Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Erk?

 Was reading at Farce the Music, and glanced over at Trailer's blog roll and did a double take.  Had to click over to the blog to be sure I wasn't seeing things; I'm not:




Might be a bit hard to read; the header is Classic Rewind: Brad Paisley-- "He Didn't Have to Be".

Granted, looking at the blog header, their kind of country and mine aren't the same.  I actually do like Brad Paisley.  (Not this song.  This song exemplifies the sort of mawkishness I detest in Nashville.)  This post actually has nothing to do with the quality of the song, however.

Can a song only eleven years old rightly be called "classic"?

Let's look at the top 25 songs of 1999 (at least, as far as About.com is concerned):

1) "God Gave Me You"--Bryan White  (Hand to God, I have no idea what this song is, though it's prompted a visceral reaction from my husband.)
2) "Little Man"--Alan Jackson
3) "Lessons Learned"--Tracy Lawrence
4) "Pop a Top" --Alan Jackson
5) "Gone Crazy"--Alan Jackson/"When I Said I Do" --Clint Black
6) "I Love You" --Martina McBride
7)"You Were Mine" --Dixie Chicks
8) "Amazed" --Lonestar
9) "Anymore" --Travis Tritt  (edit: As Erik pointed out to me, this song is from 1991.  Very odd.) (Edit, part 2: Ah, Travis Tritt back in the righteous mullet days.)
10) "Cowboy Take Me Away" --Dixie Chicks

Eh, screw it.  I actually have no idea what the selection criteria were there; for all I know it's the author's favorites.  At any rate, some of the songs rank very high up on my personal list (I actually did put "You Were Mine" as one of my favorite songs of the decade, and I'll get around to Part Two of that list eventually).

But classics?  No.  None of them.  'Cause if ANY song that came out in 1999 is a classic, so is this:

2 comments:

the pistolero said...

Yeah, not many songs from the '90s are classics on the level of "Mama Tried" or "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way." Like I told you, I can only think of two from that decade: Alan Jackson's "Gone Country" and George Strait's "I Can Still Make Cheyenne."

And yeah, that Bryan White song was atrocious. It makes the Paisley song sound like "A Good Year For the Roses" in comparison.

Sabra said...

See, I think that we should do with music like we do with cars--can't be called a classic unless it's 20 or 25 years old. Granted, that means stuff from 1990 gets in, but at least it's some sort of standard, dammit!