I greatly enjoy songs that in roughly 3 minutes tell and story and convey some universal message. Right now I’m listening to Riley Green cover a song originally done by Travis Tritt called Where Corn Don’t Grow. Where corn don’t grow is that place we have in our minds that is far better than our current place and state.

The message in the song is more relevant now than it was in the late 80’s or early 90’s when it was penned and released on radio. Today we have more examples of false ideals than ever before. In the 90’s and prior you had television, which infuriated your home to provide you with a million images of what was an ideal. Today not only do you have more images via the various channels of social media, but you have your neighbor, co-worker and cousin posting images of themselves in their best state. It’s no fault of theirs that they post pictures and videos of life’s better moments.  Yet, when you only see the good in the lives of others, how can that not have an impact on you when you hit a rough patch? When your window to the outside world is a polished version of a fragment of everyone’s life, I’m not surprised social media has an overall negative impact on one’s mental well being.

I also believe our connection to the past has become more or less increasingly inoperable given the more technology we throw at ourselves. One of the greatest challenges we face today, whether we recognize it or not, is how to build technology to make us more human and not more robotic. Technology of today makes us more focused on the present, just as a robot is focused on the task at  hand and the next order to be executed.

The trends above also impact art. Country music’s story telling aptitude has been debased to drinking and sapping love songs that sounds like they came out of the reject pile from mainstream pop music. Heavy on style and light on substance. If farming is talked about, it’s 9 times out of 10 spoken of in a party barn round about way. 

So, there you have it, the end of my dismal evaluation of the current state of country music and society in general. Certain expressions of the human spirit are an indicator of our changing foundational values of a society and where we are headed. When I listen to 90’s country music I find more substance than what has been produced by the same genre for the last decade. At least we have timeless messages to hear still, even if they are but a mainstream dream of three decades ago…hard times are real whether your social media feed says so or not.