Tag: Tyler Childers

Artists are annoying.  I think it’s because they also tend to be locked into the hive.  I guess it’s inevitable that people who exist in a world that is suffused in emotion will end up surrounded by and aligned with emotionally unstable personalities.  I’ve met up with this often when I lived in New York City.  I’d have a friend whom I met in an office job who was also a struggling actor and he would introduce me to his circle of friends and they would be almost without exception at least moderately abnormal.  And that’s putting aside that more than half of them were homosexuals.  That was the just the baseline demographic of their profession I suppose.  But all of them exhibited a whole array of off-putting behaviors.  Some of it might have to do with the large percentage of them that admittedly were on anti-depressants.  And I guess most of them were recreational users of various legal and illegal drugs.

But in addition to all these lifestyle influences all of these people shared an ethos.  They were outsiders who to a greater or lesser degree despised the normal world because it forced them to bump up against reality, when what they really wanted to do was live in their imagined world where being a forty something unknown actor, dancer, singer, musician or painter came along with an upper middle-class income and a deluxe Greenwich Village apartment.

And because of this outsider mentality they also embraced all the other groups and ideologies that also despised normalcy.  Back in the sixties and seventies it was communism.  Later on, it was whatever flavor of the month progressive name-tag was trendy.  Feminism, LGBTQ, Immigration Rights, Environmentalism, Animal Rights, whatever.  I have been at a gathering where a strident lesbian told me that once Western culture was deconstructed, women’s rights would flower throughout the much more progressive third world.  When I asked her about widow burning in India (sati) she flipped out and started shrieking obscenities.  I never found out whether she had just never heard of sati and thought I was making it up or whether the cognitive dissonance short circuited her fragile programming and kicked her into the middle-aged cat lady equivalent of the blue screen of death.

But in any case, the “artistic” community is monolithically embedded into the Leftist world.  So much so that even if you yourself didn’t believe in the things that they do, if you wanted to be a musician or other kind of artist you would not be allowed to coexist in their world if you did not mouth the words that they require you to say.  You would not be allowed to use their infrastructure, their platforms, their networks.  You would not get noticed by their critics and would never be invited onto their interview shows.  You wouldn’t exist.

Until recently I thought maybe country music was resistant to this pressure.  As a distant example think back to 2003 when the Dixie Chicks were ejected from the country music scene because of their anti-military rants against George Bush during the Middle East Wars.  That was a sort of unique situation in the entertainment world.

But I have been disabused of that mistaken belief.  Country musicians of various levels of celebrity and of various styles and levels of talent have of late thrown themselves whole heartedly on the woke bandwagon.  The latest example that came to my attention is Tyler Childers song “Long Violent History.”  I enjoyed Childers’s album “Purgatory.”  It had some good songs and his voice is interesting to listen to.  I especially liked a murder ballad he wrote called “Banded Clovis” that updated the tradition to our age.  His next album wasn’t really as good but I was interested to see what his following album would bring.  Recently I read a review announcing that his album had come out as either a vinyl or MP3 edition.  So as a CD guy I shrugged it off and figured I’d wait until the later release.  The announcement said that the album was an instrumental bluegrass collection.  Now that got my attention.  I was definitely in the mood for something like that.  But then one of the lefty sites had the breathless news that the last song was called Long Violent History and was a BLM propaganda song.  And they had a link to a video by Childers explaining why he had written the song.  So, I listened to his “explanation.”  Well, it was all that “what if you were hassled by the police and in danger of being killed at every turn?” blah, blah, blah.  So, there they go again.  If they will permit us to buy their music, we have to listen to the anti-white rant too.  Some great bargain.

Well, I guess I’ll have to forego Mr. Childers’ fiddle album.  I’m sure it’s good and it would be enjoyable but I don’t feel like paying to be preached at by him.  I’ll look around and listen to someone who at least hides his contempt for me and just shuts up and sings.