Why Country Music Was Great in 2013 (Viral Video)

country-musicOn Saturday evening (12-21), a writer for Entertainment Weekly named Grady Smith, who recently has become an outspoken advocate for giving independent country musicians equal time, and has been critical about the direction of the male-dominated country music mainstream, posted a video called “Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013“. According to Grady, it was in response to when he posted his 10 Best Country Albums of 2013, naming Jason Isbell, Lindi Ortega, and Sturgill Simpson to the top spots, and readers complained he wasn’t representing the mainstream fairly.

I saw the video from Grady roughly an hour after it was posted, tweeted it out through the official Saving Country Music twitter, and put it as the first item in the News Feed that scrolls off at the top of every page. Nonetheless, as sites both small and large picked up the video and it circulated on social network, I got barraged with messages from anywhere and everywhere wondering if I had seen it. I didn’t respond to any of them, nor did I feel the need to get in on the fun by posting my own dedicated story about the video, because I knew as soon as I saw the video that it would go mega viral and a sense of sheer dread swept over me. Subsequently the video has received nearly 1.5 million views at the time of this post.

Why did a sense of sheer dread sweep over me? Because this is not the type of thing that needs to go viral.

This is not a criticism of Grady Smith. He deserves great credit for making the video, and kudos to him for coming up with the brilliant idea and executing it well. However it took more guts, and deserves more praise for posting his end-of-the-year list on Entertainment Weekly. That is what he should be commended for foremost, and that is what should have gone viral, along with the albums he was recommending with it.

But it didn’t, and they didn’t. Why? Because when you boil it all down, in 2013, the vast majority of people, including many of the people who pride themselves in being active and enlightened country music fans, truly don’t give a shit about “supporting” the music, despite of what they will tell you, or post on social media. This video going viral proves what has been brewing over the last few years, which is that independent country fans, and other country fans otherwise disenfranchised from the mainstream, are many times just as shallow as their mainstream counterparts, finding entertainment in the least common denominator and at the expense of others.

This is the moment when some of you will start laughing, as this statement coming from Saving Country Music is like the pot calling the kettle back. First, I don’t want to diminish whatever effectiveness the video might have at enlightening some folks about the current idiocy of some modern country music. That is why Grady made it; not to entertain the masses that already know this as fact. Grady may have hoped the video would go viral, but rarely do any of us know what button to push to spurn a viral event, or we’d do it on a daily basis.

But why does it take a video like this for a piece of media to go viral? There were many excellent independent country videos this year that great effort was put into that could proselytize the virtues of true music way better than the “Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013” video. As much as Saving Country Music and other sites might love to make fun of the mainstream, the focus should always be on the positive first. But more and more, album reviews, artist features, song and video premiers, and other such wholesome music coverage is virtually ignored for the latest viral craze.

Saving Country Music, like Entertainment Weekly, posted a lot of end-of-year lists touting recommendations based on this calendar year: a songs list, albums list, video list, etc. But by far the list that got the most attention was are list of the Worst Songs of the Year. That particular list got twice as much traffic as all the other lists combined. It went viral in its own right. Criticism is an important, if not vital part of the spectrum of coverage that ensures a healthy artistic environment. But it can’t be the focus, either by the media, or by the fans. Most of the time, the media does their job. Music journalists got into the business because they love music. But it’s still a business, and they must meet the demands fans are requesting in coverage.

What I’m getting at here is that if similar attention was paid to one video, or one song, or one artist from the top of Grady Smith’s Best Of list instead of this viral video, then today we may be touting Jason Isbell, Lindi Ortega, or Sturgill Simpson straight up busting into the mainstream and making an historic racket for an independent artist, and incidentally, if it was a video or song from one of these artists’ songs, it would have made them a decent amount of money as well. But instead what is the end result of this viral video? We’re all simply assured of what we’d known before about mainstream male music in 2013, while the mainstream fans that listen to this drivel laugh us off as Prius-driving elitists.

And most importantly, I don’t think country music in 2013 was awful, and you don’t have to go any farther than Jason Isbell, Lindi Ortega, or Sturgill Simpson to see why. I think 2013 in country was amazingly positive, inspiringly positive, and I mean that. In the nearly 7 years of running this site, this was the year when I felt a dent was finally made in the pursuit of Saving Country Music.

So I made this video below to illustrate this. Will it go as viral as “Why Country Music Was Awful In 2013”? Of course not. So let’s all as music fans, journalists, advocates, activists, and artists sit back and think about what that really means, and see if in 2014 we can’t make sure to keep our priorities more in focus. I for one vow to.

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