Opinion: Modern country is the worst musical genre of all time

I’m in my seventies and do like quality music in every genre including Rap, Country, Classical, Rock n Roll, R&B, Bluegrass, Jazz, and all the rest. That’s a great quality I picked up from my Mom who grew up in the Swing era and played Classical piano, listened to the Dick Clark show daily, and generally liked almost all music, good bad, and indifferent. She passed away at age 95, and I love the memory of her playing music from the "Phantom of the Opera" Broadway show on the piano up until her eighties, struggling with Boogie-Woogie style piano playing when I was a kid, and always asking me to play a favorite Santana song on the stereo when she visited. We could all stand to learn something from her.

Being an old fart who generically doesn’t like Rap is just as lame as those same  oldsters who thought Rock n Roll was some sort of unlistenable menace in the fifties. The more things change the more they remain the same it seems.

Mike

Modern Country = Bad Rock n Roll + Twang

Old Country is where it's at. Todays Country is all about pretty boys & gals and pretty faces. Give me some man in black or Hank Williams Sr any day. Good conversation here, and I will certainly look into some of the artists mentioned especially Marty Stuart. 

In the meantime, Classic Rock and some Alternative is where I'm at. 

More Cowbell!

I dunno. Billy May. Prog. Ken Nordine. French Rockabilly. There are a few things that I believe may sound worse. Either way, an aesthetic judgement that I may normally keep to myself. Everybody’s got their thing. It’s one thing to pass judgement on the sincerity of the option, but not the opinion itself. 
 

I have about 6 bands the significant other puts on the do not play with her around list. They are Slapp Happy, The Butthole Surfers, Shake Chain, Marina P, any band with Lydia Lunch, and Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Makers. Judge away. 

@thebingster: As you have evoked the name of Merle Haggard, allow me to offer a couple of stories about the great man.

By the early-90’s I had already discovered Lucinda Williams (her album on Rough Trade), seeing her and her 4-pc. band play in small joints around Los Angeles (once in a pizza parlour to an audience of about a half dozen), Lou Ann Barton (her great debut album on Asylum Records, produced by Jerry Wexler and Glenn Frey. Lou Ann was the lead singer in the original version of Double Trouble, double referring to her on vocals and Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar, he doing no singing. Lou Ann now works a lot with Jimmie Vaughan. She’s a fantastic singer!), and all the "New Traditionalists", the term some marketing man came up with for the emerging crop of young Country artists whose influences were Hank Williams and all the other "real" Country artists of yore. That crop included Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, George Strait, Clint Black, Patty Loveless, Carlene Carter, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Marty Stuart, Jim Lauderdale, etc.

I read an interview with Haggard, in which he heaped massive praise on a new female artist: Iris DeMent. So I of course got her new 1992 debut album (Infamous Angel) and immediately fell madly in love. She instantly became my new favorite female singer (displacing Tammy Wynette), and remains so to this day. Rock critic Robert Christgau gave her follow up album (My Life) a grade of A+ (!) in his Creem magazine review. My Life contains the single most devastating song I have ever heard: "No Time To Cry", which Merle himself recorded. His version is good, hers brilliant.

Second Merle story: In the early 1970’s Merle played the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, a half hour south of San Francisco. Doing sound at the theater that night was a soundman who had done sound at a lot of shows my bandmates and I had played around the Bay Area. My bassist partner was a huge Merle fan, and attended the show. Standing at the theater’s monitoring board and chatting, the sound man asked my bassist if he would like to go on Merle’s bus and meet him. Well duh ;-) . When they got up the stairs and into the buses "living room", Merle and his band were sitting around a table, playing poker. In the middle of the table was the biggest pile of blow my pal had ever seen. They might not smoke marijuana in Muskogee, but they apparently snort coke ;-) .