drst:
i dont really like country but i do love those country songs where the women murder their abusers
Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks fuck yea
isn’t that like the only one bc if there is more i need to hear them
i haven’t listened to country since i was a kid but this one’s for the girls by martina mcbride is iconic and i get it stuck in my head sometimes
Gunpowder and Lead by Miranda Lambert.
She shoots her abuser with a shotgun 💕“Blown Away” by Carrie Underwood is about a woman letting her abusive, alcoholic dad die in a tornado.
Carrie Underwood is the queen of this genre: Some other great ones:
- Church Bells – Carrie Underwood: A woman poisons her abusive husband and gets away with it after being beaten.
- Two Black Cadillacs
– Carrie Underwood: A woman meets the other woman her husband was cheating on and they team up to murder him, then attend the funeral with no remorse.- The Thunder Rolls (Extended version) – Garth Brooks: Hard to find the extended cut, but in the full version the woman grabs a pistol and goes off to shoot her cheating husband.
- The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia – Reba McEntire: A man leaves town for a bit only to discover his best friend cheated on him with his wife. The friend is then shot by the man’s little sister and he is tried and sent to jail for it.
And no murder in these ones, but still contain women being amazing:
- Girl in a Country Song – Maddie and Tae: A song that name-drops or references every single country song that uses derogatory language about women, then chews them out for it. The “your country is music is problematic“ song basically.
- Shut Up and Fish –
Maddie and Tae: A girl goes on a fishing song with a guy who will not stop talking and trying to hit on her, so she dumps him in the lake.- Before He Cheats – Carrie Underwood: A woman totally trashes her boyfriend’s car after he cheats on her to teach him a lesson.
- Dirty Laundry –
Carrie Underwood: A woman figures out her husband is cheating by the stains on his clothes, then proceeds to tell all the neighbors and hang the shirt out front in case he dares to show back up again.“Independence Day” by Martina McBride: the mom burns down the house to escape her abusive husband.
And Miranda Lambert has a lot of “fuck you/this” sounding songs about revenge and cheating:
– “Kerosene”: it’s heavily implied by the lyrics and video that she’s burning down her ex’s house for cheating.
– “Mama’s Broken Heart”: is more about her mom trying to shame her for falling apart after a break-up, and the video is a wild bird-flipping romp around the house making herself up to look “crazy” and “hysterical” to spite her.Adding to this: “Something bad” A duet by Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood where two girls run off to have a night on the town- presumably after the one ran away from her own wedding and took her entire life’s savings with her.
Back to the original murder theme, I highly recommend “Looking Back Now” (originally titled “Whiskey and a Gun”) by Maggie Rose. Woman shoots her cheating boyfriend/husband, goes to jail, ends up shooting the prison guard who rapes her. (Okay, so she dies by lethal injection at the end, but still, awesome song.)
Maggie McCall by Sandi Thom… O.o
Adele covered “If It Hadn’t Been For Love” which was about killing a girlfriend and switched the pronouns to be about killing a male ex. *eg*
I’m usually against pronoun switching in covers, but this is my exception, I think.
“Country Song” by Seanan McGuire fits in here too–if you add in the part where it’s a retelling of the movie Slither.
Slightly off to one side of the main theme, but: Dar Williams’s “Flinty Kind of Woman” is about the women of a small New England town who band together to hunt down (and, it is implied, kill) a child molester.
Point of order:
Reba’s version of The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia is a cover. The original was performed by Vicki Lawrence in 1973.
Also, the full plot of the story has the little sister killing the best friend and the cheating wife. The brother is arrested because he had come to the best friend’s house to threaten the friend, but upon finding the body panicked and signaled a passing state police patrol car by firing off a shotgun.
It is implied that the brother found his friend’s body while the sister was disposing of the wife’s corpse.
The wife’s body was never found, so the police assumed she had run away, and the brother was wrongfully convicted of his friend’s murder and quickly executed via hanging before the sister could confess. She has no remorse for the double homicide, but the song is an indictment of the corrupt, lazy, sloppy Southern judicial system and how the state executed the wrong person.
The Reba cover sounds better, in my opinion, but the recording quality of the original isn’t very good, so it’s hard to say.
Anyway, just tacking on my 2¢ that nobody asked for.
Epilogue: the extended version of The Thunder Rolls is fucking amazing and chilling and if you find it you should keep it forever. But also send it to me because I’ve been looking for it for years. I think I only heard it once, during the live Madison Square Garden concert that I blasted through every speaker in the house when I was in high school even though I was only able to get the sound and not the video because we didn’t have that channel on our cable package.
Tag: country music
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones – i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note – all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way
and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list
and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist
and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a’ringin’ her bell”country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country – how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state – especially from johnny cash and merle haggard – now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda;
which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads;
which paved the way for meaningless party anthems – attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem – “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn – sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” – has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so – understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands – the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon – almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
tora42's nonsensne 