The pressure’s on but guess who ain’t gon’ crack?
Upper site management (think men with blue gloves) expressed some displeasure at the thought of running two days of Daily in a row that ostensibly weren’t about Magic. The words “not your own personal playground” may or may not have been used. They also may have mentioned something about not wanting to “set a precedent” for this sort of thing where writers just write about stuff that they thought of while involved in Magical activities. I guess they don’t want The Ferrett to suddenly decide to post articles about anal sex or something just because he thought about that particular topic during a recent round of multiplayer. Of course, if he writes about the multiplayer game first, all bets are off.
Moving right along (quickly), I hadn’t planned to talk about Magic today. I was going to focus more on music instead, a topic important to countless Magic players around the world and one that frequently gets play one our lovely website as well. I’ll still do that at the end, but first I have to apply the crunchy outer coating of relevant materials so that the gooey chocolate center is easier to swallow.
States Mistakes
I knew that this year’s Champs were going to be tough to predict, and sadly for my self-esteem, I was right. For the first time in memory, my prognostication was a step behind. I said that White Weenie would be the most popular deck played at States and it probably still was in most places, but it certainly wasn’t by any appreciable margin. In the face of predictions of a heavy aggro mix, many players simply took the next step that I suggested they take and picked up board control or combo decks, preparing to wreck house. (Since when do people actually listen to what I say? What’s that? It’s not all about me? People can think for themselves? Well then…) The problem here is that I didn’t figure that they would do so until after this past weekend. Oh well.
There are still a lot of results to be tallied, but the Umezawa’s Jitte issue that I also predicted appears to have been avoided in the shift to control. Jitte usage looks like it’s still pretty high, but not past the point where the large robot with a fish bowl for a head starts yelling, “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!” It’s an interesting conundrum actually, because Jitte appears to be the only card that actually gives the aggro decks a chance against board control, while it’s also the one card that makes aggro matchups particularly random.
One set of cards that were particularly good on Saturday were counterspells. Combo decks hate them, and the board control decks end up fighting like hell just for a chance to resolve and keep a threat on the table. Mono-Blue Control is very strong, and while I know some of you are going to hate to hear this, people trusting Mike Flores to produce excellent decks appear to have done very well. It will be interesting to see if anyone can find a reliable aggro deck before Worlds that puts the control decks in a bad spot, or whether we’ll have to wait until Guildpact to see whether or not the balance of power shifts. Right now the diversity of the metagame is awesome… I hope Worlds doesn’t change that.
Spotlight on Two Decks
I’m going to take a quick look at the two finalists from the Top 8 of Virginia States, both of which are very cool, and one of which I mistakenly chose not to play last weekend.
Last Monday, I was talking to Steve Sadin about decks and he mentioned he had a White Weenie/U build with ninjas and Meloku in it. This sounded extremely sexy to me, but I abandoned it shortly thereafter simply because I’d done more testing with U/B aggro builds. It turns out that a very similar build to the one Steve gave me with a mana base only a little kid could love (it did 16 points of damage to its controller in on game of the semifinals) was good enough to take home the title here in the dominion. I’m not sure if Watchwolf is really necessary and Viridian Shaman out of the board seems like it could be as easily replaced with Pithing Needle of you were of a mind, but the concept is very sound. Throw in a couple of Remands and I suspect you’d have an extremely tight, hard-to-beat deck on your hands that didn’t kill itself with painland damage.
Creatures (26)
- 2 Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
- 4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
- 3 Hokori, Dust Drinker
- 3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
- 2 Lantern Kami
- 4 Suntail Hawk
- 4 Leonin Skyhunter
- 4 Watchwolf
Lands (23)
Spells (12)
Sideboard
The other deck I wanted to briefly mention is Shaheen Soorani Greater Good Combo deck, which varies significantly from the one Mark Young wrote about yesterday. The mana base on this one makes baby Jesus cry tears of whine, but getting access to Gifts Ungiven is a huge bonus for any deck that is interested in abusing the graveyard to win you the game. I’ve already started acquiring the cards on Magic Online to build this just so I can futz around with it in my spare time. The deck is that cool. If you are looking for something fun, powerful, and at least slightly challenging to play for this week’s FNM, look no further.
Creatures (10)
Lands (22)
Spells (28)
Other Stuff
One day during my London vacation after the Pro Tour, I was desperately searching for a place with wireless access that wasn’t going to cost me my first-born child and a thirty-year mortgage so that I could e-mail my Beckett Magazine articles to my editor. I finally found a cafe that met my needs, ordered a muffin and some tea, and sat down to do my work. The tunes floating in the background were pretty standard stuff and I was largely ignoring them until a pop remix of some LeAnn Rimes tune started playing. This got me thinking about how I rarely hear any country music at all when I am traveling abroad, and this was the result.
There’s No Translating Good Taste
I used to be the type of person that could like country music. I say this not to startle you (though I’m sure there are at least a couple of you out there who just went “Duuuuude… Country?”), but more because I can’t fathom having a similar thing happen today.
Back when I was in college, I actually listened to country music with some frequency. Some might think that this was because I was young and impressionable, or maybe because I just hadn’t learned what good music was yet. They would be wrong. The real reason I listened to country was because I was overwhelmed by it. I went to school at the University of Oklahoma during the period when country was incredibly popular not just in middle America, but across the United States. Oklahoma is the giant turquoise belt buckle of the American Bible Belt, so it should not come as any surprise that country music was practically the only music available on the radio at that time. Thus if you were in the car (and mine lacked a tape or CD player), you were likely listening to country at least part of the time.
Now I don’t think country was particularly good at that time, but it wasn’t bad. This was a period of time when country was dominated by scintillatingly hot women that could actually sing, so that may also have had something to do with my interest, particularly with regard to music videos. Leann Rimes was a pudgy, Patsy Cline-sounding teenager at that time (she has since become quite sexy), but Shania Twain was wearing tank tops and jeans so tight they looked like she was poured into them and every man with a penis took notice. (Though she was largely ignored by America’s eunuch population.) The hottie that would become my future wife grew up listening to country (she’s Oklahoma born and bred), so even if I found it abhorrent, I would have been stuck being polite about the genre so as not to offend her musical sensibilities. Whatever the rationale during my four years at OU, whether it’s because the music itself had merit or because it was basically the only thing available, I learned not to hate country.
This is no longer the case.* Sometime in the intervening ten years, country returned to male domination and appears to once again be populated by low-talent bores who sing songs that sound alike and who stump for president George W. Bush when they aren’t busy getting arrested for stealing police horses. The hotties that were once so prominent have now mostly faded away, replaced by Toby Keith, Kenny Chesney, and similarly loathsome cronies who have returned to the tired stereotypes that made the genre of music the butt of jokes for so many years. Even those with friends in low places get bored of the same songs about Budweiser, jukeboxes, drinking, and unrequited love eventually**. If you are a particularly big fan of Kenny Keith or Toby Chesney, I apologize. It was not my intent to offend you. I have a certain fondness for old Peter Cetera tunes that you can make fun of if it makes you feel any better. I may even have listened to a Celine Dion CD all the way through, so I am not without blemishes of my own.
The requirements to be a male country music star don’t seem to be particularly difficult to meet, even though I am told that there are literally tens of thousands of people in Nashville trying to make it big every day. From what I can determine, you have to be tall, look good in a cowboy hat (or be a blonde guy with long hair from Australia capable of wooing Nikki Taylor), and be generally non-repugnant. You also have to act nice (country fans are pretty big on the whole “he seems nice” aspect), and have a decent-though-not-necessarily-great singing voice. Supposedly you also have to write your own songs to get you started, but I’m sure the country equivalent of boy bands probably exist.
What’s interesting (at least to me) is that you do not have to sing on key, at least not all the time. George Jones, the Bob Dylan of this musical archetype, has made an entire career out of singing sad songs flat. You also don’t need to be able to dance. Remember, they invented dancing in a line for this audience – dancing ain’t no thang. You do not need a twang, you do not have to have a mullet, and you don’t even need to be buff (though this certainly seems to help). In return for these rather commonplace characteristics, you get to travel the United States, you get to hit on – or even be hit on by – some of the hottest women the world has ever seen, and you presumably make a decent living.
This seems like a good deal.
The trick, as it is with all occupations, is getting your foot in the door.
Now notice that I said “travel the United States” and not “travel the world.” Country music is a uniquely American torture and the rest of the world, sensible people that they often are, does not seem too interested in partaking of this particular art form. There’s a good reason for this and it has everything to do with the fact that country music really is about middle America. This is where people are still driving a lot of pickup trucks (this isn’t a fashion choice – trucks are actually useful there). This is where people are still interested in getting married at a young age, and where parents are trying to prevent this from happening because they understand that kids are stupid and babies are permanent. It’s also where they care that the word “God” be kept in the pledge of allegiance, and where people are often overwhelmingly consumed with the idea and ideals of patriotism. If the topic of the music is any indication of the attitudes of its listeners, then this is also where a lot of inordinately sad people live. I grew up in the farm country of the Midwest, and my family still resides there. These are my roots.
However, the reason why country music is almost exclusively an American pursuit is because the rest of the world just can’t relate. Sure, there are other Christians across the world, but they certainly aren’t Southern Baptists. Sure, there are other patriots in the world, but they don’t seem to be like Toby Keith. And sure, there are lots of sad people in the world, but apparently they don’t drive a lot of pickup trucks.
From a non-American perspective, Country music is the equivalent of songs about growing up in the barrio, or about traveling to soccer games with your mates, or about snow wrestling on the mean streets of Helsinki. Other people can’t relate because they haven’t lived in the Heartland. They don’t have the required build-up of cultural bullsh** to give these tunes meaning. Oh sure, there’s the occasional serendipitous crossover (Garth Brooks and Leann Rimes, meet Chumbawumba), but for the most part that dog just won’t hunt.
The other reason nobody else listens to country is because it’s f***ing sad. In order to do well on a worldwide scale, you have to produce music that people want to dance to or music that rocks. People in England aren’t line dancing to the up-tempo tunes from the Rascal Flatts, and they certainly aren’t rocking to Deanna Carter’s ballads about getting drunk on a farm and making love to a college boy, or Tim McGraw’s songs commemorating his relationship with his dad. They don’t want our morose tunes about the girl that just wouldn’t fall in love with us or about our cheating husbands – they get enough of that in their everyday lives.
Interestingly, what the people of the world do seem to want aside from dance music or rock music is music they can f*** to. You get the feeling that if Faith Hill got up on stage and started crooning about “doing the dirty” and “knockin the boots” with hubby Tim McGraw instead of their “sweet love”, she’d be a leader in international record sales. Shakira’s stuff is hot in any language – couldn’t the same could be true for Faith? R&B/Hip-hop artists understand this, since they produce music designed almost exclusively for dancing or f***ing, and sometimes both at the same time. R. Kelly has his d*** on the pulse of the world, and his music sales reflect this. It’s the music where formerly misogynistic sayings about women being ladies in the sitting room and whores in the bedroom are strangely portrayed as truth and everyone loves them for it. This is why you can hear Beyonce anywhere. Country music? For whatever reason, “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” just doesn’t play that well in Paris and Tokyo.
This is why I tend to smile when I travel to other countries these days and find my ears assaulted by cheesy 80’s music, or the latest Hillary Duff single, or even the remnant of a boy band from many years past. I can hang with Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl” and MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This.” In times of need, I can even roll with “Backstreet’s Back,” though only with a healthy dose of irony. The rest of the world seems plenty accepting of this type of music and I can’t help but wonder if, no matter how bad it actually seems to them, they end up thinking:
At least it’s not country.
Tomorrow: Ill-Literate
Ted Knutson
Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2
Post Script
Can anyone explain to me how Reba McEntire has actually regressed in age over the last twelve years? She’s three years younger than my mom, for Pete’s sake, and yet she looks about five years older than my wife. If television supposedly adds ten pounds, it also must mysteriously take off ten years as well. Such things should not be possible, even with modern science.
* I don’t like most of what people consider “mainstream” country, but tend to like “alt country,” I’m passionate about some bluegrass acts (Nickel Creek, Allison Krauss), I still love the Dixie Chicks, and I’ll never tire of looking at Chely Wright.
** Actually I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. At this very moment there are two songs on the Billboard Top 20 Country Singles chart called “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off” and “Billy’s Got His Beer Goggles On.” You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.