Found a New Band to Dislike
Oct. 21st, 2010 05:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
softpawI listen to a lot of music. I like a lot of different genres, and within most genres, I'll listen to pretty much everything that comes up in a playlist, no matter what the song is or who performs it. However, there are a small number of exceptions, artists that will cause me to do whatever I can to avoid listening to their music. For example, while I like pretty much every rock/metal song to ever come out of the 80s, I loathe Motorhead. And while I've heard pretty much every song that's considered "classic rock", the only band that causes me to change the channel every single time is the Rolling Stones.
In country music, the artist that makes me spine tingle, and the artist I despise more than any other artist in any other genre, is Dwight Yoakam. If you're not familiar with him, picture this: You have a dude friend who's completely plastered drunk, possibly doing karaoke, and he decides to make fun of country music by poorly singing about his wife leaving him in his pickup truck and running over the dog, using a heavily-exaggerated nasal twang. Now give that friend a multi-million dollar record contract, and you've got Dwight Yoakam. Don't believe me? Here's a link to his biggest hit. Yet, for some reason, he's a massive country star, and has been around forever. Having grown up with country music, I've become accustomed to blocking out his music, and I've never heard a country artist who grates on my nerves as badly as he does. Until today.
I was watching CMT videos, since they make nice background noise, and I occasionally discover new music I like. Tonight, however, they started playing a song from a band called "Trampled by Turtles", which made me wonder if that was the name of the band or the treatment they gave the video before playing it. Instrumentally, it was ok-ish, aside from making the thrash-metal fallacy of confusing playing speed with musical skill (which sounds downright bizarre with banjos and fiddles). However, the vocalist utterly destroyed any enjoyment or even tolerance I might've had for the song. To put it simply, it sounded like bad karaoke, the vocalist did pretty much everything wrong that could be done wrong. He was frequently off-key, couldn't keep up with the instruments, couldn't hold a steady rhythm, couldn't even hold steady notes (nor could he cover this up with vibrato), and on top of that, his voice sucked and the lyrics were awful. I mean, Dwight Yoakam's voice may be the most nerve-grinding sound ever created by humans, but he's at least capable of basic musicianship.
Naturally, I did a little searching afterwards, mostly to find a video to go along with this post, and I discovered that Trampled by Turtles is from Minnesota. No offense to anyone from Minnesota, but that could part of the problem, they're trying to be a bluegrass band from a state that's about as far north as you can get without getting into Canada (which, ironically, has produced some pretty good country singers in the past). Thankfully, they're not likely to be successful, at least not for long.
So, here's the video I saw that made me dislike them so much, which is supposed to be their "big hit". Even if you don't like country music, give it a listen, it might make you like other country or bluegrass songs by comparison :-P
In country music, the artist that makes me spine tingle, and the artist I despise more than any other artist in any other genre, is Dwight Yoakam. If you're not familiar with him, picture this: You have a dude friend who's completely plastered drunk, possibly doing karaoke, and he decides to make fun of country music by poorly singing about his wife leaving him in his pickup truck and running over the dog, using a heavily-exaggerated nasal twang. Now give that friend a multi-million dollar record contract, and you've got Dwight Yoakam. Don't believe me? Here's a link to his biggest hit. Yet, for some reason, he's a massive country star, and has been around forever. Having grown up with country music, I've become accustomed to blocking out his music, and I've never heard a country artist who grates on my nerves as badly as he does. Until today.
I was watching CMT videos, since they make nice background noise, and I occasionally discover new music I like. Tonight, however, they started playing a song from a band called "Trampled by Turtles", which made me wonder if that was the name of the band or the treatment they gave the video before playing it. Instrumentally, it was ok-ish, aside from making the thrash-metal fallacy of confusing playing speed with musical skill (which sounds downright bizarre with banjos and fiddles). However, the vocalist utterly destroyed any enjoyment or even tolerance I might've had for the song. To put it simply, it sounded like bad karaoke, the vocalist did pretty much everything wrong that could be done wrong. He was frequently off-key, couldn't keep up with the instruments, couldn't hold a steady rhythm, couldn't even hold steady notes (nor could he cover this up with vibrato), and on top of that, his voice sucked and the lyrics were awful. I mean, Dwight Yoakam's voice may be the most nerve-grinding sound ever created by humans, but he's at least capable of basic musicianship.
Naturally, I did a little searching afterwards, mostly to find a video to go along with this post, and I discovered that Trampled by Turtles is from Minnesota. No offense to anyone from Minnesota, but that could part of the problem, they're trying to be a bluegrass band from a state that's about as far north as you can get without getting into Canada (which, ironically, has produced some pretty good country singers in the past). Thankfully, they're not likely to be successful, at least not for long.
So, here's the video I saw that made me dislike them so much, which is supposed to be their "big hit". Even if you don't like country music, give it a listen, it might make you like other country or bluegrass songs by comparison :-P