00:00:30.000A couple of months ago, we delivered the obituary for rock music, a genre that was
00:00:35.100never going to survive the post-Obama cultural shifts in America, which punish experimentation
00:00:40.040and risk-taking, as well as anything that's important to white people generally, while
00:00:45.340rewarding manufactured solo acts that are easier to market on social media and also much easier
00:00:50.460to manage and control. There's no doubt that the death of rock is a bad sign, and you might even
00:00:56.520call it a leading indicator of cultural decay in this country. Now, of course, some people,
00:01:00.940some conservatives especially, might argue that rock music itself was a driver of cultural decay.
00:01:06.840And in some cases, they might be right. But generally speaking, rock was, still is, where
00:01:11.600you can find it, a truly great art form, in my view. And more than that, it is an American art
00:01:18.320form. Rock was both a product of American culture and a producer of American culture. Each decade,
00:01:24.600going back to the 50s, saw a new stage in the evolution of the genre reflecting changes and
00:01:30.220shifts in the culture at large, whether it was the prog rock and heavy metal and arena rock of the
00:01:34.46070s or the new wave and hair metal of the 80s or the alt rock and grunge of the 90s and so on.
00:01:39.580You can go back and listen to the rock music of a particular decade and come away with a better
00:01:45.020understanding of the cultural mood of that time. Now, our current decade, as we talked about,
00:01:51.540is arguably the first in 70 years that doesn't have its own unique rock sound, which is not a
00:01:59.980good thing, I would quite emphatically argue. It's yet another symptom of an exhausted,
00:02:05.520decadent culture with no new ideas and basically nothing left to say. Now, that said, there are
00:02:11.740some subgenres of rock that, while not often producing huge mainstream hits, although sometimes
00:02:18.600as they do, are still churning out great music nonetheless. Folk rock is one of those subgenres,
00:02:24.040one of my favorites. And I say that really just as a way, since we're talking about music,
00:02:28.320to wedge in a mention of Glenn Hansard, who's one of the great folk rock and singer-songwriter
00:02:33.600musicians of our time who just sadly died in a motorcycle accident yesterday. He starred in a
00:02:38.220movie called Once back in 2007 that, if you consider it a musical, and I do, is one of the
00:02:43.880only musicals that I ever personally enjoyed. He was a great artist. And if you're not familiar
00:02:48.340with him, you should go look him up as soon as the show is over. So that's your homework.
00:02:52.660But in any case, while rock has fallen on hard times, along with a number of other
00:02:56.480once thriving musical genres, it's not all bad news. There is another traditional American genre
00:03:02.300that is somehow thriving right now. And it's worth thinking about how it has managed to succeed
00:03:09.020in an environment that has all but destroyed so many other forms of music.
00:03:15.100This is the counterbalancing narrative to the decline of rock.
00:03:18.940And it is, dare I say, as I would rarely say, a cause for some optimism,
00:03:24.840which is that as rock has faded, country music is now dominating the charts.
00:03:30.100And this is a resurgence that's not entirely new.
00:03:34.180It's been building for several years now.
00:03:36.040You can make the case, though, that country music is now the strongest it's ever been, certainly in terms of its popularity relative to other genres, that's for sure.
00:03:46.340Ella Langley's Choose in Texas has now spent 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which is a record for a female solo act, excluding holiday releases.
00:03:57.620The previous record holders were We Belong Together by Mariah Carey and I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston,
00:04:02.420although the latter was actually written by Dolly Parton, whose original version is superior in my
00:04:06.220opinion. But each spent 14 weeks at the top spot. Ella Langley's now been at 15 weeks, and her
00:04:12.900surprising triumph has been a cause of consternation for some people on social media who are clearly
00:04:18.360not thrilled maybe to see a down-home country girl from Alabama take this particular crown.
00:04:25.520And it's caused some heartburn for some critics who fashion themselves country music purists and
00:04:31.160have decided that Langley is not authentic enough or something. But in fact, she's actually quite
00:04:36.380authentic, and the song, whether you happen to enjoy it or not, is in many ways a classic old
00:04:41.400school country song. We'll talk more about that particular song in a moment and why it's successful,
00:04:46.140but suffice to say, it's not an outlier. As Billboard reports, quote, country hits claimed
00:04:51.260the top four for a second time in the Hot 100's history, two weeks after the genre first achieved
00:04:56.740the feet. Below Choosing Texas, Taylor Swift's I Knew It, I Knew You is number two for a fifth
00:05:02.640consecutive week, if you can call that country, which I think I would not. After it spent its
00:05:07.580first two weeks on the Hot 100 at number one in June, Stella Lefty's first top 10 Boston surges
00:05:13.020six to three for a new high. And Langley and Morgan Wallen's I Can't Love You Anymore rebounds
00:05:19.720three spots to its number four best. Two weeks earlier, Choosing Texas, I Knew It, I Knew You,
00:05:24.600and I Can't Love You Anymore, we're in the same spots, joined by Langley's Be Her at number three
00:05:28.820and eight other weeks. All in the past three years, country titles took the top three starting
00:05:33.760in August 5th, 2023, dated Hot 100 via Jason Aldean's Try That on a Small Town, Wallin's Last
00:05:41.360Night, and Luke Combs' Fast Car. Of the nine weeks, all time with country songs at either
00:05:46.240numbers one through three or numbers one through four in the Hot 100, this week marks the fifth
00:05:50.040in a row, dating to the first week in July. So there are other metrics we could talk about too,
00:05:56.160including the fact that country has been the fastest growing U.S. genre in on-demand streaming
00:06:00.380since 2023. The longest running number one songs in the last three years on streaming services have
00:06:06.380all been country songs. And meanwhile, as country music is surging, several other genres, not just
00:06:12.740rock, have been collapsing. Which again, is not a good thing, to be clear. I mean, one of the
00:06:17.580downstream consequences of the implosion of the monoculture, a topic we've talked about at length
00:06:22.660and for good reason, is that perhaps somewhat paradoxically, pop culture has become less
00:06:29.720eclectic, less vibrant, and less varied, even as the culture has fractured. You may expect the
00:06:36.660opposite to happen, but that's not how it's worked out. In the 90s, there were many thriving genres
00:06:42.040of music that were all producing massive mainstream hits, grunge, alt-rock, rap, punk,
00:06:49.380pop-punk, metal, adult contemporary, even like ska and techno and Europop had their
00:06:55.220moments in the sun on occasion. All of these genres and a few others you could name were
00:07:00.220thriving and occasionally or frequently, depending on the genre, would dominate the airwaves
00:07:04.680with huge crossover hits. Now today, most of those genres have receded into their niche
00:07:11.320corners of the music scene. Some of them essentially no longer exist. For years now,
00:07:16.420the only truly mainstream genres left were pop, rap, and increasingly country. And now even rap
00:07:22.980is experiencing a stark and noticeable decline. R&B and hip-hop have dropped from 41% of Billboard
00:07:28.900200 album-equivalent consumption units to just 30%. As of this summer, recently rap music went
00:07:34.520a period of some weeks without a single song on the Billboard Top 40 list, which is the first time
00:07:41.160that that's happened since like 1990. Now, the reports of the death of rap music have perhaps
00:07:47.440been exaggerated. It's not dead, but the decline of the genre is very real. There's no question
00:07:53.080about it. Now, in case you're not familiar with the lingo, by the way, album equivalent consumption
00:07:57.760units are a metric that's used to measure the popularity of music, taking into account the fact
00:08:02.060that pretty much everybody is using streaming services now. Nobody's actually buying albums.
00:08:05.980So they've come up with a formula that tries to convert streams into album sales.
00:08:11.120And according to the latest version of this formula, which changes sometimes,
00:08:15.700if songs from one album are streamed 1,200 times on paid subscription services like Spotify or Apple Music or whatever else,
00:08:23.040that counts as one album equivalent units.
00:08:26.740That's treated exactly like one album sale on the Billboard charts.
00:08:30.340Now, how did they come up with 1,200 as the baseline?
00:08:34.040It may sound like they just sort of chose it arbitrarily and randomly.
00:08:36.900And, well, that's exactly what they did, as far as I know.
00:08:39.120But that's how things are tabulated now.
00:08:42.140And by this metric, I must note that also Latin music is on the upswing.
00:08:47.460We have to acknowledge, for reasons you could probably guess,
00:08:49.840Latin songs account for roughly 10% of all U.S. music streaming as of the first quarter of this year.
00:08:55.080We all remember the Super Bowl halftime show.0.99
00:08:57.980Or we don't really remember it because it was boring and forgettable.0.85
00:09:00.780But nonetheless, it was a victory for Latin music. And if you go back to 2015, before the Biden administration allowed tens of millions of foreigners into the country, Latin music accounted for around 4% of the overall music market in this country. The vast majority of these new listeners, we can assume, are probably not Americans, although, of course, you won't find any official statistics on that point.
00:09:22.720Now, granted, I'm not the guy to judge the quality of Latin music today as compared to the Latin music of the past.
00:09:28.380I frankly find the whole genre quite tedious and dull.
00:09:31.880It's just not my bag, which probably doesn't surprise you.0.66
00:09:35.000But I will say that even as Latin music is technically growing in popularity,
00:09:39.940it still has not reclaimed the cultural heights it reached in 1993 with the Macarena, in my opinion,
00:13:06.820And if you start today, you could delay two mortgage payments.
00:13:09.720Call American Financing today, 866-569-4711.
00:13:13.400That's 866-569-4711, or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Walsh.
00:13:20.740Yeah, what we're talking about today specifically is country music.
00:13:24.660And before we go any further here, I do have to acknowledge that a lot of modern country music is also terrible.
00:13:30.240I'm not going to pretend that every country music song is worthwhile while all Latin and hip-hop and R&B is a waste of time.
00:13:36.100That wouldn't be true on either score.
00:13:37.440There are plenty of cliche boilerplate country songs that sound like they were made primarily to serve as the soundtrack for an Applebee's commercial because that is why they were made.
00:13:47.720There are plenty of country songs that have infused so many pop and even hip hop elements that they barely qualify as country songs at all.
00:13:55.560But even so, many of the popular country songs in recent years have been faithful in tone and theme and sound, basically, to traditional country music.
00:14:04.040I mentioned Elle Langley, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, and others. This is not just a story of country music achieving widespread success by stripping itself of every defining feature and becoming a soulless corporate product, indistinguishable basically from AI slop. I mean, there is some of that happening, certainly. That might be part of the story. That's an element.
00:14:25.000But we're also witnessing a genuine resurgence of the genre at its core, of the traditional genre.
00:14:33.460And this is significant in part because historically, country has been dominated by rural Americans, especially in the South and the West where it originated.
00:14:42.300What we're seeing now is a major victory for Southern culture, which we'll talk more about in a minute.
00:14:47.420And that's a culture that, as we all know,
00:15:16.540that I think sold like a million copies or something, the first to ever do that,
00:15:20.380was called The Wreck of the Old 97. It was released in 1924. It was about a train derailment
00:15:25.400in Virginia. So this was a genre that was, in many respects, invented to tell the American story,
00:15:31.820especially its tragic elements. And in the West, country music had its origins in the lifestyle of
00:15:37.700ranchers and cattle drivers on the frontier. The songs had relevance to specific portions of the
00:15:42.600country in ways that a lot of music executives didn't realize at first. But in the 1990s,
00:15:49.100when the music industry turned on the sound scan system, they immediately realized how popular
00:15:53.520country music was in these particular areas of the country. Rural radio was the stronghold for
00:15:59.660country music, even though there were several artists with wide crossover appeal, like Shania
00:16:04.080Twain and Garth Brooks. But as of 1997, there were more than 2,400 radio stations devoted solely to
00:16:10.300country music broadcasting throughout the United States, accounting for more than a quarter of all
00:16:15.080commercial radio stations in the country. And around the same time, country music accounted
00:16:19.000for roughly 20% of all record sales. Meanwhile, in February 1996, as country music was surging
00:16:23.860in small towns across America, New York City's biggest country music station stopped playing
00:16:29.040country music full-time. They moved over to dance music. The biggest radio market in the United
00:16:34.340States, there was no full-time country music on FM radio. So country was indeed a phenomenon in
00:16:41.120the South and the West in particular, and now it's coming back. So the song Choose in Texas
00:16:46.020in particular is a solid vehicle to spearhead, or at least participate in, if not spearhead,
00:16:51.820this comeback. And I'm not going to pretend that it's some historic, extraordinary achievement
00:16:55.460in songwriting or anything like that. It's not an artistic masterpiece necessarily, in my opinion,
00:17:01.840but it's a genuine country song it's a good it's a good little song that is now objectively one of
00:17:07.900the biggest hits of this century it's also not some insufferable girl boss anthem if anything
00:17:14.020it's like an anti-girl boss anthem and it's not a brain dead pop song pretending to be country
00:17:19.640wearing the style of country music like a skin suit as we've seen in plenty of other cases
00:17:24.340uh in case you've somehow never heard this song here's a short snippet which
00:17:29.180in my professional legal opinion will not get me sued into oblivion by columbia records but
00:17:34.900we'll see how that goes watch she's from texas i can tell by the way he's too stepping around the
00:17:43.820room and judging by the smile that's written on his face there's nothing i can do
00:17:52.960so it's about a woman who's pining for a man who's choosing someone else
00:17:58.160It's a song that feels less like a lot of modern pop country and more like a spiritual successor to Dolly Parton's Jolene,
00:18:05.940which, given that Jolene is one of the greatest songs of all time, is not bad company to be in.
00:18:11.000And a song like Jolene resonates through the generations because it's about feelings and problems and troubles that people connect with.
00:18:18.400It's about someone who's pleading and desperate and heartbroken. That is a human experience.
00:18:23.600Now, a lot of modern pop and hip-hop music and plenty of the worst and most fraudulent country music, by comparison, consists of the artist bragging about themselves.
00:18:35.040I mean, it's false and it's fake, and it doesn't speak to anything deeper in the human soul, which may be one of the reasons why the public is tiring of those genres.
00:18:47.180I mean, there's only so much of that that you can listen to.
00:18:49.140There's only so many decades we can hear that kind of thing, one hit song after another, where the guy's talking about how great he is, that after a while, you just get bored of it.
00:18:58.820It's not connecting with anything real inside you.
00:19:02.500Now, when I praised the Ella Langley song on X, a few people responded that her song is also degenerate nonsense because it's about a woman drinking away her sorrows.0.82
00:19:11.660I'm not trying to make the case that the song is like a Bible for how to live your life, which is not really what music is meant to be.
00:19:18.460But first of all, like it or not, drinking away your troubles has been a regular theme of country music for like 70 years.
00:19:24.060I mean, it's certainly been a topic that's been revisited by country musicians for a very long time.
00:19:31.060And second, again, pining for something, feeling heartbroken because you can't have it, is human.
00:19:37.640It's real. And those are the aspects of the human condition that music is supposed to illuminate and give voice to.
00:19:44.820So in short, it's a song about yearning. It's a song about longing.
00:19:48.460Now, this is a topic for a longer monologue, but I've been thinking about this for a long time.
00:19:53.900You know, as a culture, there's no question that to some significant degree, I think we've lost this sense of yearning.
00:20:04.600And pretty much every song and every genre for decades, for centuries, used to be about someone who wanted something, usually another person, that they couldn't have.
00:20:17.520Or it was about someone who had what they wanted and then they lost it.
00:20:23.000Or it's about someone who has something they want, but they're afraid that they might lose it.
00:20:29.540Or they have something they want and they're grateful because their life used to be bad and now it's better because they have this thing and there's some gratitude to it as well.
00:20:39.460I mean, you might even make the case that music is basically the sound of longing.
00:20:43.660Even wordless music like the great symphonies conjure the feeling of longing, of yearning, of heartbreak, of desire, and not base desire, but desire for love, for beauty, for God.
00:20:58.520It's what music is. It's what it's supposed to be.
00:21:00.980Music was an art form that existed to express the deepest and often frustrated desires of the human soul.
00:21:09.440uh the two previous record holder songs we just mentioned we belong together and i will always
00:21:14.220love you we're about longing go all the way back to the early days of modern music uh you know
00:21:19.760can't help falling in love uh by ellis presley or yesterday by the beatles or every breath you take
00:21:24.200by the police bit of a creepy example that last one but it's an example nonetheless longing
00:21:29.440yearning even the upbeat the like up tempo kind of songs upbeat ones used to generally be about
00:21:35.380what the artist longs for, what they're pursuing, not what they already possess. I want to hold your
00:21:42.320hand. Wouldn't it be nice? Jessie's Girl. I mean, you could name a thousand examples across many
00:21:46.360decades. Not all of them are towering works of genius. Jessie's Girl isn't exactly Beethoven,
00:21:50.640but you still see the theme of longing and yearning there. But then a distinct shift began
00:21:56.880sometime in the late 90s into the 2000s until by like the 2010s and 2020s, virtually every popular
00:22:04.480song was no longer about longing or yearning for what you didn't have or didn't want to lose,
00:22:11.260but rather about bragging about what you already had. Entire genres of music, at least in the
00:22:17.920mainstream, produced almost nothing but boasts and bravado. So instead of, I want this thing I can't
00:22:25.440have, which used to be like every song, it became, I already have everything and everybody else wants
00:22:33.300what I have. This is a dramatic, 180-degree artistic shift that happened very noticeably
00:22:42.500that seems to have gone largely unnoticed, or at least it's not talked about.
00:22:47.480Now, for millennia, since the invention of human art in any form, it would have been extremely
00:22:52.760unusual for an artist to produce a work of art designed with no other purpose than to boast
00:22:59.180about himself. Now, sure, like pharaohs and emperors may have commissioned works of art to
00:23:04.200show off their status and their power, but the artists themselves, even if they were sometimes
00:23:10.440egomaniacs hungry for respect and admiration, as artists can tend to be, as humans can tend to be,
00:23:16.600were not generally producing art whose sole and most explicit message was simply that
00:23:22.100the artist himself is great and rich and cool and everybody wants to be like him.
00:23:29.720Art didn't become that until very, very recently.
00:23:33.020And so you look at the most popular songs in recent years, the last 5, 10, 15 years by Drake or Megan Thee Stallion or Cardi B or whoever else.
00:23:41.580The only message in the music is that the person who made the music thinks that they're awesome and rich and attractive.
00:24:07.460Now, for decades, musicians sang about things that they saw and liked and wanted,
00:24:11.640but didn't have, or did have, but were afraid they might lose,
00:24:15.960or have lost, and now they're sad about it, or whatever.
00:24:18.380Now they have everything, and they don't want anything, and that's what the song's about.
00:24:21.920even though most of these people are actually desperately sad and dysfunctional and hate
00:24:26.600themselves but they won't talk about that in their music a lot of time because because they lack
00:24:31.120the courage or introspection or artistic talent to dig that deeply now not to get too lost in the
00:24:37.080weeds my i did say that you know this discussion mostly belongs in its own monologue but here we
00:24:41.900are doing it here uh but you even see something like this shift reflected in children's entertainment
00:24:48.420This is going to seem like kind of an obscure connection, but I actually don't think it is.
00:24:53.560You know, once upon a time, every kid's cartoon used to be centered on characters who were frustrated by the limitations and realities of the physical world.
00:25:03.120Often because they wanted something that was always out of their grasp.
00:25:07.480That's like the central plot of most of the classic cartoons.
00:25:11.460You know, Roadrunner and the Coyote, Charlie Brown and the Football, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, Pinky and the Brain.0.80
00:25:17.400the silly rabbit who doesn't understand0.94
00:25:18.980that tricks are for kids, et cetera.0.99
00:25:20.360I mean, that wasn't a show that was a commercial,
00:25:21.740but still, that's kind of like what cartoons were, you know?
00:25:25.640Now, every kid's show instead is about characters
00:25:29.540who have no conflict or frustration in their lives
00:25:33.520and they get whatever they want all the time
00:25:35.540and everything works out and they're never hurt
00:25:37.060and, you know, nothing bad ever happens.
00:25:39.640This is a point that Matthew Crawford,
00:25:41.200the author, makes in one of his books very convincingly.
00:25:46.760And he points out that in the early days of Disney, Mickey Mouse was like a slapstick character, constantly getting bruised and beaten and defeated by the world around him.
00:25:57.720Right. That's also Looney Tunes, like in the, you know, in the early days of Looney Tunes.
00:26:01.520That's what all it was like. These characters are getting beat up constantly.
00:26:05.320And it's supposed to it's hilarious. Right. As a kid, you laugh.
00:26:07.760Well, today, kids can tune in to the show Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and they can watch Mickey, you know, traipse around a magical building that can do anything and give Mickey and the other characters whatever they want all the time.
00:26:20.640And nobody ever really has any problems. And certainly no one's ever hurt or frustrated or left wanting something they can't have.
00:26:27.940The children today have grown up watching entertainment where the world gives you whatever you want,
00:26:33.440and you're never left wanting or longing, and they tend to bring those expectations out into the real world.
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00:28:36.040So all that to say, after that somewhat circuitous detour,
00:28:42.500if the concept of yearning or longing is making a small, limited, isolated comeback in part by way
00:28:49.940of country music, that would be good news. And it would suggest that people are becoming more
00:28:54.540aspirational as opposed to being demanding and insufferable, maybe. At the same time, I don't
00:29:00.520think that that's the only major reason for country music's sudden rise in popularity. As with
00:29:05.180anything else, there are probably many different factors at play. Another factor is that almost
00:29:10.140unlike almost every other genre, modern country is generally wholesome. You can listen to the
00:29:17.080music with your kids in the car. You don't feel like you need to take a shower after hearing one
00:29:20.600of the songs. Of course, it's not hard to find degenerate country songs. Save a Horse, Ride a
00:29:25.980Cowboy, Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo, as well as a certain song by Trey Lewis about a loose woman
00:29:31.520who's known for making the rounds in various cities, most notably Dallas. But even some of
00:29:36.160those songs, some of them, are wholesome compared to many of the most popular and ubiquitous pop and
00:29:41.940rap songs of recent vintage. And meanwhile, Ella Langley is uploading videos like this one, where
00:29:47.140she tells her fans how she came up with the intro and outro for her latest record, splices home
00:29:51.660video footage in with her playing the song at her recording studio. Watch.
00:30:06.160Apples on the table, peaches on the shelf
00:30:21.980Apples on the table, peaches on the shelf
00:30:27.000If you want any more than you sing it yourself
00:30:34.420I'll say 30 years ago, degeneracy was transgressive. It was shocking.0.74
00:30:44.640You know, it's like a thing that nobody was expecting. It was countercultural.0.67
00:30:48.600Popular artists in various genres would intentionally shock and offend and provoke
00:30:53.700by flouting social norms and challenging basic rules of etiquette and morality.
00:30:59.660But the problem is that today, degeneracy is the drumbeat of our daily lives.
00:31:04.020We see it often and everywhere. There's no escaping it. You go on the internet and you see
00:31:09.280the most shocking and awful things imaginable, the most gratuitous things imaginable. You could
00:31:13.780just see it pop up in your social media feed. It's all just part of the background now. It's
00:31:19.680background noise, unfortunately. Meanwhile, you can't go for a walk in any major city without
00:31:24.880running into at least 10 drug-addicted homeless psychopaths, any one of whom could stab you in0.98
00:31:29.200the throat and get away with it. So there really are no rules of etiquette to flout anymore.
00:31:33.440Our morality is largely and falsely considered a matter of subjectivity.
00:31:37.320Well, if morality is subjective, then there is no moral law to obey, which is the whole point.
00:31:42.920That's why people claim that it's subjective.
00:31:44.640But then there's also no moral law to transgress either, which is a problem for artists whose whole shtick is to be nothing but transgressive and have nothing else to say.
00:31:55.740And in a situation like that, then indeed, wholesomeness becomes the only truly transgressive thing.
00:32:03.440Or at least it's an escape from the norm. Anything that's encouraging or edifying in tone, anything that gets at the longing and hope and desire in the human soul is a novelty to modern audiences. And for the record, when I say all this, I don't intend to do the typical conservative commentator thing of like latching on to some famous person who we believe to be vaguely aligned with us and lift this person up as a champion for the right wing cause.
00:32:28.000I have no idea what Ella Langley's politics are. I wouldn't be surprised if she were liberal.
00:32:31.760Probably is. I'm not looking to any country music star or any other celebrity to be
00:32:35.920my political champion. None of them will surprise me when they endorse Gavin Newsom or whoever in
00:32:40.8602028. My point is simply that country music generally and historically is more traditionally
00:32:46.920patriotic and wholesome, especially compared to other popular genres. And that might help explain
00:32:52.060its rising popularity. Now, for a long time, you know, much of mainstream art across various
00:32:58.660mediums has either been a showcase for degenerate bravado, as we've already discussed, or else what
00:33:04.460you also find on the other end of that pendulum swing, you know, something rather grim, you know,
00:33:09.660for a sort of grim forum for brooding and despair. Perhaps one of the reasons that horror has become
00:33:15.520one of the most popular and bankable film genres is that audiences are looking for a respite
00:33:20.080from the false, thin braggadocio of mainstream entertainment.
00:33:24.940There's nothing wrong with horror films, in my view.
00:33:27.100In fact, you could argue that given their focus on the supernatural
00:33:29.600and how seriously those films take the spiritual realm,
00:33:33.520that horror is a religious genre, even sometimes a Christian one in some ways.
00:33:38.660But there is another option outside of that dichotomy,
00:33:42.400and maybe the success of country music reflects that.
00:33:45.660It certainly reflects something else from a geographical perspective.
00:33:48.280as i alluded to earlier the success of country music is another cultural triumph for the south
00:33:54.360you know if a guy who's commuting in chicago is listening to langley or stapleton then that's a
00:34:02.280major victory unlike anything we've seen in this country in a long time and i mean that unironically
00:34:06.680you know as conservatives we're so used to sort of wallowing in defeat that we rarely remember to
00:34:11.820mark the victories and this is one of them now country music is playing in new york city again
00:34:16.320all those years after they banished it from the airwaves.