Ryan Adams is caustically voicing his utter disdain for country music...once again.
"There's this wrong idea about me being identified with things that are Southern or country," Adams told Buzzfeed. "I do not f--king like country music, and I don't own any of it. I watched 'Hee Haw' as a kid with my grandmother, I only like country music as an irony. I liked it when I would get drunk."
Adams is often tagged as an alt-country performer. Now, that's an irony.
"I suppose playing country music felt like learning how to build a beautiful bookshelf or something," he said. "There was a certain amount of honesty that had to be there and it had to hurt. I loved the discipline of that. It reminded me of the challenge of playing punk rock. But me playing country music ... it was a false face. It was style appropriation."
Even though Adams is attacking country music now, it seems like 2008 was a high water mark for the alt-country star to verbalize his sheer dislike for country music - and he even took on Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, known as the Mother Church of Country Music.
In a 2008 blog, Adams wrote, "I hate HATE country music. I always have. I 'reference' it when I make music that sounds like that, the way a director would use water as a backdrop for a scene with a shark in it. But I cannot stand country music one bit. Unless The Grateful Dead are messin round with it. Then it is tolerable," stereogum.com reported.
In that same blog, he stated, "The Ryman Auditorium (a sh--hole in Nashville) has the balls to charge you for security when you play there but if some college kid, and I mean SOUTHERN college kid decides to get wasted and scream through 7 songs of a solo acoustic performance, they could give a f--k."
Based on Adam's most recent outburst against country music, it seems likely that he will have more to say on the subject in the future. Stay tuned.
