Welcome Again

Welcome to my blog-site in its new location.

If you've never visited the Twin Cities' Only Alt Country Rant Blog, let me re-introduce myself to you by telling you who you are.

If you're visiting this site, you think Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain, Faith Hill, Rascall Flatts, Brooks & Dunn, Big & Rich, and all the other shit-heels down in Nashville are the Anti-Christs of country music. You realize that Johnny Cash didn't die, he dug a hole and climbed in because he was so fucking ashamed of what people were calling "Country Music" these days.

If you're visiting this site, you're a radio person who realizes that Program Directors and Music Directors at Mainstream Country radio stations only play music that will get women between the ages of 18-45 to stay tuned into the station for the commercials. That's it. Many of these stations have monopolies on the format in large urban areas, so as representatives of the art form, they ensure that it's narrowly defined as the most disgusting, sappy, cliche-ridden, soap opera crap, and they ace out a very wide range of influence and interpretation that the genre is undergoing, and has undergone, for many years in the clubs and theatres of those same cities. The men and women who program these stations are soulless automatons who are more concerned about making money than preserving a musical history, so naturally, they're all going to hell. Pray for them.

If you're visiting this site, you have a burning desire to be outside where you can fish, camp, and hunt; you have a burning desire to do these things in the city sometimes; you have a burning desire to find out where the cockfight is happening on a Saturday night within the ever-growing Mexican community in your city, because you know there is one; you have a burning desire to learn to the play the banjo that was given to you as a gift by the person who loves you the most; you have a burning desire to holler at the tv screen as your football team rips your heart from your chest and cavalierly throws it into the garbage can; you have many burning desires...

Which makes you different from everyone in the mainstream Country music industry, because they're all focused on making money, that's why their biggest influences are Elton John and Billy Joel, instead of Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash.

If you're visiting this site, it's imperative that you go out and buy these albums immediately, if you don't already own them:

Johnny Cash: At Folsom Prison
Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose
Willie Nelson: Red-Headed Stranger
Uncle Tupelo: Still Feel Gone
Waylon Jennings: Honky Tonk Heroes (featuring the music of Billy Joe Shaver, Country's current Poet Laureate)
Merle Haggard: Swinging Doors
EmmyLou Harris: Elite Hotel

That should get you started. It'll make you feel better. You'll feel a sudden urge to rob a gas station and make your own liquor. You'll give your neighbor the stink-eye for starin' at your woman, and you'll drive everywhere in town with the windows down on your green pickup, instead of running the air conditioner.

Welcome back folks, it's time to get weird...ummm, weirder.....