this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
1150 points (98.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
11623 readers
2880 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s never been great. Nasal and basic, with real zingers like “my love burns like a hot stove”.
Rockabilly, now we’re getting somewhere good. Music with a little soul. Other various fusion efforts can be good too.
I won’t wax poetic on it, but top 40 country has been rather banal for decades.
I will wax a little poetic, then. ;-)
Nashville has had a machine since at least the late 60s for harvesting songs basically provided for free by writers desperate for a break, and routing them them through overproduced studios full of controllable singers even more desperate than the songwriters. Now, to be fair, the occasional gem slips through, more when the model was less refined, and then there's folks like Dolly Parton who infiltrated it like a virus and then took it over to explode with decent music.
Still, other than what Steve Earle called "The Great Credibility Scare of the 80s" when he, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, KD Lang, and Melissa Etheridge (among others) were allowed to bubble to the top of the scene, there's always been a grifter business mindset that's somehow worse in country because, as a direct outgrowth and expansion of certain varieties of folk music, audiences ask for authenticity when all they really want is cultural validation (hint: for country-adjacent music, authenticity usually looks a lot like it does in other genres). Bubblegum country therefore somehow feels dirtier than bubblegum pop, and it gets even worse as product categories ossify and Nashville country gets targeted to a more and more specific segment of the public.
I'm fully aware that even the stuff I like, the "Rockabilly [and] other various fusion efforts" broadly called "Americana," is subject to its own tropes and business pressures, but being smaller and targeting a different niche, there's at least room in the conversation for artistry and risk, and thankfully good music isn't as hard to get made as some other forms of entertainment, so there's a lot of it out there waiting to be found.
Also, nothing wrong with some nasal vocals in the right context, LOL. I do grow weary of "High and Lonesome" bluegrass vocals after about two songs, though.
Kinda depends on how far you go back/what genre of country you are talking about. But John Hartford has some of my favorite lyrics that still carry weight today. I probably think about the song In Tall Buildings everyday on my drive to work.
The thing I hate the most about modern country is that there's nothing that really connects it to country/bluegrass other than the poor use of steel string guitar and fake accents. I live in Oklahoma.... Nobody talks like that, and even if they did you would usually lose it when you're singing.
Someone like reba mcentire has a fairly common Oklahoman accent if you talk to older people in the boonies, but she doesn't really sing with a heavy accent. It's all performative affectations from rich kids from suburbs pretending like they're from the country side.
YT fed me Rick Beats at one point, this feels like a discussion he has on repeat re the fall of modern music.
The ones where their voice cracks on purpose to make them sound more amateur bother the hell out of me.
Psychobilly is even better imo. Tiger Army is the shit and Nick13's solo stuff is great too.