BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones - i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note - all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a'ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country - how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state - especially from johnny cash and merle haggard - now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda; which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads; which paved the way for meaningless party anthems - attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem - “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn - sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” - has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so - understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands - the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon - almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
Johnny cash wrote an entire album about the destruction of Indigenous lands and of Indigenous people, Kris Kristofferson has been an activist most of his career working closely with the UFM, Woody Guthrie was a social justice advocate and union activist, Dolly Parton has tackled explicitly feminist issues even in the 60s and has been an avid supporter of her lgbt fans, Willie Nelson made Farm Aid to try and help farmers in danger of losing their farms due to mortgages keep them and is also an avid supporter of LGBT rights as well as marijuana legalization, Lorettea Lynn wrote about birth control in the 70s and had her song banned, i could go on!
When in the correct hands, country music is a powerful medium, but post 9/11 it’s been handed off to apathetic white men who have turned it into the most useless genre of music out there.
I think about this post a lot for some reason.
Todd in the Shadows and Lindsay Ellis each have a video (Todd’s is a solo venture, Lindsay later collabed with him on hers) which also touches on the general climate of post-9/11 and how protest music did – and didn’t – fit into the time period. They also briefly discuss the state of country music in their vids:
Watching these will help give further context, I believe, to this already awesome post.
(And yes, I was 18 when 9/11 happened. I remember everything from that time-period, and OP is 100% dead-on about how 9/11 crippled the music industry, and country in particular.)
Look at the rest of you, being worked to an early grave for a pittance at best and company store credit at the worst, physical and mental health eroding daily, driven to despair by cold, unfeeling Powers That Be, all of whom would willingly sacrifice you if it means they can save a penny or two, clinging to the hope that months from now you’ll have a living wage.
shout out to all the people who identify with gifted kid burnout syndrome who are probably just neurodivergent but werent diagnosed as a child, who used to devour books like it was nothing and never really understood why the protagonist would leave their cool fantasy world behind to go back home at the end of the story, and who are now extremely disappointed in reality and use escapism as their primary coping mechanism. how’s that bisexuality and deep-rooted anger at the school system going for you?
it’s going great!
There’s a different term for this!!!
Google “twice-exceptional students” which are basically people who were considered gifted in school but have some neurodivergence/learning disability that didn’t really make their professional life super hard until high school/college and then it hit like a ton of bricks. Something like 40% of twice-exceptional students do not complete college, so it’s a pretty big deal and people should know the distinction between this and gifted kid syndrome.
…wait there’s a name for that
i used to be considered extremely gifted, so much that i skipped 5th grade
my add/adhd was rarely an issue (aside from occasionally interrupting people, hyperfocusing on a book, being generally “weird,” etc.) and no one really suspected that i had it
then, since skipping a grade didn’t challenge me much, my parents moved me to a private school with more challenging academics, and i got a full scholarship
but as the homework load got bigger in 7th and 8th grade, my grades and motivation and love of school just went down the drain
and then it finally hit a breaking point this year, in 9th grade, when i was struggling to keep a’s and b’s, mostly because of forgotten assignments and procrastination
then i made my way to adhd tiktok and did the one thing you’re not supposed to do from adhd tiktok: self-diagnose
but after that i did my research (with more reliable sources this time) and i realized it was actually a likely possibility
so then i told my parents, we went to the doctor, and it turns out i do have add
i’m on medication now and it helps a lot, but my grades are still mostly b’s
i miss being “gifted” sometimes
also, i’m not bi but i’m ace and demiromantic soooo
and the deep-rooted anger at the school system is going amazingly, thank you for asking :)
Huh. Looks like I’m a “twice-exceptional student.” I dropped out of college due to my own frustration with it. Tech school was kinder to me, but I did hit a few potholes there too.
Also, I was repeatedly misdiagnosed throughout my childhood. Today, I know I have the double-whammy of depression and anxiety.
And OP called me out so hard, they should’ve just @’d me. XD
Calling the Goths! I have posted tiny houses and cottages, but never one like this. It’s a little gothic mini mansion.
The Gothic Victorian Mini Mansion is hand built with reclaimed and vintage materials, a Mansard roof, a tower and Emmet the gargoyle guard to keep watch!
The Great Room of the Gothic Victorian is a blend of plush, regal and cozy. Relax and play the piano, sip a glass of wine or a cup of tea.
The kitchen is large enough to entertain, and has dishes and glassware for 8.
The kitchen has reclaimed quartz counters, a full-sized fridge and sink.
The antique sofa and chairs are red velvet and quite sumptuous!
The antique, brass fireplace glows with flickering, remote controlled candles, and the custom sliding door leads to the full bath.
Take a bath in the cast iron, claw-foot tub!
A copper sink and quartz counter.
The “tower” adds a large entryway, with hooks for garments, and a round, stained glass window.
The Gothic Victorian living room from the loft.
There is room in the loft for storage.
The bedroom loft is over 6 feet tall!
The custom stairs are behind the fireplace doors, under a carved, brass chandelier.
The alternating stairs make an easy access to the loft bedroom.
Drapes can be opened to enclose the entire loft, creating a private, Gothic cocoon!
The candles in their candelabras create just the right mood!
The Gothic Victorian takes architectural cues from the late 1800s and has to be one of the best recycled tiny houses I’ve seen.
Jesus christ please if you do not know something well you don’t need to die on the hill you can just go “ i dunno,” and ask questions it’s fine please I beg of you
Also, jumping to conclusions when they don’t have the relevant information sucks and is immature. Just say “I don’t know.” It’s okay not to know something the second someone asks you, and to want to ask questions to be sure!
Me thinking about the elaborate fix-it fic I’m writing:Coping?
I know this is about a specific fandom but goddamn if this isn’t the universal fandom mood when a season or series ends, no matter how well they handled it.
Probably the only thing I’ll say on it because so many other people have said it better then I can but please stop equating IRL shipping to fictional character shipping aka ego shipping
If you think literally Marvin the magnificent is as in real life person as Sean Mcloughlin that’s your problem not ego shippers
True that. Literally the youtube fandom communities are the ONLY people who have this issue. I have not once seen someone equate an hollywood actor with their character and say it’s not okay to ship that character with other character bc it’s played by a real person (which all characters are, tf)
If you have that train of thought, consider it from this angle and why any other angle really doesn’t make much sense. You can be uncomfortable with ego shipping but you can’t force others not to ship the egos just because you’re uncomfortable that the egos are both played by the same person irl. At the end of the day, they’re just characters, and it’s okay to ship characters because the characters *are not real*.
And in addition to this, Seán has ACTIVELY RETWEETED ego shipping art. He knows we do it, and he’s clearly okay with that. If he’s fine with it, there’s no need for anyone to be attacking others for it, because yall can’t speak for him and shouldn’t speak OVER him.
videos on this persons channel: (racism, nazism, transphobia)
a video of george floyd’s murder with a clip of markiplier from the unus annus greenscreen contest, making it look like he’s condoning the murder.
a video of a car crash titled “rare footage of markiplier’s niece being killed in a horrible car crash.
a video titled “when I look at the transgender flag.” (I have not watched this, but you can expect the worst)
this person also has a playlist called “best vids” (the description is “this is true content”), which consists of hate crimes against the lgbtqia+ community and black people. they have other playlist like “boring deaths ” and “epic deaths ” which have videos of/about celebrities and everyday people being killed/murdered. markiplier’s “update” video is also in the playlist.
at the bottom of the channel there is a link to another channel called “subscribe to end the lgbt community” which of right now has 306 subscribers.
Reblogging because I want to live in a world where Jews don’t have to be afraid of Nazis.
Fuck Nazis.
Also don’t disrespect Markiplier by using his funny jokes in your racist agenda. He’s too pure for that. One of the biggest a YouTubers that have yet to be an asshole.
Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom.(Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it??
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it!
authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.
This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.
If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?
I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.
I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.
And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts! Rock on, fanfic hamsters!
as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS
In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.
I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.
If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.
If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?
i’ve been contacted a few times by people who have bound my fanfic into print: it never stops being a delight and an honor to see that some stuff i wrote for online consumption meant enough to someone that they wanted to keep it in their actual home, on their actual bookshelf.
Bless this post for validating my DEEP desire to have my favorite fics bound in print, but ALSO for making me realize there’s a fic I LOVE, never finished, that was deleted in one of FFN’s purges, and I’ve NEVER TRIED TO LOOK FOR IT ON THE WAYBACK MACHINE.
Guess who just got all 27 chapters saved as a PDF that I can’t WAIT to re-read for the first time in nearly a decade?
i will never forgive the internet for what it did to the word “mansplain”
mansplaining is a very specific phenomonon wherein a man who is NOT qualified to talk about a topic assumes he knows better than other people who ARE qualified, purely because of sexism.
sharing a fun fact you learned isnt mansplaining. infodumping isnt mansplaining. adding your relevant personal experience to a discussion isn’t mansplaining, (as long as you remain respectful of others’ experiences as well, but that’s always true). correcting someone who is objectively wrong and spreading misinformation REALLY isn’t mansplaining.
stop telling men that all of their interests and attempts at socializing are insulting and unwanted, your gender essentialism is showing.
Honestly I wish people with neurological disorders and mental illness talking to themselves was more normalized so here’s to people with autism who narrate things! people with adhd who talk out loud to remember stuff! people with tourette’s and tic disorders with verbal tics! people with psychosis who talk to their voices! people with DID who talk to their alters!
If you talk to yourself for any reason you are wonderful and not bad or weird. And if you see someone talking to yourself and think it’s weird? Maybe mind your own business!
