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RE: I'm a redneck that doesn't like country music
Seems to me that most songs, good and bad, are
just songs about crappy love stories and drinking beer and what not.
I am learning to sing. Country is very difficult to sell a story and make sound good! Knowing this makes me love a lot of it, especially those tunes that almost anyone can appreciate. But some of the lyrics are too trite, some of the musical arrangements and melodies as well.
It's really hard to make a good song in any genre.
I wish I could find the video but some music scholar picked apart about a dozen popular country music songs and showed on a program that they were all essentially the same song from a chord progression standpoint. Lyrics are tough for sure, you need someone with a lot of real life stories for those to have any sort of meaning and this is probably why I appreciate the greats of country like Johnny Cash and Kenny Rogers. The stories they tell are pretty amazing.
The value of predictable chord progressions is that almost anyone can play along. This is community music, a different kind of art.
I myself like to sing more complex stuff, I like the challenges, but in a brand new setting, being able to recognize simple progressions allows me to sit in on songs I have never heard before. That has enormous value, and is true of most folk music I believe.
Lyrics are a whole other thing. The best lyrics are usually very simple, and simple is very hard to write. I can't write lyrics at all, even though I am a poet.