For me, the country music craze started around 6 or 7 years ago when I was in middle school. I attended a private Catholic school from age four to fourteen. Over the years, I came face to face with the definition of helicopter parenting. From monitoring their kids Facebook’s to their text messages, these parents knew and controlled every aspect of their child’s lives.
A huge thing that these parents were against was today’s rap and pop music. The constant cursing- these kids weren’t even allowed to say “fart”, mind you- and drug and sexual references led these parents to hide this kind of music from their children’s innocent little ears. Here’s where country music- a genre constantly referencing God and promoting Christianity- comes into play.
I really didn’t notice the growing popularity of country music in my friend group until I joined my private school’s basketball team in sixth grade. The team parents set up a carpool system to divide up who would take all of us to get an after school snack before practice or who would drive us to the away games. I ended up spending a lot of time in my friend’s parent’s cars through this and in turn, led me to spend a lot of time listening to country music. Who knew “She’s Country” by Jason Aldean could be considered a warm up song?!
Of course, even country music features songs that could be deemed inappropriate, but the drug and sex references are considerably less frequent in country music than in pop or rap songs. It also helped that these parents had the uncanny ability to filter the songs that came through their car speakers.
Personally, my parents never really controlled my life like some of my friend’s parents. My parents had me when they were older and just weren’t interested in spending all of their time monitoring my life. Granted, they still forced me to add them on Facebook and weren’t into me watching R rated movies, but they never looked at my phone or told me what music I could or couldn’t listen to. Because of this, I had no idea all parents weren’t the exact same way. In fact, I had never really heard country music before (outside of Robert Earl Keen or the Dixie Chicks) until my friends’ helicopter parents were constantly driving me to sport practices.
At first I absolutely hated this genre. I hated being forced to listen to it even more, especially since it wasn’t even my parents forcing me to listen to it. I went from hardly ever being told what I could or couldn’t do by my own parents to being forced to listen to a certain type of music by my friend’s parents. But I quickly got over this, mainly because the country music fad literally took over my private school. Our school dances featured country music more than any other genre. Imagine jamming out to “Big Green Tractor” at your eighth grade dance- I mean how much “jamming” can you actually do to a song about riding through a cornfield on some guys tractor. But we somehow found a way, and my love for country music grew quickly.
Today it’s pretty much all I listen to, and when I hear those old Jason Aldean songs I soft smile at the thought of middle school and my friends’ crazy parents. The parents have lightened up since then, but country music stayed with all of us.