will help us define some of country music’s most annoying features. (for proof, check out the lyrics to her songs mentioned below)

Country music usually falls into 3 different categories – corny joke songs, songs of destruction and betrayal, and songs that are blatant attempts to jerk "a lone tear from your eye" by being stupidly and disgustingly overdramatic.

For example, in the corny joke songs category, Mrs. Lynn gives us the following gems: “You’re the Reason Our Kids are Ugly”, “This squaw is on the warpath” and “I burnt the little roadside tavern down” Country musicians like to write songs that they think people will find funny, but I can only imagine the most brain-dead members of our society getting a good chuckle out of these mentally-challenged romps. If you have any alpha waves at all, your mind will puke this back up faster than spoiled milk. Perhaps the live audience at a taping of “Hee-Haw” would find themselves struggling to breathe between the guffaws, but to the rest of us it's like having our pinky toe smashed by a flaming hammer.

Next, there are songs of destruction and betrayal. These songs cover topics such as infidelity (that's "cheat'n" for our country music readers), drunkenness, lost love, dead pets, etc. Loretta gives us, in this sub-genre, titles such as “Another man loved me last night”, Playing house away from home”, “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin If you Got Lovin on your Mind”, “Taking the Place of My Man” (a touching number about how wine has replaced the love of her life) – really in this category there are too many titles to mention. 75% of the songs in her repertoire fall into this category. If you like listening to music about people being mistreated and/or undergoing unrealistic amounts of hardship, then this is the category for you. If life was as bad as these songs make it out to be, I'd be slugging down the whiskey myself.

Finally, there are the overly-dramatic songs that force suspension of disbelief in copious amounts. Good ole' Lo-Lynn has plenty of this in her music. You’ve all heard these before...they take some object, like a person’s feet or a tree in the yard or an old picture frame, and correlate it to some lost love or moment in their life. The storyline is usually something like this: “Every time I rub mamma’s feet, I see the feet of my long lost lover. He was on his way to making it big in the decorative plate business and had one last meeting to go to across country before he came home with a wad of money and we’d get married and live in bliss forever. As the train was leaving the station, he stuck his head out the window to blow me a kiss and throw me a rose, but he got stuck and couldn’t pull his torso back inside the railcar before they reached the tunnel. He died and I picked up the petals from that broken rose and kept ‘em till this day, but they are starting to fade.” Only in country music could a person find out from the police officer who's arresting her for fighting with "the other woman" that both her childhood sweetheart and favorite dog died moments ago while trying to buy a keepsake gift for her. The art of gross overexaggeration is not lost on these folks.

How stuff like this ever got such a large audience I’ll never know. They say millions of people can’t be wrong, but after looking at this stuff I’m not so sure. As for me, I will avoid this stuff like a roll of poison-ivy toilet paper and suggest you do the same.