Country, absolutely, has become a generic mess of slop. Or at least, chart country / bro country certainly has. That’s a very specific result of the kind of people who listen to bro country; soulless conservative zombies who will lap up anything that references their preferred cultural touchstones. There’s still amazing country music out there but you definitely have to dig deeper to find it.

But as with everything soulless conservative zombies do, you shouldn’t let it shape your view of the world as a whole. It doesn’t mean that popular music in its entirety, or pop music as a genre, have suddenly become creatively bankrupt. There are artists out there producing incredible tracks. Some of them toil in obscurity, some not only break into the mainstream, but define it.

Saying the good stuff is buried is sort of meaningless, in that its always been true. 90% of anything is crap. That’s exactly the point I was making in my previous comment; it’s easy to look back at the past and find the good stuff because we’ve had time to forget all the trash. The present always arrives unfiltered and undiscovered.