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Country music wouldn’t be that bad if it was just one song and not an entire genre of its own. There is nothing inherently wrong with a man in a cowboy hat singing about his new truck and his favorite beer. However, the problem with country music is that once you’ve heard one song, you’ve heard them all. They all sound the same, and the lyrics are nearly identical. So many times I’ll hear a country song play and I genuinely cannot tell if I have heard it before or if I’ve just heard a different song that sounds exactly like it. Although there are some songs about more meaningful subjects, the majority of country songs I’ve heard center around some or all of four things: trucks, beer, women (often in objectifying ways) and being stuck in a small town. If the singer is feeling creative, they’ll throw in a song about a breakup, but even that is usually set in the aforementioned small town.

In addition, country music is overplayed. People who like country music seem to play ONLY country music for every occasion: weddings, dances, long road trips and even working out. It’s as if once you’ve decided country is your favorite kind of music, you forget there are other genres out there.

My biggest grievance with country music comes from my own personal experience with it. Growing up in a small town in Nebraska, country music is the only type of music anyone ever played. It was blasted on every radio station, at every school dance and pretty much at any public event that involved music. I remember listening to it in 8th grade math class while we did homework; I remember my classmates dropping everything to swing dance to it at homecoming; and I especially remember it playing in my high school lifting class. When the lifting instructor allowed the students to have free reign of the music, do you know what my peers chose to listen to? Slow country! We spent nearly an entire semester working out to the tune of men with Southern accents either serenading the love of their life or moping about being broken up with. Now, whenever I hear a country song, I get flashbacks to the worst parts of middle and high school. If country music was the soundtrack of YOUR most unfortunate adolescent moments, you would hate it, too.