For the better part of the 1990’s I knew exactly where my daddy would be at 4:00 pm every weekday....stretched out on the couch in the living room of our home on Jackson Drive with our fifty-inch big screen rear projection television tuned in to The Nashville Network. For the next half hour he would be glued to The Wildhorse Saloon Dance Show, thirty minutes of country music and line dancing, hosted by Katie Haas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my daddy dance a step in his life, much less line dance, but he did love country music, and I have a feeling he had a crush on Katie Haas. On occasion, though very rarely, I would watch it with him, and little did I know then, but I was bearing witness to the dawning of the country music apocalypse, soundtracked and choreographed in 2/4 time. I can’t completely blame the demise of country music on line dancing, but it was most certainly one-third of an unholy trinity that ushered in the country music Armageddon.
Those who believe the Bible foretells of the rise of the Antichrist, believe that one day a man will rise to power and prominence in the world, the likes of which haven’t been seen before. The masses will love him. Muslims, Jews, Christians, and unbelievers alike will be lured in by his eloquent words and near miraculous performances, only to have him turn away from everything he promised and unleash misery upon the world. The country music world has already witnessed the rise of such a man, and his name was Garth Brooks.
Garth Brooks brought country music back to the forefront of American music, a place it hadn’t held since a Gospel singing kid from Tupelo, Mississippi ventured into Rockabilly and became the King of Rock and Roll. By the eighties pop, rock and hip hop ruled the music scene, with country music, a once proud genre that was synonymous with American culture, now relegated to a niche demographic. But not for long.
Garth’s earliest albums were straight, pure, cowboy country music, and they were popular enough to elevate him to the top of the country charts. On the strength of hits like the sing-along friendly “Friends In Low Places”, the every man relatable ballad “Unanswered Prayers”, and the bold, risk taking, socially conscious “The Thunder Rolls”, his second album would go on to sell seventeen million copies in the United States alone. His third album, “Ropin’ The Wind” made the Billboard Top 200 just on pre sales, a first for country music, and then debuted at number one on the Billboard pop charts, also a country music first. This album wasn’t just straight country, or better yet, (George) Strait country, like his previous two releases. “Ropin’ The Wind” incorporated elements of pop and rock into this noticeably new breed of country music. It wasn’t just his music that changed the landscape, it was also the performance at his shows that truly “changed the game.”
A Garth Brooks concert looked more like a rock and roll performance than the typical “man with a guitar stands behind a microphone at center stage” country music show. Garth used a massive stage that came to life with pyrotechnics and a sophisticated light show that could rival anything in the pop/rock world, and the crowds loved it. Bear in mind this is the same genre of music where fans once gasped with repulsion and issued a ban when Johnny Cash stomped on the stage lights at the Grand Ole Opry. Now they were devouring tickets, 50,000 at a time, selling out sports stadiums almost instantly, just to watch a man in a cowboy hat and head set mic be fired out of a floor canon and run from one end of the stage to another amid fireworks and laser lights while singing songs about a Rodeo!?
Garth Brooks wasn’t just the biggest country music star in the world, he was arguably the biggest star in all of music, even performing before an estimated one million people in Central Park. He achieved the type of celebrity supernova that needs only one name. Elvis. Michael. Prince. Madonna. Garth. And then, at the peak of his fame, he turned on us. Country music living legend Garth Brooks became rock and roll singer Chris Gaines. The man we thought was the savior of country music, was really the Anti-Chris. Country music fans didn’t know what to make of this, they felt betrayed and just as he turned on them, they turned on him and a year later he retired from recording and performing. Something had happened in country music that had never been seen before and once the corporate vultures roosting in the rafters of the record labels got a taste of global commercial country success, they only wanted more. Enter the harlot of Babylon.
When you think of the home of country music what places come to mind? Tennessee. Kentucky. Texas. Alabama. Maybe even Bakersfield, California. Would you ever once, in a million years, think....Canada?!? And yet, the next biggest star, not just in country, but in all of music, would come from, not the south, but the north. Jeremiah, the “weeping prophet” foretold, “From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land” (Jeremiah 1:14). Chris Gaines killed the career of the biggest star in the world, but the second coming of Garth was a Canadian woman named Shania Twain.
I vividly remember where I was the first time I heard the name Shania Twain. I was nineteen, newly married, and sitting on the blue leather couch in my father’s “man cave” located at 1025 Jackson Drive. I was busy reading a paper when the video for “Who’s Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” came on Country Music Television. I stopped what I was doing, looked up and asked to no one in particular, “Who is that?” To which my now pregnant bride replied, “Don’t worry about it.” Not since Elly May Clampett and Daisy Duke had a “country” girl created such a fuss. No offense to Loretta Lynn, but this was not your momma’s country music star. Country music fans quickly traded in their coal miner’s daughter frocks and fringe for a belly bearing pop country princess whose name was an Ojibwa word that meant “on my way.” And she certainly was on her way, but at the same time country music was on its way to an early grave. We were on a dirt road to hell.
On the strength of this single alone, or perhaps, the video for this single, her self titled debut album had moderate success, but it was only when she teamed up with the hound of hell that is producer “Mutt” Lange, that she became the twenty million album selling heir apparent to the rhinestone throne vacated by Garth Brooks. Crowned with a newly awarded Grammy, Shania expanded her empire to encompass the entire musical realm by releasing a third album which sold forty million copies, becoming the biggest selling album by a female artist in any genre in history, and the biggest selling country album of all time. It was all too good to be true. How could we have been so blind? Was it not obvious when, at the 1999 CMA Award’s, Shania donned a Pepto Bismal colored crop top cowgirl costume complete with Lloyd Christmas cowboy hat, that we had been seduced by her siren songs? Seriously, Google it.
After collecting four more Grammy’s and releasing another album that sold over ten million copies, perhaps she, like Alexander the Great who “wept when there were no more worlds to conquer.” In 2004 she too retired from performing, but the damage was already done, country music was dead, and we all lined up to dance on its grave.
We should have known better, but we just couldn’t help ourselves, we’d come to like our neon moon with a side of electric guitar. Honky tonk patrons had been led astray like this once before by John Travolta, so perhaps God was punishing us for not learning our lesson from the Texas two step trauma of the seventies that was Urban Cowboy. The country equivalent to disco.
In the wake of Garth and Shania cowboy couture came back with a vengeance in the form of ten gallon hats, painted on wranglers, snakeskin boots and bolo ties. I grew up country and no one I knew dressed like that....until it was Saturday night and they were on their way to Denim and Diamonds or Cotton Eyed Joe’s or some other country cliche club. Even I was converted from the stage diving, mosh pit dwelling, slam dancing world of grunge that defined my teens, to the irresistible communion of line dancing with friends and family. Led astray by the false prophets that were Brooks and Dunn, we did the Boot Scoot Boogie and they played the fiddle while Nashville burned.
“And I saw a star fallen from heaven to the earth. To him was given the key to the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and smoke arose out of the pit like the smoke of a great furnace. So the sun and the air were darkened because of the smoke of the pit. Then out of the smoke locusts came upon the earth. And to them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power” (Revelation 9:1-3). Out of the ashes rose more and more “artists” willing to sell their souls to capitalize on the mass marketed, carefully sculpted, choreographed and crossover conscious pop country genre, brought to you by Clear Channel. I’ll admit, for a while even I, a Tennessee boy raised on George Jones and Conway Twitty, was led astray by the mesmerizing and hypnotic rhythms that were Big & Rich and Cowboy Troy. Eventually I saw the light, and this is where I have to draw the (Florida Georgia) line. I repented in sackcloth and ashes.
I don’t blame the kids today for liking Jason Aldean, or Brantley Gilbert, or Blake Shelton. They didn’t have a choice. They were born in Babylon, and that’s precisely why I have written this psalm of lament, to illustrate to them how we got here.
“By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,
And there we wept, when we remembered the Ryman.
When the wicked carried us away in captivity,
Required from us a song,
But how can we sing a Hank Williams song in a strange land?”
I know you may think I’m a little crazy, like the guy on the street corner holding the sign that says, “The End Is Near.” That’s fine. But all I’m saying is, if you add up the number of letters in Garth’s first name (Troyal), his last name (Brooks) and the original Taylor Swift (Shania), you get 6-6-6.
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