I listen to country on the radio more than most other genres, but that's mostly because the pop and rock music on the radio, here, is really awful. The rock stations are still playing music from the 1970s and the pop stations are all playing urban dance club music. There is a college station I'll listen to, occasionally, but the 20-somethings seem to tend to gravitate toward monotonous whining type music. And I can't get into that, either. So I listen to the country stations, or nothing.
And I actually like Blake Shelton's music. Most of his songs have a kind of "swing" to them that I find very appealing. But generally speaking his kind of modern country-pop music is pretty lame, too. What I really like about country music is the old-style country music. What is now being called "roots music". The last generation of really good "roots" country artists are all dying off, like The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson). And both they and the next generation have avoided the giant 'country-pop music business machine' that Blake Shelton embraces and promotes. These are people like Gillian Welsh, Kasey Chambers, Steve Earle, Buddy and Julie Miller, Emmylou Harris, and so on. But we don't hear them much on the radio because the radio stations are all part of that mega-country-pop music machine. It's a shame. But greed ruins everything it touches. And that's especially true of the arts.
