Rural Mellow Country Crooning

After spending two not-so-glorious days in the tiny Mpumalanga burgh of Kriel last week, I've decided that small towns seem to have an unexplainable need to express the sorrows of their rural lives in the form of cheap, reproduced country music.

From 7am to 7pm Kriel Info Radio, the local community radio station, played non-stop country hits. And I mean non-stop. Most of which were not even by the original artists, but by some lowly South African troubadours who failed to get placed in the top 1000 during the last Idols competition.

Does this insipidly mellow crooning really relieve the agony of daily rural living, people? I doubt it! After one hour I was ready to slice my own wrists with the nearest butcher knife! How can a song about some cowboy that was "born beside a cornfield" inspire anything else but the urge to drown ones sorrows in a dirty glass of cheap alcohol?

I'm not surprised to hear the locals muse about the lack of economic growth in their town. I'm sure the awful music is scaring off any potential investors. Who wants to put their money in a town where the most popular radio station plays hick rubbish from dawn to dusk.

I hate to break the next two painful truths to you people, but a) you're not living the southern American dream so stop pretending you are, and b) cheap country music was never groovy, hip or funky, and never will be.