THE VULGAR MASSES ARE RIPE FOR THE PLUCKING
by Bryce Martin

When I watched a well-known Pentecostal evangelist on television with a woman acquaintance a few years back in the 1980s, I said, “He’s phony. He turns it off and on too easily – the tears, the mock facial expressions.”

She pshawed that. “He wouldn’t be on television if he wasn’t aboveboard,” she said.

I could not really believe I heard that. I knew there were people who believed that if television let you bring your message, then it was on the up and up. I knew there were people who believed that but I never thought I would actually hear someone say it.

I am not about to say I am above being fooled, unless -- as it was that time -- Jimmy Swaggart was the one trying to do the fooling.

There is even a large group of people who think they actually know what they like when it comes to records, movies, and books. None of these people can tell you in an analytical way what makes a good recording, a good movie, a good book.

Press them on it and they will say, “I know what I like,” with the emphasis on the word “I.”

Sure you do.

These people bought the package when it came to John Denver, Mac Davis, Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, and others in between of mediocre ability, the latest hand-jobs.

There are two things at work. There is the business of country music, whereby anybody can sing any genre of music, apparently, and call it country music, and then there is actual country music. The business has to do with manipulating the charts, marketing and selling the product, which includes cash and other inducements to radio stations.

Most people cannot distinguish between what is country and what is not country. They have never thought about it. They have never studied what makes a good poem and what makes a bad poem, what the qualities and techniques are for a good or a bad movie, book, or any manner of things. All they know – or what they think they know – is what they like, which has little or nothing to do with any real merit the product might or might not have.

When someone, especially in country music, crosses over to popularity in the general population, appeals to the straights and dopers, the liberal and conservative, you can bet he or she is a popular singer masquerading as a county singer. Not only that, they will amount to a mediocre pop singer at best.

Going back as far as this phenomenon of marketing strategy has existed in my lifetime, I have tried to educate anyone who might be around to listen. It might sound something like this: “Not only is John Denver not country he is not much of a talent.”

More recently, similar words I have reserved for Garth Brooks.

Always, and I do mean always, I get the same vulgar response. And I do mean vulgar. Forty years ago or today, it is the same words.

“I wish I had the money he has made,” or “I wish I had the money she has made.”

See what I mean? It is hopeless. It is pathetic.

They even go so far as to say it in a smug way, as if they have some city street smarts or some country common sense that has just showed me up for the fool I am.

It makes me wonder how we exist as a country, how we survive day to day and why an aggressive foreign propaganda machine has not trampled us under. The culturally and economically exploited remain clueless.

“I know what I like.”

No, you like what someone else wants you to like from the choices given.