The 2010 CMT Music Awards will air live tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. Toby Keith, Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood and Keith Urban will be among those performing on the show.  Kid Rock will be hosting.

Kid Rock?   The Dixie Chicks weren’t available?  Oh, I forgot.  The other two girls left Natalie Maines to try to salvage their careers as the Court Yard Hounds.  How about Bret Michaels? He’s everywhere you look these days.

Kid Rock goes all the way back with CMT to the taping of CMT Crossroads with Hank Williams Jr. in 2001. In fact, at last year’s CMT Music Awards, he won in the Wide Open Country video of the year category for “All Summer Long.” , a teenage  ode to drinking beer and dope smoking during summer vacation.  That’s country?

 From white rapper to manufactured country music star.  Ain’t America wonderful?

Kid Rock is currently hosting his Chillin’ the Most cruise to the Cayman Islands. Later this summer, he will be performing with other noted country music star Bon Jovi‘s tour of stadiums in the U.S., Canada and England. He is now recording a new album, with Rick Rubin producing, that will be released in the fall.  Rick Rubin is the producer who introduced Johnny Cash to a whole new generation.

What is happening to country music reflects a lot about the culture we live in.   Artists who actually lived what they sung about like Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, The Statlers, Jim Ed Brown, Porter Waggoner, Bocephus, Randy Travis, Jeannie C. Riley, and Elvis Presley are slowly being replaced by fashion model wannabes and burned-out rock stars. 

Please don’t get me wrong.  There is still a lot of great talent in country music.  Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, George Strait, Toby Keith, Reba, Martina McBride, Clint Black, Montgomery Gentry,  Brooks and Dunn (about to split up), Rascal Flatts, among others, are very talented performers.

However, in our culture of fast lives, fast food, and instant gratification, superficiality sells.  That’s how we got stuck with Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm).

It is easier and more profitable for a record company to sell someone who looks good and can sing a little, or release a country music album made by a fading rock star, than it is for them to market someone who is unbelievably talented and writes their own songs, but resembles your next door neighbor.

Remember the Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison country music CD fiascos?  No?  I don’t blame you.  I wouldn’t admit it, either.

Can you imagine Hank Williams, Sr., Patsy Cline, or Buck Owens trying to get a record deal today?

I’m sorry Mr. Williams.  Your vocalization is way too twangy and you drink way too much.  “I Saw The Light”?  What kind of song is that?  A song about redemption?  Get real.  “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”?  Who Cares?  You’re just not marketable.

Ms. Cline, we can’t use you.  You look like somebody’s next door neighbor.

Mr. Owens, what is the “Bakersfield sound” that you’re talking about?  That won’t get any airtime in New York City.   “Act Naturally”?  That’s a song?  Next thing you know, you’ll tell me that the Beatles will want to record it.

Now you know why Toby Keith formed his own record label. 

The big recording companies like RCA Nashville and Arista are run like any other business.  Executives are transferred from other cities and other divisions within the company and are judged to be successful by the amount of revenue they generate.  The decision was made several years ago to turn country music into pop music.  Country music started the transition from Kitty Wells to Taylor Swift and from George Jones to Kid Rock in an effort to claim a bigger share of the CD-buying public.  The disconnect arises when you take a genre that has traditionally sung  about God, America, family, and heartache and try to make it about fashionistas, MTV, and shallow people with situational morality and ethics. 

That dog don’t hunt.

Allow me to close with this video from Alan Jackson and George Strait.  They released this song in 2000. They expressed the situation much more eloquently than I can.

Dedicated to my high school classmate and brother in Christ, Drew, of the Drew and Linda Morning Show on WWQQ101.3, Cape Fear’s Country Leader.

Sources:  cmt.com, youtube.com