NPR has a short piece on country music and it’s dramatic turn toward conservatism in the second half of the 20th century. It is fairly interesting, so check it out of this type of talk is up your ally.

I find the piece most useful as a jumping point for other lines of thoughts. For example, how is country music conservative at all? Have you ever met someone not in the country music industry that was pro-Republican? Growing up in West Virginia and interacting with a fair bit of folk, bluegrass, alt-country, etc. musicians has left me with confident most of them are left-leaning, pot-smoking, root-for-the-underdog types–a description that does not fit well with the Republican party.

A similar confusion of a true music scene and a its industry cousin regularly happens with hip hop/rap. What, you don’t like rap because what you hear on the radio puts you off? Oh, okay.

To return to country music for a moment, I recall that when the Dixie Chicks latest album was released, a vocal minority targeted radio conglomerates to ensure that the new album was not played on the radio. This clear anti-freedom-of-expression signal by the music terrorists was expected to doom album sales. Although I do not know what overall sales were for the Dixie Chicks’ album, it was the number one selling album on iTunes for a long time. Oh, and they won a ton of awards, too.

Last, this subject reminds me of one of my most memorable Bill O’Reilly episodes. O’Reilly was in one of his frequent disputes, this time with Ludacris, and had some major hip hop magazine editor–I think it was the editor of Source–to discuss hip hop. Immediately, the interview took a predictable turn when O’Reilly started taking the piss out of hip hop because of its sexist and violent content. In an unusual response, the interviewee began spitting out Johnny Cash lyrics, all of which were incredibly violent and overtly sexist.

The point was not to dismiss problems with hip hop–how a music genre can be problematic baffles me–but to highlight the fact that plenty of music has these elements and it should not drown out the good material, or intent, of the remaining pieces. And there’s the whole double standard (vis-a-vis race) bit, too. Heh.