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4:56pm December 20, 2013

That feeling when…

madeofpatterns:

youneedacat:

…you listen to country music with someone because you (and your parents) were raised on it, and it means something to you…

…and then the person comes back to you, excited about the country music they’ve found. Which is either horribly, overtly racist (I mean the actual lyrics, not just the industry in general, where that’s very true and everyone holds up a handful of performers of color to make it seem better), or overtly making fun of poor and working-class white Southerners (like your relatives), or both, nothing you or your family would ever listen to. And they want to “listen to it ironically” with you.

Because that’s all this kind of music ever meant to them. A place where the usual rules of common decency don’t apply, and they can let loose and do things they’d never admit to otherwise.

And you don’t know whether to throw up or cry. But you do know you’ll never share your music with them again.

Ugh.

Country music is so good, though! There are so many songs that are *about it being important to care about people*.

Yes!  Lots of country music is good that way.  

The reason they thought otherwise, is that they treated my entire culture as a place to slum it.  And one of the rules of slumming it is that you’re going to a place where you don’t understand the rules, in order to break all the normal rules of your own society, that you think are holding you back and making it hard for you to freely express yourself or have fun, or whatever.  Which ignores the fact that you’re actually dealing with real people who have rules of our own, many of which are the exact damn same rules as your culture, and you’re stepping all over us in the name of letting loose and having fun and being free of all those pesky rules from your own culture.

It took me a long time to come to terms with how much that hurt me.  They saw us as (culturally)-working-class transplanted-Southerners, and brought allllll their stereotypes of that with them to their interactions with me and my family.  They saw that we did things very different to the way they did, and they decided there were no rules.  And… argh, it’s complicated, but it was a pretty degrading experience.  And country music was part of it, because you know those r*dn*cks listen to that stuff and r*dn*cks are flagrantly racist and that means it’s okay to listen to really specific flagrantly racist music and call people r*dn*cks (and make fun of them) as long as you do it “ironically”, while “slumming it”, basically.