Welcome to Country Music, American Idol Scotty McCreery

Well hello there American Idol winner Scotty McCreery, my name’s The Triggerman, and I want to formally welcome you to country music.

Don’t worry, just because I’m a hardliner, doesn’t mean I’m gonna rip into you just because you’re an Idol alum. In an ironic symptom of the current state of country music, teeming masses of 14-year-old glitter-faced girls high on Spree and voting en masse on cell phones seem to be a better judge of talent than boardrooms full of business and marketing majors. Look at Carrie Underwood; she’s kept her nose pretty clean with me. So American Idol or not, I promise I will judge you on your own merit.

You’ve got quite a voice on you there Scotty. You’ve learned how to bottom out on the beginning of phrases . . . just like Garth. Hell, just from seeing pictures of you and the adolescent suffix on your name, I thought you would sound like a castrated Smurf (sorry, don’t watch Idol so I’d never heard you before). I was wrong.

Somebody was explaining to me the other day that on American Idol, contestants at some point choose what genre they are, so there’s country people, rock people, R&B people, etc. Well isn’t that cute. I come from the school that thinks that you don’t pick country, country picks you.

Because country isn’t just a genre of music like all those other ones; a simple word to offer distinction or categorization. It is a culture that has a rich and storied history that must be honored, or at least understood for the music to be true. Your princely little American Idol crown was bestowed in the midst of a culture war in country music. While purists fight to preserve the roots of the music, pop acts look to exploit it, and outfauxs and fat white country rappers work to squeeze every last stereotype out of rural culture for financial exploit.

It’s hard to know where you fit in that scheme at the moment, because even though you’ve been given the title of an “Idol”, meaning something to be worshiped, I don’t care how many licks from a kitten it takes to clean the peach fuzz off your face, until you actually put out an album, you are nothing more than a glorified Karaoke contest winner in my eyes.

But your album will come out, and if you listen to what all those men in those tall buildings tell you to do, you can puts plenty of 0’s behind the first number in your bank account to be left behind when you die. Or maybe you could use this one-in-a-million opportunity afforded by the gratuitous excess of American media, as well as your undeniably strong voice, and truly look deep down inside yourself, and find that one divine spark that exists in every human soul at inception, that one thing we are all meant to share with the rest of the world, and then share it, regardless of the financial outcome, or what the masses or asshole critics like me have to say about it.

Now that would be something I could idolize as an American.

–Triggerman

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