Sometimes country songs could be so gay...

[prixmium]

So when I listen to music, it's basically always looking for stuff to associate with a particular fandom/ship/fic, though I do just casually listen to the radio while driving a lot. Being from Tennessee, I get sort of upset when people write off country as a whole. However, I will admit that a lot of it is pandering, dumb, and regressive. However, I kind of fell in love with this stupid, saccharine song when I first heard it. I'm not sure if it was an accidental spotify find or if it was something I heard in a local business only to relocate later. I rarely discover country music intentionally, but sometimes it's good!

Anyway, listening to the song without the video, it has always occurred to me that while I like it just fine for M/F angst that it could be a fantastic WLW-cover song that deals with a whole new layer of complication. The fantasies of cultural and social conformity that one is brought up to have and may enjoy versus things that break with those traditions, the question of whether or not you can ever fully participate in those social constructs even when they are (reluctantly) handed over to you, and so on.

So basically I just wanted to mention that, but in looking up the video, I also find it charming. It isn't the image that I had in mind, and I really appreciate that the girl they chose is a beautiful mixed race young lady. In my head, it being a country music song, I was, you know, envisioning that the guy singing was talking about some little elfish white girl with blonde ringlets (not that there's anything wrong with that). I'm really encouraged to see country music including even this much diversity in what seems to be something this mainstream. Also, as a teacher, I find the interaction between the teens in this video (whether they're actual teens or not) really authentically acted. It's better than I anticipated.

"Thomas Rhett - Marry Me" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[cerberusia]

I enjoy country music without shame - I don't even know if it has the same connotations over here in the UK as it does in the US - and I really enjoyed that song! It was perfectly mellow for a drizzly, gentle afternoon. And yes, a female cover would be great.

A female cover I really enjoy isn't, strictly speaking a female cover: the track itself is the original. But a few years ago, Azora Telford did a video for Gotye's Somebody I Used To Know in which she interpreted the song in ASL, and her love-object was also female. It's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUt4W8sE8Ns&feature=youtu.be

[prixmium]

I wonder what kind of connotations it does have over in the UK? More than anything, I think that a lot of things that are seen as fundamentally southern, in the United States, become easy scapegoats. While it is true that there has been a lot of bigotry in the South, historically, it is not as if those things didn't exist elsewhere. They just weren't so prominently central to the economy for the rich and poor whites who, at various times, defended slavery or systemic racism to protect a way of life that they had learned to justify to themselves. And again, none of that is okay, but I think a lot of Americans have learned to look down their nose at "the South" so as to feel as though the microaggressions and even the major instances of racism or other bigotry throughout the rest of the culture are "not as bad" as those in the South have been. They want to behave as if all southern culture, or white southern culture, is either lacking in creativity or is inherently racist, bigoted, or bad, even when it isn't the truth.

I think that video is really neat! I find ASL so interesting, and I wish that it was something we taught the basics of to kids. I don't know any, but I feel like I could've picked up on it as a child so easily, as with other things I wish about American language education.

[cerberusia]

Country music isn't popular, but I'm not sure it has many connotations other than 'American'. It's not a genre we know. I got into it through folk music, which influenced country&western through Irish and Scottish immigrants to Appalachia.

Oh yeah, I've seen my fair share of that. It's not as if the southern US doesn't have more than its fair share of racists, but there's an unattractive tendency particularly among the well-heeled urbanites to pin it all on 'the South' in a way that neatly elides a) the valuable parts of Southern cultures, and b) their own complicity in the same power structures.