to follow on the topic of southern us commercialism = southern us culture, in Atlanta Georgia immediately adjacent to the ostensibly educational Georgia Aquarium is the “World of Coca Cola,” whose singular goal is to advertise a non-health-contributing beverage at you, one that is sold at literally every vendor in the city, if not the state, and you need to PAY to get in!

I did not go there, but since I went to the aquarium I was near enough to it to see that the price of admission does not get you any complementary product to consume either.

and also a rather incongruous mix of attractions. I wonder if this is a legally mandated community service sort of thing since the drink was invented by John Pemberton, a confederate colonel/snake oil merchant/eye surgeon who owned slaves.

It makes me wonder if the Coca Cola company ever experimented with putting cans of coke into archive footage of revdr Martin Luther Kingjr and Rosa Parks like they did with Fred Astaire and Groucho Marx.

ALSO my angle isn’t: don’t drink coke, it was invented by a slave owner (though “don’t drink coke, it’s liquid candy” is valid); every company that old was started by a slave owner. If pepsi was a decade or so older it would also have been. Slavery is woven into the textile of american history, if not white history as a whole, and human history as a wholer, to paraphrase the hokey sort of person who wants to pretend slavery didn’t happen or benefit them. BUT I can imagine the contemporary owners of the company considering that an image-related problem for them and wanting to make sure they have a defense prepared that they can point at when the topic comes up.

But EARLIER in June I needed to visit a hard wares store. While operating an automobile even. Rather a change from the earlier days of this website. My life has changed but my opinions haven’t. My cousins once insisted that when I was older I would appreciate the Beatles and Bob Dylan also. I don’t, I merely encounter more songs that are worse than theirs. While momentarily stopped at a traffic intersection near the store, I overheard bits of a hokey country-sounding song playing from a neighboring motorist’s vehicle. I thought that was odd, and so was quite surprised when I arrived at the store and the SAME song was playing from the local sound system. The song’s lyrics concerned how “we all have a hill billy bone down deep inside,” essentially trying to say we are all dumb southerners who enjoy songs like this ultimately. Somehow it was released in 2009 and I was never prior aware of its existence. My gripe, though, is it isn’t a hillbilly song. there is no fiddle, no banjo, no jug or washboard. It has electric guitars and studio production. No hillbilly music is getting played on a radio station in Madison Connecticut, if anywhere.

The singers, apparently there are two, aren’t hillbillies either. They are red necks. Hillbillies do stuff for a reason or out of necessity, rednecks just affect the imagery they see from celebrities and/or politicians. If you observe a hillbilly wearing a cowboy hat, chances are that’s just the only kind of hat available, or maybe you’ve even witnessed an actual cowboy. Rednecks vote for Trump, hillbillies don’t trust city folk, if they’re even registered to vote, if they even know an election is happening. Dumb rednecks are dumb by choice because somehow or another that is a status symbol, dumb hillbillies are dumb because their schools are under-funded, if they even have schools. Rednecks collect guns and pose with them on instagram, Hillbillies know that you know they have guns and don’t need to advertise it, and as long as you stay off their land it won’t become an issue. Assuming they still have land and corporations supported by rednecks haven’t cheated them out of it. Rednecks swear they aren’t racist, especially the racist ones. Hillbillies, again, don’t care who thinks they are racist. Rednecks hate queers. Hillbillies think rednecks are queers.

In fact, it isn’t even a redneck song. it sounds more like Black Cat by Janet Jackson in 1990 than anything country or Appalachian. Supposedly Black Cat is “Jackson’s first solo writing credit.” Do you know who wrote the Hillybilly boney song? Two totally different people that aren’t the ones singing it.

it’s about the phoniest garbage I have heard of since a tv commercial advertising “honky tonk badonkadonk,” which I looked up for this post today and BOTH songs are sung by Trace Adkins, who has never had a solo writing credit. Though this apparently was written by a different group of boneheads who sell songs to other boneheads than the song about bones.

pardon me, “bro-heads.” Thankfully I didn’t know about this terminology i 2005, else I might have requested my immediate execution rather than a pardon. The only group phonier and jerkier and more addicted to following orders from unaccountable imbeciles than rednecks are bros.

I don’t get this at all. You don’t want black people in your neighborhoods, your public offices or your precious advertising but you will appropriate vernacular like “badunkadunk” from their dumbest recording artists. Is that just to make it so lame that they don’t want it either? Black rappers stopped saying “bling” so fast that I can’t tell if the scheme worked or if the originators realized it was lame before that happened.

and the “previous single” is called Arlington. Possibly the most deliberately depressing place in the united states, Arlington National Cemetery, and again written by other people, even though the album is titled “songs about me.” Trace Atkins is not buried in Arlington Nat’l Cemetery, and he never will be unless he gets crushed by a meteorite whose path sent it through the fence while he was being chaffeured past the place. Though as I mentioned in a title tag above this I was surprised to learn that Adkins has in fact been fired upon by an enemy combatant and hit, but the aggressor was his second of four wives.
He only has a song that mentions it because redneck is a quasi-relgious identity, where you subjugate women and drink international conglomerate brand beer (provided it isn’t endorsed by anyone gay or trans) and crow about how “rebellious” you are then suddenly are serious and solemn worshiping [the concept of] The Troops on designated federal holidays while picking fights with anyone who isn’t. The only reason we still HAVE troops in 2023 is because bullies and idiots who obey bullies won’t stop picking fights over really stupid issues.
What a phony pandering sack of empty nonsense this goobert is.

he has had seventeen studio albums full of songs about the same three topics, all written by other people, and he wants me to believe he wrote a book? About how free-thinking he is? He’s literally named after copying someone else’s work. I CHECKED, he is credited as a co-writer on ten songs, total, in twenty five years, which admittedly is more than I was expecting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he did more than make a suggestion, and only the first was released as a single. Since it wasn’t a hit single I guess his writing privileges were revoked. Which is more about the machinations of The Music Industry as a whole than redneckery specifically, but as noted that is inextricable from corporate directives. Nobody is less rebellious than people who need you to know they are rebels.
Even compared to his hill billy co-boning co-singer Blake Shelton Adkins is depressing. Shelton has 16 co-writing credits in 12 albums and even a single solo credit in twenty zero years, and has actually been photographed not wearing a cowboy hat. Unfortunately now I know hard trivia about both of them and may even be able to discern them from each other.

but there are always worse things to know.