I’m sure there must be somebody doing it, but most of that music reminds me of rock in the middle Eighties where it became incredibly generic and relied on videos. I’m sure there are people playing country that are doing it well, but they’re just not getting the attention that the shittier stuff gets…I don’t really see a George Jones or a Buck Owens or any anything that fresh coming up.
In an interview that followed up on Petty saying from the stage of the Beacon Theater in New York City that modern country was “bad rock with a fiddle,” Petty elaborated on the point, saying in part,
Yesterday the big story was that Tom Petty had said some disparaging things about the direction of country music to the Rolling Stone. It’s getting chippy out there folks, and the war of words swirling around the current direction of country music is heating up.