I hated country music growing up. It was all twangy, drippy, audio rubbish that occasionally

bled into my life via the radio. Whereas now, pushing 40, I regularly enjoy a Spotify playlist I made called Old Drunks and Sawdust.

You can't really appreciate the splendor of a haggard old man with some jail time and a drinking problem under his belt,

crooning about mistakes until your own life has accumulated its own aches and pains.

It's the same reason I don't think anybody can fully benefit from trying mushrooms

until they're at least 30.

Now that life has knocked me off my perch a few times, I really enjoy hearing

grizzled old men sing about regret.

Incidentally, I will post a link to that playlist, Old Drunks and sawdust,

on the Patreon episode description should anybody like to take a gander.

What you may not know is that country music has recently exploded across the earth. Somewhere around 2008, 2012, round about then, country

music ceased being a potentially dying sub-genre limited to Nashville and Smoky Southern saloons and

became a global phenomenon.

For example, right now you're listening to the melody of Dusty and Stone, the

Premier Country Music Duo of Swaziland Africa from their hit album, Mujioic Country Favor. It's not coincidental that they're singing about what is a primary motif of the country music genre, nostalgia for small town rural life where everything

was simple and everybody knew each other.

The ascendancy of country music globally coincides almost exactly with the chapter of history where humanity went from being a rural species to an urban species.

In 1800, 97% of human beings lived in rural conditions, farms and villages.

Only 3% lived in cities.

By 2008, my freshman year of college, humanity crossed the tipping point to where more than half

of the population lives in cities. By 2050, 80 percent of the human population will be urban. and by the end of the century, Homo sapiens will be an urban species.

So I think country music is a global coping method for the literally billions of people who have transitioned

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