mikao's world

Country Music Haunts Me

When I was a child, growing up in the wilds of northern Saskatchewan and the flat plains of southern Manitoba, listening to country music was pretty much a given, albeit not by my choice.

Three times, when I was between the ages of 8 and 15, my family made the two or three day trip across the Prairies to British Columbia to visit my Dad's family. The music of choice (chosen by my parents) on these trips (all the way there and all the way back) consisted of a free cassette tape that the Ford Motor Company of Canada gave out with all of it’s 1986 vehicles of 1985’s greatest hits (including such classics as Maneater), ABBA's The Singles, The Judds, and Kenny Rogers.

To this day I can still sing along word-for-word with Kenny Rogers' The Gambler, and I know all the songs on The Judds' Number One Hits. Someday perhaps this will come in handy, you know, if I'm on Jeopardy and there's an 80s country music category, but I doubt it.

My older sister was a bit of a country music fan in high school, but she didn't listen to music very much so it wasn't too bad while she was still living at home.

However, she chose to go to cowboy college where everyone listened to country music and took country line dancing lessons. She wore cowboy shirts and some weird kind of shoes that cowgirls wear (or so I was informed). She got a huge belt buckle from her boyfriend and wore it all the time.

When my sister came home at Christmas and on breaks, she would either a) listen to country music on the stereo in the kitchen and sing along, or b) listen to country music on her walkman and sing along. I couldn’t decide which was worse, listening to her and the country singer, or just listening to her trying to sound like the country singer.

My current roommate Jodi is a country music lover. I didn't really notice it much at first at the beginning of the year, but lately she's been listening to more and more. I think this is partly due to two factors, a) our other roommate listens to terrible Bruce Cockburn, and b) I’ve been listening to a little too much John Mayer lately.

Jodi listens to a radio station called Country 100, "Southern Saskatchewan's Best Country!" I guess this is understandable since she's going to be a farmer's wife and drive tractors some day. But, I digress. Pretty much all radio stations sound the same (although the music is different depending on the type of station it is), have similar gimmicks, commercials, etc. But what drives me crazy about Country 100 is the fact that 99% of the time when they announce their station name, they say something about it sounding great in "crystal clear FM stereo." This drives me insane. Who doesn't know they're listening to FM radio? Does anyone listen to AM radio anymore anyways? Who listens to fuzzy FM stereo? If you quit saying all this junk about it being in FM stereo then you could play more country music (for the country music lovers out there), or more paid advertising, for Pete's sake (Pete in this instance being the station owner who benefits from more advertising being sold).

This morning when I woke up to the sounds of Jodi getting ready for class, I mumbled something to her something along the lines of "All I can hear is country music." She told me later that she was quite perplexed at this statement, because there was no music playing. But, I often do not make any sense when I first wake up, and also talk a lot in my sleep (this is something my future husband should be looking forward to), so it could have been either.

However, what I meant was this song was repeating itself over and over and over again in my head and it was driving me crazy.

Country music, and country music stations, haunt me.