It Ain’t Real Pain Unless You Want to Kill Someone

As if things weren’t bad enough, I’ve been listening to a hell of a lot of country music lately. Since I tackled the vocation of ‘writer‘ yesterday, I think it only right to continue my handy series of articles with my guide to becoming a country music star.

It suffices to say that city-folk are at an immediate disadvantage. It helps, when you decide to become the next Hank Williams, if you actually come from the country.

If you can’t change the past, then the least you can do is work on your accent and scale your world-view down a notch. You’ll never hear a country music song borrowing lines from Camus or comparing heartache to a broken iPhone so, in order to succeed, you must forget about these things in favour of more earthy similes.

Assimilate meaningless drivel like ‘honky-tonk’, ‘hoochie-coochie’ or ’achy-breaky’ into your vocabulary and refer liberally to your pick-up truck, the juke box and Jesus.

Get your wardrobe right. This might seem like an obvious point but to overlook it is to doom yourself to weep outside the doors of Carnegie Hall. Three chords and a heart made out of hay and cow-shite won’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t have your boots, your blue jeans and your Stetson. And if they ain’t made in America, you might as well wear an Osama Bin-Laden costume (use the word ‘ain’t’ a lot too, that’s very important).

The next important point to observe is that real country music is about pain. Now, we’re not talking about a paper-cut or banging your funny-bone against the handle of a door, we’re talking about the real thing. This is the kind of pain you feel when your hoochie-coochie woman takes her love to town leaving you at home, in the trailer, to drink moonshine and think of all of the ways that you could put her in the ground.

City-folk know nothing of pain - it ain’t real pain unless you want to kill someone.

Think about marriage too. Think about everything you know about this institution and then forget it completely. If you’re a country music star, the only reason to get married is so that you can get a divorce and spend the next two or three albums whinging about that no-good devil-woman.

I’ll take the time now to acknowledge the existence of female country singers. Not all country music stars are misogynist hicks - some of them are sassy country gals whose reaction to pain is a whole lot different. You’ll notice that as soon as her man leaves her, the subject of the song will cry and cry and cry and cry and cry and cry… until they die.

If she survives the crying process, she’ll more than likely go off on a hedonistic binge in an attempt to find a man as good as the one she just lost (Honky-Tonk Merry-Go-Round).

But whether you’re a cowboy or a cowgirl, it is crucial that you are unlucky in love, possibly an alcoholic and preferably a gun-wielding psychopath.

However, even if your chosen subject is heartache, you’re bound to run out of material eventually. Worry not, because you are free to sing about agricultural processes(Amarillo Sky), regional topography (Black Hills of Dakota) or even the acceptance of a questionable stereotype (It’s Alright To Be a Redneck). Use your imagination, by all means, but not too much - you don’t want to look like a faggot.