Entertainment Weekly country music writer Grady Smith recently put together
his list of the 10 best country albums of 2013. It's actually an exceptionally strong list, with nods to several local Cream/Scene faves, among them Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Lindi Ortega, Holly Williams, Brandy Clark and indie darkhorse Sturgill Simpson. So hey, wow, good stuff. But where's all the mainstream stuff? Brad Paisley, Gary Allan and the currently defunct Civil Wars landed in Smith's Top 10, but past that, the big names were nowhere to be seen.
Now, some commenters claimed that Smith and EW excluded mainstream country albums just for the sake of excluding mainstream country albums — a pretty baseless claim once you actually read the article (or when you have a look at all the mainstreamers Smith praised last year). Nevertheless, Smith took to YouTube with a pretty remarkable supercut of the year's most over-exhausted tropes (watch it above) in order to prove just how formulaic mainstream country was in 2013. As Scene staffer Adam Gold pointed out in our annual Year in Music issue, this was the year of "bro country and hick-hop," and Smith's video demonstrates those genres' most recycled themes: talkin' 'bout trucks, dirt roads, talkin' 'bout tight-jeaned women sliding their "sugar shakers" up in said trucks, the sun going down and the moon coming up, the "good stuff" (i.e., booze) and calling women "girl." It's enough to inspire some pretty intense douchebumps.
See also: contributor Casey Black's breakdown of the lyrical content of some of the year's biggest country songs (spoiler alert: trucks!), and a look at the pitch lists that Music Row sends around while crafting their Next Big Thing (spoiler alert: need hits!).
