sigh

If you like songs about puppy dogs being too late to save disabled kids who die in house fires, become angels and prevent car wrecks, screamed at you on top of overly dramatic pedal steel fills, you'll love Martina McBride. Bring your wallet because it will cost more than $40 to absorb her vocal histrionics on the back of your skull and have your soul stirred repeatedly by songs of poverty and abuse sung by a very rich woman with servants. Tonight State Fair Grand Stand, $1,000 (Angels get in free)

Buck Owens wouldn't shit down Rascall Flatts' throats if they were dying of starvation. Maybe I complain too much, but if you're going to force me to accept the Chesney-ification of Country Music, please give me some sort of connection to the historical timeline of the art form. Don't just give Hanson some facial hair and put a fiddle and steel player in their backing band and call them the next Alabama. By the way, who the fuck wants to be the next Alabama, anyway? I sure as hell didn't ask for the next Alabama. Thursday State Fair Grand Stand, $Your Eternal Soul's Damnation in Hell (if you go with two of your best friends, make sure one of you wears a tshirt, the other a Western shirt, and make the fattest of the 3 of you wear a long-cut, untucked silk shirt with a spikey collar and the sleeves undone, pout at any girls you meet)