The country world's answer to 50 Cent? Read on.

I was originally going to study the vast majority of 50 Cent’s acting portfolio on Why Does It Exist? until it occurred to me that it may be perceived that I have a bone to pick against rappers in general and Fiddy in particular. That couldn’t be further from the truth. What it boils down to is a simple question of mass: there are simply way more rappers willing to take six hours out of their day to make an embarrassing appearance in an embarrassing flick than in any other musical genre.

Of course, there’s only one other musical genre that manages to rake in millions and millions of dollars a year while remaining relatively separate from the mainstream and that’s country music. Glorious, shit-kickin’, proud-to-be-‘Merican country music with its gloriously autotuned warbling and comically-oversized Stetsons. The mainstream country industry (by which I mean shit like Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, Alan Jackson and the like – not Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard) is a train that keeps chugging whether we blue-staters (or, in my case, godless pinko Canadians) notice or not. That having been said, its cinematic output is considerably smaller than one would expect and a lot of it is of the cancerous-little-girl-bonds-with-pony variety. When its stars are not stretching their tear ducts on the Hallmark Channel, they tend to appear in considerably larger projects like Country Strong. I truly thought that country music and the entire Southern half of the United States had managed to get away from me until I came across a miracle man by the name of Billy Ray Cyrus. Read the rest of this entry »

RUFIO! RUFIO! RUFIO!

When did irony become so all-encompassing as to all but eliminate honest from cultural products? Somewhere in the early 90’s, apathy and self-awareness became a de facto part of creating pop culture. Rock stars were no longer carnal demi-gods completely lost in their own awesomeness; they were replaced by bored-looking dudes from the suburbs in ill-fitting clothes making one hell of a racket. Action movies replaced their own superhuman jingoism with a cynical, snarky self-awareness that turned the movies into big jokes. While films like Commando certainly had a sense of humour about them, they certainly didn’t poke fun at themselves and the genre. They were designed to be awesome to eight-year-olds and crusty academics alike. Twenty years later, we live in a world where blockbuster action films like Machete rewrite the history of low-budget action filmmaking and the only irony-less rockstars are preening chodes like Bono. It has become resolutely uncool to be cool on purpose and resolutely cool to be uncool on purpose.  Obviously I’m not against the idea of irony or else I wouldn’t have a website where I wilfully subject myself to cultural detritus, but sometimes I weep for the death of really honest, really dumb ideas. While I certainly could’ve done without pretty much everything Pink Floyd ever did, completely unhinged bonkers shit like The Who’s Tommy would never have existed in a post-ironic world. Read the rest of this entry »